Edge — Not Recommended For Power Users and Developers
There are a lot of great things about Windows 10. For one thing, I did not have to pay for it, and got an easy upgrade from my already paid for Windows 8. In many ways windows 10 seems more like a full version of windows 8, which was clearly a beta in my opinion. So, yes, I am not that surprised that Windows 10 is free.
Obviously, free also means, some kind of advertisements. Microsoft has been slowly creeping in advertisements, but so far, they are mostly doing it for their products and services. Occasionally, they will recommend a app from the App Store but so far nothing to the point where they have become Google. I mean, if Microsoft is a 10 in terms of ads, then Google is literally the Googol. So, yeah, not that invasive yet.
One of its apps (because we cannot call things software now because marketing and mobiles and also because people) that Microsoft really wants me to use is Edge. Edge is a new browser that Microsoft has built up from the ground up. I believe when Microsoft says this because I can literally feel the difference on the rare occasions that I use it. Edge is as far removed from its much complained (and deservingly so) sibling, Internet Explorer. To be fair, I did try using Internet Explorer for a very long time before giving up on it. When Edge was announced, I got excited, tried it and then gave up on it.
One reason why Internet Explorer is bad is because of its legacy baggage. Everyday folks might find it hard to believe this but Microsoft has been, and always will be a productivity company. They are no different than say IBM or Xerox. Luck went their way and their operating system became popular with everyday folks, gamers and adult entertainment watchers. Ever since that happened in the early 90s, they have been balancing their consumer facing side and their business facing side. Sometimes it works out great. Other times it just plain bad.
The poster child of everything that can go wrong with this customer/business balancing act is Internet Explorer. You see, through clever business maneuvering, Microsoft ensured that internet explorer will become the most popular browser ever. This mean, people were using this (admittedly bad) browser at home and also at office. The issue is, at an office, everything has to go through the IT admin. Whereas at home, the decision maker is usually whomsoever is the person who has opened browser to watch slowly loading half naked female imagery. A lot of applications were built with a specific version of the internet explorer in mind, and hence, many offices were stuck using older version of internet explorers. As a consequence, Microsoft was stuck supporting all these old browser users.
That meant, as and when a new version of internet explorer was released, it still carried a lot of code that was irrelevant to current users, but was needed to support older (also called as legacy applications). While its competitors such as Chrome and Firefox could make their browsers better, smarter and may be even lighter, Microsoft was stuck constantly trying to figure out the complicated spider web that is adding new things while still keeping old things. In other words, the internet explorer had a lot of baggage. As mentioned earlier, this all happened because of what happened in the 90s.
Microsoft makes a truck load of money (much, much more than what it makes from consumers) from enterprise customers. That is why, when windows 10 arrived, it finally decided to cut the umbilical chord. Edge was born with none of that baggage stuff. Of course, if you dig deep inside, you can still find the old, baggage carrying internet explorer on your windows machine. It’s not going anywhere but just not openly visible. So yeah, Edge happened. My hopes were raised. Then, I used Edge. Then, my hopes were dashed. Yeah, Edge is bad.
I do a lot of web development, and training. I simply cannot recommend the developer tools that come bundled with Edge. They are nowhere near as good as Firefox or even chrome. So yeah, Edge is simply not a good choice for developers. Coming to power users, Edge cannot handle too many tabs like Firefox or Chrome or any other browser can. It feels heavy, sluggish and there always like a fraction of delay when it does thing. For instance, if I were drag out a tab into a new window, there is a good chance it will crash. If there is a video playing in that tab, it will always crash.
That means, if a tab is doing some heavy lifting work (which is expected since there are some heavy web apps that we all use these days), there is a chance that the tab will crash, and thereby crashing all the other tabs and windows with it. I cannot believe the Microsoft testing team allowed such basic bugs pass through into a final release. Of course, there is the small matter where a lot of web apps and sites are simply not tested for Edge/internet explorer these days. Most of them test it on Chrome and Firefox and leave it at that. Perhaps its not the fault of Microsoft, but rather the app developer who failed to test his app on Edge.
I for one, don’t really see why Microsoft even bothers with Edge. Folks are happy with Firefox and Chrome. Besides, at least those companies are trying to make some money out of the browser. For Google, Chrome is just another data collecting device. Firefox maker Mozilla wont have any other source of revenue if Firefox is bad. Microsoft though…it’s not in the browser business. Perhaps somebody at Microsoft already realizes that. If so, that is just great. If not, somebody will figure out eventually.
