Microsoft has Edged out Internet Explorer

Microsoft launched its Edge browser some time ago, and has evolved it at a steady pace since. This past year has seen major developments with Edge that make it more relevant than ever before, and leave Internet Explorer even further in the past.

Edge is now on Chromium (the engine for Google Chrome)

The biggest change this past year has been Google moving to Chromium for its rendering engine. This was essential because Microsoft was not keeping up with the latest web standards development on Edge, and was instead starting to fall further behind the three major browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari).

By moving to Chromium, Edge now supports many more websites and web apps, and is far more compatible with the continuously evolving web scene. As a web platform company, this means we are able to support Edge better than ever before.

Edge is coming to Mac

A major, and rather surprising, announcement last year came with the notice that Edge will run on Apple Macs. The move makes a lot of sense for Microsoft as it had lost so much of the web development community to Apple over the past few years (since MacOS is compatible with Linux) and Microsoft want to provide the developers with the means to experience Edge natively (which it can do now with the move to Chromium).

You can already download the Edge Beta for Mac from the Microsoft Edge Insider site, but only do so if you’re comfortable with running Beta software on your Mac.

Affino and Internet Explorer (IE) Support

It has been some time since we officially supported Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. This is mainly owing to the fact that it was so far behind with web standards support, even when it was being actively developed.

It means that Affino simply will not run perfectly on IE, like it does on modern web browsers. The upcoming Affino release has for the first time notices advising users to upgrade from IE to Edge or other modern browsers. This is because we will be releasing the new Advanced Seminar templates which do not even display on IE, we instead display the simple Seminar listing, and a notice to upgrade.

IE users in turn miss out on all the great new capabilities like being able to see the seminars by day and stream, and being able to send themselves their itinerary.

If you have a userbase that is heavily IE based, then you should be actively promoting to your community the security, usability, and privacy benefits of moving to the latest generation Edge (or other major browsers) as part of your regular narrative to encourage them to move with the times.

As Affino evolves further it is likely that more such notices will be displayed, including for the next generation Control Centre which will not be IE compatible. This is essential for us to be able to offer the best mobile user experience, and will allow us to greatly improve that over the coming years.