The new browser of the house of Redmond will not be at all the carbon copy of Chrome. The differences are there and they are many, as you can see from the first beta
A few days ago Microsoft showed to the public the first preview of its new browser Edge that, as we know well for some time now, is no longer based on proprietary technology of the house of Redmond but on the open source project Chromium by Google. Edge, therefore, is about to be added to the long list of browsers based on Google Chromium.
For this reason, there are many who fear that Edge will be nothing more than a version of Chrome with an interface revised by Microsoft. In reality, it’s not like that, because from what emerges analyzing the preview, and from what Microsoft itself declared, there are at least fifty Chromium services that have been disabled in Edge, to replace them with others developed in house. Among these, logically, there are all those closely related to Google services such as Google Now, Google Pay, Google Cloud Messaging and so on. Other changes compared to the standard Chromium, instead, are related to the technologies that Microsoft wants to manage personally to offer its users a specific user experience.
Microsoft Edge Vs Google Chrome: the differences between the two browsers
For example, Microsoft is including in Edge all the features necessary to make the Edge browser perfectly compatible with the house services, such as Microsoft accounts and Azure Active Directory for user authentication. There will also be the integration of Bing as the default search engine and the necessary technologies to better manage multimedia content protected by copyright inside the browser. And, speaking of multimedia content, Edge will be able to play them with up to 4k resolution and HDR or Dolby Vision colors.
Edge will also be compatible with Microsoft Hello, the biometric facial recognition used as a method of user authentication. The company also promises that the new Edge will offer users the same experience as its predecessor when scrolling through pages, whether viewing Web pages or PDF files. It improves instead the support for touch screens, especially with regard to the virtual keyboard, and support for devices with ARM64 architecture CPUs. At the moment, however, Microsoft has not yet finely defined the details of the interface of Edge: what you see in the preview is far from final by admission of the same engineers in Redmond. But they are the same engineers to say also, proudly, that with the work developed for Edge Microsoft has provided over 300 useful contributions to the development of the Chromium project.