Microsoft Edge Finally Ready for Power BI
Why you finally can navigate properly through the Power BI service using a Microsoft developed browser
Introduction
It has been strange telling companies and users to use Google Chrome for the best user experience in Microsoft’s Power BI online service. Standard and custom visuals work as expected after publishing out of Power BI Desktop. Performance gains in terms of filtering and rendering reports are significant by browsing reports in Google Chrome compared to other browsers. It seems to be the only browser that prints/exports all components of the report correctly.
Chromium and CefSharp
The reason for this, is the Chrome’s underlying source code and rendering engine Chromium which is the open-source browser project behind Google Chrome.
The desktop application “Power BI Desktop” also relies on this project for rendering visuals locally by using CefSharp. This is a wrapper that allows you to embed web browsers into your .NET application. If you open up your task manager after starting up Power BI Desktop, you will find several instances of a process named CefSharp.BrowserSubprocess. They can sometimes be even quite memory consuming.
Now, the good news is that the new Edge browser is also based on Chromium and it includes several Microsoft specific enhancements. It was first released on January 15, 2020.
Conclusion
Edge moving to be Chromium-based finally allows you to recommend using Microsoft Edge for Power BI Online. Dashboards and reports are likely to work similar in both browsers Edge and Chrome. Further, you can now be sure not to experience any unpleasant surprises in Microsoft Edge after publishing reports to the service.
