- Microsoft’s rebuilt Edge browser is finally here with a modern design, support for Google Chrome extensions, and more. In this guide, we’ll help you download and install the new Chromium.
- Top web browsers 2020: Edge makes double digits In October, Google's Chrome browser shed market share for the third month in a row. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Edge broke into double-digits — the.
- Since then, Microsoft has enhanced the Edge browser and diminished Internet Explorer. Early in 2020 Microsoft released an updated version of Edge, built on the Chromium technology that powers Google Chrome. Now Edge has been gaining in market share. The newest version of Edge was released with the Windows 10 October 2020 update.
- I've stuck with a different browser — Microsoft's new Edge, an upgrade from the browser of the same name that launched with Windows 10 in 2015 — for more than a day.
- Download New Microsoft Browser 2020
- New Microsoft Browser 2020
- What Is The New Browser Recommended By Microsoft
- New Microsoft Update Browser 2020
- New Microsoft Browser 2020
Support for Microsoft Edge Legacy ends on March 9, 2021. Shift to the new Microsoft Edge to stay protected.
With Windows 10, Microsoft introduced its Edge browser to compete with Firefox and Chrome, making it the default browser pre-installed on millions of PCs sold. Even so, users were slow to adopt it and Microsoft eventually announced plans to relaunch Edge as a Chromium-based browser (Chromium is Google’s Open Source browser project). Since January of 2020, Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge has replaced the previous versions of Edge. Although Edge is now built on Google’s Chromium, a number of unique features do set it apart from Google’s Chrome browser.
Here we’ll compare our Firefox Browser to the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge in terms of privacy, utility, and portability, to help you have a better understanding of which browser better suits your needs and preferences.
| Security and Privacy |
|---|
| Private Browsing mode |
| Blocks third-party tracking cookies by default |
| Blocks cryptomining scripts |
| Blocks social trackers |
Edge is integrated into the Windows 10 platform and runs in a sandbox environment, meaning it isolates programs and prevents malicious programs from spying on your computer. It has a built-in SmartScreen that scans the reputation of sites you visit and blocks suspicious sites. To enhance privacy, Edge allows you to use biometrics or a PIN with Windows Hello instead of passwords for online authentication.
At Firefox, we pride ourselves in protecting our users security and privacy. Our privacy policy is transparent and in plain language. We actually put a lot of work into making sure it was straightforward and easy to read. With Enhanced Tracking Protection now on by default, we block 2000+ trackers automatically. Trackers are those little pieces of code that try to piece together what you're doing across multiple internet sites to build a composite and detailed picture of who you are, compromising your privacy all just to target better ads.
Your Privacy Protections shows you the trackers and cookies that pages have attempted to leave, and how many Firefox has blocked for you.
In Firefox, Private Browsing mode automatically erases your browsing information like passwords, cookies, and history, leaving no trace after you close out the session. Edge on the other hand, actually records browsing history in their private mode (called “InPrivate”) and it’s a relatively easy task for someone to reconstruct your full browsing history, regardless of whether your browsing was done in regular or InPrivate mode.
Both browsers are relatively equal in terms of data encryption. However, if online privacy and transparency are important to you, then Firefox is clearly a better choice here.
Download New Microsoft Browser 2020
Utility
| Utility |
|---|
| Autoplay blocking |
| Tab browsing |
| Bookmark manager |
| Automatically fills out forms |
| Search engine options |
| Text to speech |
| Reader mode |
| Spell checking |
| Web extensions/Add-ons |
| In-browser screenshot tool |
Firefox is a fast and open source browser, which means users can customize their browsing experience in every way possible. Firefox also allows the casual user several different ways to customize the UI with applying different themes and toolbar configurations. Since our browser has always been open source, we have a large following of devoted developers who have created an extensive library of add-ons and browser extensions.
Since Edge has moved to the processor intensive Chromium platform, you can expect it to run a little slower, especially if you have multiple programs running at once. However, with Chromium platform comes a massive library of extensions as well as a decent level of UI customization that Edge did not have before its move to Chromium.
Edge has some nice UI features, like their tab previews which can make it easy to find the right open tabs if you’ve got a lot of them open. Another helpful tab-related feature lets you set aside any active tabs that you aren’t using but don’t want to close down.
Firefox features a scrolling tab interface, which keeps tab information viewable and scrolls them horizontally instead of shrinking them down to just favicon size. Also whenever you open a new tab, our Pocket feature suggests relevant articles and content for you. Plus with Pocket, you can also save articles, videos, and other content with one click, for reading at a later time.
