Tag: Chromium

Tip o’ the Week 475 – Chrome-plating to the Edge

Posted on (Updated by ewand

clip_image002April’s big news was the public preview of the first Edge browser that uses the Chromium rendering engine. If this seems like a minor footnote in history, it at least marks a turning point in browser development by Microsoft. Instead of continuing with the Edge browser on Windows 10 using its own EdgeHTML rendering engine (and all the potential compatibility headaches and support issues that may entail), the team decided to move to using the open-source Chromium engine that underpins Google’s Chrome, and to make Edge available on older versions of Windows as well as the Mac.

After early builds were leaked, the Edge team has been working to release the preview in daily (“Canary”) builds, or weekly (“Developer”) versions. They can be side-loaded alongside both the regular Edge browser and Chrome, so giving it a try is a fairly low risk activity, and in unscientific comparison tests it appears to be as fast or slightly faster than both Chrome and the other Edge.

Check out more info on the Edge Dev blog, and get the latest build from the Edge Insider site. The Chromium-based Edge (already being referred to as “Edgium” by some) will support addins built for Chrome, though for now, just a subset are available from the Microsoft Store, and many more will follow and it is possible to add others.

clip_image006In time, most (though not all, it seems) of the features that have clip_image004been built into Edge will migrate to the new version, but for now, the test builds that are being made public look a lot like Chrome in places – eg. the settings menu, that takes place inside a browser tab rather than a sidebar, like “Classic” Edge.

Other oddities include shortcut keys – in old Edge, CTRL+SHIFT+P will launch an InPrivate window (useful for logging into Azure portal or Office365 admin page using different creds … what else?) but in both Chrome and the Edge Dev build, that launches the print dialog, and Incognito/InPrivate is CTRL+SHIFT+N.

Tip o’ the Week 470 – Chrome Activities on Time

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002As many of now know, the Edge browser in Windows 10 is going to change.

In short, the browser application will be rewired to use the open-source Chromium rendering engine, meaning that Edge will be every bit as compatible as Chrome is in displaying web pages and apps. It doesn’t mean that Edge will look and feel the same as Chrome, though – if the latter is a skin on the Chromium engine that provides a load of additional functionality, so Edge will be a different skin but will look and act much the same as it does today.

For now, at least, there are a lot of Chrome users on Windows 10 and various teams at Microsoft have gone to some lengths to build Chrome extensions to support other services or software, maybe in the same way they work on Edge or even beyond. See here for a list of Chrome extensions published by Microsoft.

clip_image004One such extension was published recently, which allows the activity that a user is doing in Chrome, to be published to the Windows Timeline feature.
Install the Activities extension here.
(assuming you’re using Chrome… Edge users who just clicked on that link, go and have a word with yourselves).

clip_image006After installation, then any browsing you do in Chrome while will show up in Timeline – press WindowsKey + TAB or click the Timeline button that is generally found next to the Start button on your taskbar, and use the slider at the side to jump to a particular date, or click the search bar on the top right (keyboardistas, just press CTRL-F) and search for a keyword within the content you were browsing earlier.

It’s a fantastic way of searching not just browser history, but other activities – like Office docs or many Windows apps.

clip_image008Look under the icon for the Activities extension, and you can choose which browser you’d like to use to open the tile from the Timeline – in the example above, a Google search within Chrome took us to a content page, and clicking or tapping that tile will re-open the website.

So, if you’re currently using Chrome under sufferance but would like to keep most of your browsing in Edge, having browsed in Chrome and gone back to the Timeline, it will give you the option of using your default – Edge – or using the other one, er, Edge…