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 a...