Firefox and Edge both offer excellent reading modes. With Firefox, you just tap on the small icon in the search bar and the browser strips down all unnecessary elements and presents you a clean looking article. In Edge, you can click on the small book icon to get a clean, easy-to-read page.
Firefox also includes lots of handy built-in features by default like Enhanced Tracking Protection, a built-in screenshot tool, large file sending and more.
Out of the gate, Firefox has more features and integrations built into the browser and readily available on download. And while both browsers have a tremendous number of add-ons and extensions available, Edge’s compatibility with Google’s Chromium platform gives it the advantage in terms of sheer numbers.
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| Portability |
|---|
| OS availability |
| Mobile OS availability |
| Syncs with mobile |
| Password management |
| Primary password |
New Microsoft Browser 2020
With Internet Explorer, Microsoft learned from its lack of availability across platforms and made Edge readily available on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and soon Linux.
Firefox has been available on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux for years. And as you would expect with any modern browser, Firefox lets you log in with a free account and sync data such as passwords, browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs between your computer, tablet and phone. It also allows you to sync across platforms as well.
Edge also allows you to connect your associated Microsoft account and sign in to sync your favorites, history, passwords, and more between your computer and iOS or Android devices.
Overall Assessment
Aside from sucking up a lot of computing power, Edge running on Chromium has answered a lot of users’ needs for functionality and features. But there’s still a lot to account for in terms of the browser’s privacy protections. It’s our assessment that Firefox is still a better choice for most people to use in their daily lives, based not only on functionality but more importantly on our transparency in how we collect user data, what exactly we collect, and what we do with it. Because our parent company is Mozilla, a non-profit organization dedicated to internet privacy and freedom, we simply have a different set of priorities when it comes to users’ data.
The bottom line is that while we suggest using Firefox, the best browser for you ultimately will be the one that fits your individual needs with extension support, browser customization, speed, privacy and security.
What Is The New Browser Recommended By Microsoft
The comparisons made here were done so with default settings and across browser release versions as follows:
Firefox (81) | Edge (85)
This page is updated semi-quarterly to reflect latest versioning and may not always reflect latest updates.
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.
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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
Edgium—that's what some industry watchers have been calling the new version of Edge—can autofill credit card details, but doing so works differently than it does in Chrome. If you type a credit card number into a Web form, Google Chrome automatically detects what you're doing and asks if you want to save it. Edgium, on the other hand, pays no attention to you typing credit card information to a website. To get the browser to save a credit card number, you must go into its Settings and to Profiles / Payment info.
AdvertisementOnce you've gotten to the Payment info settings dialog, you can click an 'Add card' button. Edge does correctly detect credit card entry, and when you have one or more saved cards available, it will prompt you when there's an opportunity to auto-fill with it. The saved credit card info is, for now at least, purely local—it does not sync from one browser to another when you're logged in as the same user.
Favorites
The one place we outright prefer the new Edge to Google Chrome is in its Favorites management. In both Chrome and Edge, there's a little star inside the address bar itself to toggle Favorite status for a page. But in Edge, there's also a little star button beside the bar, which drops down the list of Favorites you've already created. We're fiercely protective of vertical screen real estate and therefore don't really like enabling the Favorites bar in any browser. But the convenient little drop-down is nice, and we think it makes the Favorites function much more useful.
Favorites synced perfectly and instantly from machine to machine when we tested using our sync-is-working personal Windows Live login.
Microsoft contributions
One of the complaints we've frequently heard from readers about rebasing Edge on the Chromium project is that it removes diversity from the Web browser ecosystem. This is obviously true—if Microsoft uses Chromium to build Edge, it doesn't have to build and maintain the majority of the codebase itself. But it overlooks the strength of open source software development—active cooperation.
Microsoft began contributing code to the Chromium project almost immediately after beginning its first beta builds of Chromium-based Edge. One of its first contributions was to improve battery life in the browser; that contribution is still in development and has not yet been accepted into the Chromium master—but importantly, engineers from Google and Microsoft are cooperating in the testing and implementation here, with a public record for all to see.
New Microsoft Update Browser 2020
Microsoft has also announced its intent to bring browser accessibility, touch optimization, and Arm optimizations from its original Edge into the Chromium project. As CNET reported earlier this week, Microsoft has made nearly 2,000 commits to the Chromium project in the last year. This is an important distinction—the company isn't merely consuming Chromium, it's publicly and openly cooperating with Google in ways that any company or even individual can.
Although Microsoft and Google's collaboration on a unified browser framework does mean less code diversity for the Web, it represents a major improvement in openness and fair access.
New Microsoft Browser 2020
Listing image by Mike Mozart / Flickr