Is Microsoft Edge on Chromium a No Brainer? (Premium)

Microsoft’s decision to halt development of its proprietary web browser rendering technologies is controversial on many levels. But from a more pragmatic perspective, this change will impact users in some unexpected ways, not all of which will be positive. So I think it’s time to air a few concerns that have nothing to do with Google’s and Microsoft’s relationship and everything to do with how we interact with the web browsers on our PCs and smartphones.

At a high level, ecosystem is one of the many decision points that goes into any personal technology choice. For example, those who choose the Apple-only route give up a lot when they go down what I think of as a “one-way, dead-end street.” But what they gain is certainly desirable: Things just work, and the integration between the Mac, iOS devices, Apple TV, and Apple Watch enables a seamless experience that the rest us—if we’re being honest with ourselves—are jealous of.

One of the many seamless experiences that Apple fans enjoy is the replication of accounts and passwords across their devices. If you sign-in to a website in Safari on the Mac, the user name and password for the account you created there will be available to you, automatically, when you sign-in to its app on your iPhone: Just use Face ID or Touch ID to authenticate yourself and you’re in.

Google offers a similar—and, go figure, even more seamless—experience for those who use Chrome on the PC or Mac desktop and Android on mobile, assuming that you also use Chrome for password management. As with the Apple example above, Google will make any account information you create in Chrome available to apps in Android (and vice versa), allowing you to authenticate yourself and instantly sign-in, without having to type in your username or password information. (Both Apple and Google also facilitate browser bookmark and settings sync between devices using the same mechanism, but I’m going to focus on passwords here to keep things simple.)

There are many ways to manage passwords, of course. You could use a third-party and cross-platform solution like LastPass, for example. But these solutions integrate less well with the underlying platform, especially on mobile, and are thus slower and more ponderous to use. You could also simply do a one-time and one-way sync using a web browser on your PC or Mac to “copy” your passwords across. But this approach could be problematic when passwords change, especially if you’re adhering to best practices and using long, complex, and impossible to remember passwords. (Yet another reason to use a password manager.)

We all have our own approach to this sort of. But as a Chrome user on both the desktop and mobile, using Chrome for password management makes sense. It’s integrated into the browser and works seamlessly. It syncs passwords through my Google account to Android, which I prefer over the iPhone. And my Google account is protected with two-factor authentication, so the passwords are as safe as they can be in our ever-connected world.

This system works so well that it’s become a major blocker for moving to other web browsers, though I experiment with doing so all the time. There are browsers like Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and others that offer both desktop and mobile clients and the ability to sync passwords (and other data) between them. But they don’t sync passwords to Android. These browsers use their own account systems.

Of them, only one is truly important to me: Microsoft Edge integrates with my Microsoft account (MSA), which I use almost as much as my Google account. I use it to sign-in to my Windows 10 PCs and to access various Microsoft services, including Office 365 Home (and its 1 TB of OneDrive storage), Outlook.com, OneNote, and more.

That I maintain two “primary” online accounts—Microsoft and Google—is probably not unusual. But it does make moving between these worlds a bit more difficult than is possible, say, in an Apple-only ecosystem. But because I use Chrome on Windows and maintain my online passwords there, the experience is pretty seamless. As I’ve tested different versions of Microsoft Edge over time, I’ve even (one-time) synced my bookmarks and passwords to that browser so that a reasonable copy of them is available there too.

But there’s no back-end sync happening. Over time, the data in Edge is out-of-date, and that will always be true unless I decided to move to Edge full-time, at which point I would lose out on the Chrome/Android password sync that makes using both Windows and Android easier.

And that’s my question about the Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge.

On the surface, it would appear that moving to this new browser would be a no-brainer for some majority of Windows 10 users. After all, Chrome (which is based on Chromium) is by far the most popular web browser. And Android is by far the most popular mobile platform. I could move to Edge Chromium and not lose a thing.

Right?

Maybe not. In the leaked screenshots we’ve seen so far, someone has blacked out the user profile picture that appears in the new Chromium-based version of Edge. In Chrome, as in Chromium, this user profile picture is tied to a Google account. But in Edge Chromium, it would be tied to a Microsoft account, wouldn’t it? And that means that using Edge Chromium, from a password (and other data) sync perspective, would be no different from using the version of Edge we have today. It will be less seamless than just using Chrome.

Those using a third-party password manager are probably smiling right now, sensing the bullet that they’ve dodged. And despite the extra time and steps required to use such a product, especially on mobile, maybe they have a point. In fact, one might correctly argue that using a third-party password manager is a good step towards always trying to be more portable, something I both practice and preach.

But like many, I’m essentially lazy. I want things to just work. And I really like how seamless the password experience is between Chrome (on both desktop and mobile) and Android. It does just work.

This means that I, and others like me, have a decision to make about the Chromium-based versions of Edge. That decision will be made pragmatically, in that I’ll do what’s best for me and recommend you do the same. But this will be one of many things to examine when we finally do get our first peek at the new browser, hopefully soon. And maybe it won’t be the wrench in the spokes that I’m imagining. We need to experience the Chromium-based version of Edge before we know for sure.