 Microsoft released its Edge browser, originally known as Project Spartan, in 2015. Wow, was that only four years ago? Feels like a lot longer than that. You know what they say, time flies when you're having fun. Anyway, out of the gate, Edge brought some interesting features to the table, like a reading mode and the ability to easily mark up and share web pages. But it was also slow and memory hungry, and it lacked support for the thousands of helpful browser extensions that you could get on Chrome and Firefox. So, while it peaked at 20% market share among Windows 10 users in August of 2015, its subsequent slide over the following months and years indicates that most of those people were probably just using it to download Chrome. So then, in late 2018, after four long years of progressively more desperate tactics to get people to please... Please just try it. Please. Microsoft decided that rather than trying to fight Chrome, they would enter the belly of the beast, becoming Chrome, then destroying it from the inside. Just kidding. I mean, that might be what they're doing, we actually don't know. But what we do know is that there's a freaking chromium-powered Edge browser out there in the wild, and we spent the last couple of days finding out whether it's the next big thing, or the browser equivalent of two kids stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat so they can get a ticket for your PG-13 taskbar. Today's video is brought to you by Corsair. The Corsair Ironclaw RGB wireless mouse features a native 18,000 DPI optical sensor, a comfortable palm grip, and sub-1 millisecond slipstream technology. Check it out at the link below. [♪ Music playing. Clicking sound effect. Music playing. For the uninitiated, Chromium is Google's free and open-source software project that forms the foundation of Google's mainline Chrome browser builds, which, by contrast, are not open source. So what that means is that anyone, including Microsoft, can take that foundation and potentially build their own browser on top of it. And actually, Microsoft is far from the first company to do this. Some of the more well-known third-party Chromium-based browsers include Opera, Brave, Amazon Silk, and Samsung's aptly named Internet. Now, the new Chromium-powered Edge is not fully launched yet, but Microsoft is publishing developer builds as they get closer to the full rollout, and that means that we can try it right now. So we're going to be using the Windows 10 version, but this is kind of cool. The new Edge will actually be available on Android, iOS, and even macOS. So, let's get started. When you open a new tab, you get some layout options. Focused has some frequently visited sites and a simple search bar, unfortunately powered by Bing, but fortunately with the option to change it to Google Search, DuckDuckGo, or Ask Jeeves or whatever. And then next up is Inspirational Layout, which adds the pretty Microsoft background of the day to the mix, or the Informational Layout, which adds an MSN-style news section. On your first boot up of the app, it will probably prompt you to import your Chrome data, including bookmarks or favorites, your saved passwords, your autofill entries, and your browsing history, but if you're not 100% sure about the Switch, you can also do that in the settings later. Once you do that, it actually begins to feel eerily like you're using a Microsoft-skinned version of Chrome, though, right down to the menu layouts. So, most of the settings that you'd expect to find are there, but like it's weird, because they might be located in a different submenu. It's like using a Chrome from an alternate universe where, like, the snap never happened. What in the- spoilers! Spoilers! You had more than a year to see the first part! There's a second part? Ugh. Perhaps the weirdest part, though, of the New Edge experience is installing Chrome extensions. Now, by default, the New Edge only allows you to install a small number of Microsoft-approved Edge Insider add-ons, but, in true Chromium fashion, you can allow the installation of any extension from the Chrome Web Store by simply clicking Allow Extensions from Other Stores. With that said, there's no guarantee it'll work. LastPass, for example, wouldn't let us sign in on Edge. Now, thankfully, there was an Edge version already available, and that one worked fine. We're just saying that, whether it's for security reasons or other compatibility reasons, Microsoft says that the list of official add-ons will increase as they go through and verify them. So it's not that they're taking a walled garden approach, they just want to make sure that the user experience is okay. So then, if you were, like, amped to switch from Chrome to Edge, we just want you to keep in mind that you might not have all of your Chrome features exactly as you like them. Also, making matters worse, if you are one of the Edge