The compatibility is certainly now there in spades: Its result from the HTML5Test measure
of supported web standards is near the top. See the intro and table
above for the actual scores. What pushes Edge over the top is support
for Dolby Digital, ObjectRTC, and the Screen Capture API. In general,
however, you won’t run into the kind of site incompatibilities that
users of the previous incarnation of Edge occasionally encountered.
Compatibility
isn’t the only benefit of the new Edge: As you can see in the table
above, it’s also a leader in performance as well as thrifty memory and
disk usage.
What new features has the Edge team been working on, you ask? The initial focuses have been privacy, the customizable start page, and the intriguing Collections feature for web research. For enterprise customers who still rely on Internet Explorer to run legacy programs (and we still run into these at places like insurance and doctors’ offices), Edge offers an IE Mode, but this won’t be available in standard consumer setups.
Another new feature worth highlighting is Immersive Reader mode. Not only does this offer distraction-free web article reading, stripping out ads and nonessential eye candy (or eye poison, more aptly), but It can also read webpage text aloud using lifelike Neural Voices. This is really something to try: It reads with sentence intonation, rather than simply word-by-word, as we’ve come to expect text-to-speech audio.
The Collections feature presents a sidebar onto which you can drag webpages and images, write notes, and then share the whole assemblage to Excel or Word. This feature hasn't appeared in the released version, but it works well in the beta and Microsoft says it's coming soon.
Maybe you don’t want a colorful corporate logo burning itself into your consciousness every time you open your browser? Edge offers four Home page options: Focused, Inspirational, Informational, and Custom. Focused is a blank page with search and buttons for your most-visited sites; Inspirational adds the gorgeous Bing photos that change daily as backgrounds; to all this, Informational adds customized news, weather, sports, and finance cards.
The browser offers three preset privacy levels: Basic, Balanced, and Strict. As you move from the first to the last, you increase privacy but possibly disable site features. The private browsing mode, like that in all browsers, doesn’t save any history from a private session.
Mobile versions for Android and iPhone with syncing smooths moving from desktop to mobile, and we find that password management works more reliably than in most other browsers, though it’s still a good idea to use a separate password management utility such as LastPass.