Microsoft Edge : Top Features That Matter

Microsoft Edge is Redmond's replacement for Internet Explorer - the web browser that ruled the Internet for a painfully long time - for almost two decades! At the Build 2015 conference, Microsoft announced that the Windows 10 will ship with Microsoft Edge, the brand new shiney web browser that will not only replace IE on Windows machines, but also rival with the big shots in the market - Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft had their talented engineers work on 'Project Spartan' with an aim to develop a modern web browser that'd be a worthy competitor to Chrome and FF.

Did Microsoft get it right this time? It's too early to say, but the feature list looks solid. The most noteworthy features that will make it to the Microsoft Edge are -

• Inbuilt support for Cortana: Microsoft's Digital Assistant capable of processing natural voice commands.
• Inbuilt reader and note-taking and the notes can be shared with other users.
• Simplistic and minimalist design
• Brand new web rendering engine called EdgeHTML

Satya Nadella is betting big on Cortana and it's no surprise that it will make it to most of the applications in Microsoft's applications; Edge included. The Cortana app has been specifically engineered to accept natural language inputs from the user and then process those instructions into action items. Cortana can help you provide suggestions based on your previous usage, provide alerts and bring you information by searching it on the Internet (using Bing). It's yet to be seen how useful or interesting it will be to use Cortana to do stuff on Edge.

The note-taking and sharing feature lets you draw stuff directly on the web page you are viewing and then share all of it with other users. Edge will also allow you to save all your doodles to OneNote, the note-taking program from Microsoft. The reader does the obvious job - that lets you add stories, article or blogs to it so that you can read them later in an environment optimised for reading (no ads, fonts and background of your choice etc.).


The minimalist look is going to rule the UI for several months to come and Microsoft Edge is no different. We do not know if it will support custom themes, but that would be nice feature to have. Microsoft did not reveal much information about the EdgeHTML - the proprietary layout engine it's built especially for the Edge. We learn that it's been forked from Trident layout engine and supports modern web-standards - something the Internet Explorer didn't love. Performance review of EdgeHTML by AnandTech on a preview built of Windows 10 had revealed that it performed exceptionally well in JavaScript engine category - at par with Google Chrome.

The Edge is expected to be part of Windows 10 release and we've no clue if the older versions of Windows will be able to upgrade their IEs to Edge. It'd be quite wishful to expect Microsoft to release Edge for OSX or Linux; in case anyone of you wants to have it.

We'll keep you posted about all the new features that go into the final builds of Microsoft Edge. Till then, we'd like to have feedback from everyone who's got access to Windows 10 beta. Oh, did we tell you that the symbol is indeed Microsoft Edge logo?