I think bringing a sane extension model to Edge is a bigger deal than any of the other improvements that Edge is making over IE11.<p>For a couple years now, I would have instantly switched to IE on my touch enabled Windows machines <i>if</i> there were equivalent versions of my Chrome extensions available for IE. Overall performance, especially during touch scrolling and zooming, and memory footprint has long been dramatically better in IE than any other Windows browser (though Chrome seems to be trying to close that gap a bit lately).<p>If converting a complex extension like RES was really "easy to convert" with "only a few changes", that's going to be a very interesting development.
> <i>There are “no plans” to make the browser (or its core engine) open source but Edge proudly incorporates open-source code</i><p>I'm tired of this trend. In my opinion saying you're using some piece of open-source library for XPath does not exonerate you from releasing a browser that isn't open-source in a market that has Firefox and Chromium. I'll bet they aren't going to release Edge for Linux either.<p>Microsoft has been copying Apple lately but Apple is the wrong model for Microsoft to copy.
I don't understand why they even need their own web browser. Why not just ship Windows with Chrome. They could preset the settings to have bing as your home page. Or maybe that is illegal? What advantage to they gain by having their own browser? If there would be legal difficulties they could try to strike a deal with Firefox or Opera. On the same note I don't understand what Microsoft is trying to do recently. I mean eventually Windows is supposed to be free and everyone can get all the updates. .NET is becoming more open source. Visual Studio is becoming cross platform and this works on the free version. I like all these things, but I don't understand how they benefit Microsoft? The only explanation I have heard is that they are trying to "stay relevant", but what good is that relevance if they are giving Windows, .NET, and Visual Studio away for free? Am I missing something?
I played with Edge on my dev machine, here are my initial impressions:<p>> Its slow. I ran some benchmark tools and it is so far behind Chrome and Firefox. (I know its still in preview)<p>> I dont like the idea of installing extension through Microsoft Store.<p>> Developer Tools is still behind Chrome or Firebug. Missing JS & CSS editing, viewing cookie etc.
I feel like all of the changes Microsoft is making are not going to matter if they keep trying to build a walled garden. There's just no way that I'm investing any significant amount of time into technology that binds users to a one single app store.