Microsoft Edge Browser is Now Usable — But Who is it for?
The new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser for desktop will be out on January 15th, 2020. I’ve been using the Beta version for a few months.
With Chromium as the foundation for the new Edge, Edge users will be able to use Chrome extensions (though not themes). The new Edge also feels fast and light. But with Google’s Chrome browser taking 67% of the browser market pie, is it too late for Microsoft to regain the market dominance it enjoyed for a decade with Internet Explorer?
The 2010’s saw a revolution at Microsoft, which some had come to see as a legacy tech company. Today, with Microsoft’s renewed focus on corporate and business solutions, and its new emphasis on accessibility and neurodiversity, as well as open source and cloud software, it’s worth asking who the new Edge browser is for and what it means for Satya Nadella’s new Microsoft.
Who is it for?
Businesses — The New Edge features Microsoft Search built into the Bing search engine. The goal is to make it easier to search for employees to find internal company information, such as coworkers’ names and office locations. It’s easy to imagine company employees getting shiny new Windows 10 computers — and Edge being the only browser installed.
Schools — Microsoft’s excellent free Learning Tools for reading were already built into the old Edge browser. They’re also built into other Microsoft products. They’re not built into the new Edge Beta yet — hopefully, they will be in the official release of the new Edge in a few weeks.
Luckily, the new Edge already features Read Aloud, a text-to-speech reader that can read text on any website, and many PDF’s. This is in contrast to Chrome itself, which does not have this feature out of the box. Solid Chrome text-to-speech extensions exist, but none work as flawlessly as Read Aloud in Edge.
Microsoft is all-in on touchscreen devices, so Edge has supported drawing and inking on PDF’s for a while now. Here, good Chrome solutions and extensions abound, but only Edge has PDF text-to-speech and drawing capability out of the box.
Microsoft also recently released Teams. While businesses already using Office 365 can use Teams as a Slack alternative, Teams for Education is an online classroom and student collaboration system. With a tight integration between Teams, Office 365, and Edge, Microsoft can better compete with Apple and Google for the K-12 education market while keeping its foothold in the business and productivity market. The new Edge demonstrates what the new Microsoft is all about as the company heads toward its 50th birthday.
