What is Microsoft Edge? What Should it Be? (Premium)

Inspired by a Thurrott.com forum post, I'm revisiting one of the more contentious issues we have with Windows 10.

I don't mean to suck all the air out of the great conversation that is happening in BDSREV's Does Microsoft care about Edge?. But then, that post is available to everyone who visits Thurrott.com, and not just Premium members. So I'm sure it will continue forward, that ideas will continue to be exchanged.

But this is an important and central conversation because it speaks to the very identity of Windows and of Microsoft's strategic aims.

To frame this conversation somewhat, I am examining Microsoft's original goals for Edge and why they make absolutely no sense today given how things have evolved.

But first, let's address the elephant in the room. As I'm sure you know, there is still an ongoing debate about what, exactly, Microsoft Edge is.

That is, is Microsoft Edge a "real" Store/Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app? Is it a unique hybrid app that utilizes both Store/UWP and desktop application technologies? Or is it some deeply integrated platform feature of Windows 10, something that cannot be separated from the OS itself?

And we have ample precedent for those questions.

Microsoft, after all, artificially architected Internet Explorer in the late 1990's so that its code was commingled with that of Windows 9x and NT, making it difficult, if not impossible, to remove IE from Windows. It did so for competitive reasons---well, anticompetitive reasons, actually---and not because doing so was technically "better" than the alternative. Microsoft did it to harm competition, not to benefit its users, and it did so knowing full well that this act would limit consumer choice.

Those facts were proven in court and played a decisive role in Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's original decision to split up Microsoft into two companies so that its operating system and application development efforts would be explicitly separated. (The primary reason Jackson never followed through on this punishment is that the Judge undermined his own authority by illegally bragging about his plans to the press. But that's just an interesting historical aside.)

That Microsoft is again commingling a web browser with Windows today---this time with Microsoft Edge and Windows 10---is clear. And that, for a variety of reasons, no one cares. No antitrust agency, in the U.S. or elsewhere, will ever call them to task for this behavior. For better or worse, Microsoft's domination of personal computing is long-gone, and it is free to again engage in business practices that are only illegal for monopolies.

But we return to that question that seems to bedevil so many in the Microsoft community. What is Microsoft Edge?

It doesn't matter.

Microsoft Edge was dreamed up alongside Windows 10, a platform that Microsoft originally envisioned as being cross-platform, something that would run on everything from embedded devices, to phones, to tab...