Today’s blog post comes from Jim Prothe, Marketing Director

Microsoft had teased back in November that it’s newly rebuilt Microsoft Edge browser would release in January. Now, the Chromium-based browser is available for both Windows and Mac users alike. Anyone looking to install the new version can simply head over to the Microsoft Edge site and download it for free. 

How Does Chromium Edge Perform?

As a major Gold-certified partner to Microsoft we test things pretty heavily prior to rollout and over the last few months – I can say I’m happy with how this browser performs. Dynamics 365 pages load quickly as do all of the other Microsoft services I frequently use such as SharePoint, Stream, and PowerBI. The same is true of most personal sites I visit from banking to news. Not surprisingly, pages load just as quickly as they do in Chrome. 

Extensions Etc

Power users everywhere rejoice! Extensions that work for Google Chrome will now work in the Edge browser. So while the Microsoft store is building out their library of extensions, you can be assured that most of what you’re looking for will run in Edge just fine. 

Built-in Security

While yes, Chromium is an open-sourced standard maintained by Google, Microsoft takes a hard left from Google’s approach to end-user security. By default, Microsoft turns Tracking Prevention on to Balanced, which blocks most ads and all trackers from sites you haven’t visited before. Conversely, Google still lets sites track you across the internet by default.

This is incredibly helpful for organizations that worry about what their users might click on. Of course, you can move it to strict and then the browser behaves much like it has an ad-blocker installed and blocks almost all advertisements. 

The Bottom Line

Microsoft’s completely rebuilt Edge browser is a great effort for something that has been totally rebuilt. Who is this for? Most likely this will benefit the enormous legion of users who “just click the blue E” icon in their task bar. Or, people who want a better experience but have reservations about using Google products for privacy reasons.