faithful, Hi. Microsoft's Chromium-based reboot might be a bit of a bummer for you, too, because a fresh start means that the current build is even lacking some of the features of old Edge. So these include setting aside tabs, style of support, Ooh, that's kind of rough for you Surface Pro users out there, and an official dark mode, although you can at least enable a beta version of that last one in the flags. Now, the Edge team has promised that those features will return, and they've also committed to new ones, like easily shareable tab collections, a three-tiered privacy control system, and, best of all, an Internet Explorer compatibility mode! I'm actually not joking about this. That is a godsend, not only for nostalgic masochists, but also for corporate and IT workers that are stuck using legacy apps that just won't run on modern browsers. And the Edge engineers say they're not only creating new features for their own browser, they're also submitting suggestions to the Chromium open-source project, which might influence other Chromium-based browsers, and even Chrome itself. For any of this to actually matter, though, Edge has to perform as well as Chrome, Firefox, or the others. And, actually, given Edge's reputation as the Nuh browser, it probably has to perform even better. So we ran Chrome, new Edge, old Edge, and Firefox through a handful of benchmarks. HTML5 test for pure HTML5 performance, BaseMark for a mix of JavaScript and graphically intense workloads, and WebExpert for a wide sampling of tasks intended to mirror everyday browser use. And I gotta say, for a fledgling browser, the new Edge held up alright. It kept up pretty well with Chrome, although both of them lost to Firefox and WebExpert, and it beat both the old Edge and Firefox in BaseMark. Now, it did have the worst pure HTML5 performance out of our tested browsers, but then we ran the test again using HTTPS instead of HTTP, which brought its score up to a tie with Chrome. So then, at least from a pure performance standpoint, the new Chromium-based Edge is immediately a big step up from the old Edge and extremely close to Chrome, in terms of what you can expect from day-to-day browsing. So, with a well-performing, feature-rich, extension-heavy alternative to Chrome on the table, other than Firefox, of course, sorry Firefox fans, you guys are still a thing, we should just all be celebrating then, right? Like, competition is good, right? Ah, not so fast. So, we've talked a lot about what a Chromium-powered Edge browser means for the user experience, but there's another huge question that the existence of this chimeric concoction brings up. Is Google about to fundamentally own the ability to set their own standards for how the Internet is developed? Because here's the thing, depending on where you get your stats, Chrome has been sitting at around 65 to 75% global desktop browser market share, with Edge around 5, and the supposedly defunct Internet Explorer still hovering around 5 to 10%. Now, Firefox and Safari still have healthy enough user bases, but think about this. Once this new Edge actually launches, and Edge and Internet Explorer users, hopefully, switch over, as much as 85% of the Internet could be dominated by browsers based on Google-owned software. That gives Google an unprecedented level of control over the way the Internet will continue to change. And while Google has developed many standards and protocols that have benefited all web users, like the Speedy protocol that formed the basis for HTTP2, they've also been responsible for some shady, locked ecosystem-type stuff in the past, like changing YouTube so that it ran worse on non-Chrome browsers. Wait, I'm just trying to think. Was that before or after they removed Don't Be Evil from their corporate motto? Can you remember? Yeah, me neither. So the thing is, all of that could be much ado about nothing. And for their part, Google has said they remain committed to the open web, and will continue to work with others in the web browser ecosystem. But we still thought it was important to not just try out new Edge in this video, but to also point out that if you subscribe to the age-old wisdom about absolute power and absolute corruption and all that, you might want to at least give Firefox a try. Or Safari? Sure, or Safari. This video is brought to you by the DropX Alex Cavalli Tube Hybrid Amp. It was built from the ground up by Drop and Alex Cavalli, a long-time favorite from the audiophile community. It combines solid state and vacuum tube amps. It's got an entirely new circuitry design. It delivers the required current for planar magnetic headphones. And, thanks to its high voltage, it can drive dynamic headphones to perform their best. It's got a one-year warranty, and you can check it out at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. 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