Browser review: Microsofts new “Edgium” Chromium-based Edge

Before much longer, every new Windows PC is going to have a new default browser: it will still be named Microsoft Edge, but it's a completely different browser than the old version. Cue the jokes now about "the new browser everyone uses to download Chrome"—but we're not sure that so many people will actually bother downloading Chrome anymore.

The old Microsoft Edge was a completely in-house Microsoft design, proprietary from the ground up. It wasn't necessarily a bad browser, but it never really took off—by the time Edge became a thing, most of the people who cared about their browsers were so sick and tired of Internet Explorer they'd long since moved on to either Firefox or Chrome; and the people who didn't care much about their browsers frequently ended up finding the old Internet Explorer and setting it as their default when they discovered that "the big blue E" on their taskbar didn't work with legacy IE-only websites and apps.

The new Edge isn't entirely—or even mostly, so far—a Microsoft effort, though. Edge is now based on the open source Chromium browser, which is the underpinning of Google Chrome and several other, lesser-known browsers as well. It should seem immediately familiar to seasoned Chrome users—and it even allows installing extensions directly from Chrome's own Web store. It's not hard to imagine a lot of Chrome users simply not bothering to replace it when they see how familiar it is.

Edge's own Web store is pretty sad and underpopulated right now, but we expect that to change rapidly. It's not hard to imagine little need for an Edge user to bother going to Chrome's Web store and shopping for extensions in another six months, as necessary as that would likely be right now. In the meantime, while installing Chrome certainly isn't hard to do—unless you're seriously short on bandwidth, which many rural users are—it's even easier to click the single popped-up button in Chrome's Web store to enable those extensions in Edge.

Saved passwords

For better or for worse, the vast majority of the new Edge doesn't need much of a review, since it's effectively the same as Chrome itself. The only parts that really need a review are those that Microsoft has needed to bolt on for itself—such as user login and synchronization of saved credentials between browsers. We tested the login and sync, and they were something of a crapshoot.

The first credentials we used to test were Office 365 credentials from a small business, and while the login itself worked immediately, the actual synchronization was broken. To be fair, the problem could be that this Office 365 account doesn't have a license associated with it—it's just used to administer the actual users of a small business's domain. Still, it should have worked; unlicensed Office 365 accounts are a commonly encountered and perfectly valid condition in the wild for exactly this reason.

With the Office 365 account logged in, local storage of passwords worked perfectly, but sync just didn't happen. Eventually, we checked the sync settings for the account and saw that they said "setting up sync—you can start browsing while we get this set up." A week later, the settings still say "setting up sync." We're not holding our breath.

Next, we used a personal Windows Live account which long predates Office 365 and has been used solely to log in to a Microsoft Volume License Service Center account until now. The personal account immediately worked flawlessly, both login and sync. When logged in with the personal account, there was no "setting up sync" message—and a newly saved password was instantly available on a second computer logged in with the same account.

Saving credit and debit cards