Microsoft Edge for Mac Beta
Previously, the Microsoft Edge browser was available as a preview build, but Microsoft has now graduated to an official beta. Microsoft’s beta channel represents more stable software than the preview channel.
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The beta version of the Edge browser features new personalization options, such as tab page customization, dark theme support, and extensions from the Microsoft Insider Addons store or other Chromium-based web stores like the Chrome Web Store.
Tracking prevention has been added to protect users from being tracked by websites, built-in Microsoft Search for Bing, and Internet Explorer mode with Internet Explorer 11 compatibility.
Paul Thurrott (via Hacker News):
Thanks to the open-source nature of Chromium, Microsoft has had its first major and positive impact on Chrome, Google’s web browser. Thanks to a feature request from Microsoft, Google will issue a change to Chromium, the open-source project by which Google makes Chrome, that significantly improves battery life.
“Today, media content is cached to disk during acquisition and playback,” Microsoft’s Shawn Pickett explains in his change suggestion for Chromium. “Keeping the disk active during this process increases power consumption in general, and [it] can also prevent certain lower-power modes from being engaged in the operating system. Since media consumption is a high-usage scenario, this extra power usage has a negative impact on battery life. This change will prevent the caching of certain media content to disk for the purpose of improving device battery life for users.”
[Microsoft’s] most major chromium impact is to move input handling off the main thread which has been empirically a massive success on Edge.
Previously:
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The damn thing installs a daemon that polls for updates in the background, and it lives on even after deleting the app. Or so seemed to be the case when I first tried it a couple of months ago. Not in a rush to do so again.
Support WebKit and Mozilla. Google and Microsoft united behind one browser? Give that a couple years and see if websites will load on anything other than Chrome.....
@Matthew I use Firefox on Linux, Windows, and Android precisely because I like a little variety in the marketplace. I have considered using a Webkit browser, but there's not a lot to choose from for Linux. I guess Gnome Browser, Midori, or Epiphany for GTK. Not sure if any of those are great browsers. I love iCab, but it's Mac OS and iOS only. Too bad.
Nice Microsoft finally has a cross platform browser, but for me I use Safari on my Mac's and will consider the Edge Chromium on my Windows PC.
