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 tablets, to traditional PCs, and to other devices of all kinds. That partially explains the decision to commingle Microsoft Edge and Windows 10, regardless of how those things are, in fact, commingled. Microsoft saw a future of Window 10 everywhere.

Which, as you, know, did not materialize.

Today, Windows 10 is in use on roughly 700 million devices, the vast majority of which are PCs. The second-most frequent use of this system today, almost certainly, is the Xbox One. And we know that there are only 30 million or so of those consoles out in the world. So Windows 10, despite its original design, is pretty much just for PCs. Just like previous versions of Windows.

And that, I think, is what has hobbled Microsoft Edge from the beginning. Microsoft knows from its telemetry data that the number one activity that people engage in with Windows is web browsing, and I’m sure that was roughly similar on phone too, back when that was a thing. So getting Edge right was important, and I’m sure that whatever level of system integration there is there occurred for that reason: To make Edge work as well on Windows 10 as it could.

But that strategy of Windows 10 everywhere failed. So the strategy to make Edge central to Windows 10 has been rendered moot. And this has triggered the inevitable push to put Microsoft Edge on mobile: There are now versions of this app on Android, iPhone, and iPad.

Microsoft Edge for mobile is nothing like Microsoft Edge for Windows 10: It’s just a user experience shell on top of whatever the underlying web browser rendering engine is; which is Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS (iPhone/iPad). Some have—curiously—derided Edge mobile on those grounds, that in not using its own rendering engine, Edge is somehow not a “real” web browser.

Those people are horribly wrong. And are missing the point.

In fact, I’ll take that a step further: Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 should be rearchitected—created anew from the ground up—to work like it does on mobile. It should be a user experience shell, a mobile app, built on top of the web browser rendering engine, which in this case is called EdgeHTML and is “part” of Windows 10. And will continue to be advanced on that biannual Windows 10 schedule.

Put simply, I may not know what Edge is today—frankly, I don’t even care—but I do know what it needs to become.

Separating Microsoft Edge the mobile app (the Store app, on Windows 10), from EdgeHTML/Windows 10 not only makes sense, but it’s necessary. It will let Microsoft advance the browser user interface and functionality in lock-step across all of the mobile apps on Windows 10, Android, and iOS. In this new world, that’s the kind of co-development that makes sense.

So why didn’t Microsoft just design Edge this way originally?

I can only guess, but it’s likely because it felt that it could essentially create a single Edge “app” for Windows 10, and that single app would just work everywhere. Under my plan, each Edge mobile app would be a separate app and would require its own engineering effort. (There would obviously be some overlap, too.) It’s more work to create different apps on different platforms.

But with Windows 10 everywhere having failed, limiting Edge for a use case that never came to fruition no longer makes sense. Nor does tying its improvement to the biannual Windows 10 release schedule. That’s a short cycle for an operating system, but it’s a glacial pace for a web browser that still lags significantly behind the competition in all the ways that matter most to users. We are literally three years into Windows 10’s life cycle, and Microsoft Edge only accounts for 4 percent of all desktop web browser usage. And that’s Edge’s best—really, only—viable market.

Microsoft Edge, as originally envisioned, makes no sense. And it’s time to set it free as the mobile app it needs to be.