Developer Perspective for Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge began as a supplement to IE, but was considered to be a separate development in an attempt to break past and legacy Internet technologies. Microsoft says it wants to get better interoperability than other modern browsers by improving performance, security, reliability, and reducing code complexity.

Edge will run on all Windows devices with different form factors, input type, mouse, touch, and stylus. Although Microsoft decided to keep IE in Windows 10 for the older version of the software, the main browser is still the edge. Microsoft recommends that developers only use edge as a development object for new projects.

Now there are two chakra binaries: (jscript9.dll) provides backward compatibility for enterprise applications, (Chakra.dll) provides interoperability, from this moment on, will eliminate document patterns and MS-specific extensions, and promises to be regularly updated, faster, and follow web standards.

Edge HTML is a new rendering engine that has already started working as a modification to the Trident. Trident development was halted, providing only security fixes and reliability as a major factor.

Edge does not support plugins other than the built-in PDF reader, and Flash will be updated through the Windows Update mechanism. In other words, without Silverlight, there's no java. So there is no ActiveX, browser Helper object, VML, VBScript, IE8 layout, and the DirectX filter will slowly transition and be replaced.

The following extensions will be replaced with new: pluggable protocols, Shell help APIs, active documents, custom download managers, custom security Manager, MIME filters, custom print handlers, Explorer Bars, custom context menus (through the registry), timers, accelerators, and others. More than 200 APIs have been replaced, and for some other vendors legacy will no longer be supported by Microsoft, except for some legacy issues. This is a new feature of Microsoft's introduction of the experiment API with other browser vendors as a test of water until they become a standard, and this time will be met by all the browser execution solution vendors.

Edge expands a number of ES6 features, including: class, digital face-to-word, math, number, object, RegExp and string built-in plugins, Promises, proxies. There are also a number of features being considered: templates and subclasses. The Edge User Voice Group,asm.js has become a top 10 feature requirement supported by the developer. And Microsoft has started to support Asm.js in the 10074 version of Windows Insider Preview. According to Microsoft, Asm.js,edge is 3 times times and twice times faster than IE11 on unity Benchmark and zlib respectively.

After this summer's official launch, Microsoft plans to add some other features to the edge, such as Object RTC, Pointer lock, and more support and extensions for Cortana. There are little details based on HTML and JS, but Microsoft shows that the Reddit enhancement suite and the Chrome extension will support the edge, which requires a small amount of expansion to run on the edge.

In terms of speed, edge performance is significantly better than Chrome and Firefox in Jetstream and Octane 2.0 benchmarks, according to Microsoft.

Edge Status page indicates that many of the features in development are still being researched, and Edge Dev is a good starting point for finding more information about the browser.

The Remoteie website also runs developers testing their sites on the edge of Windows 10 Technology Preview.

Developer Perspective for Microsoft Edge