Using Internet Explorer on older versions of Windows was a pain sometimes, at least for website creators who had to put in some extra work and code to get their sites to work with Microsoft's browser. That should not be an issue with the new Microsoft Edge browser that's being developed for Windows 10, at least according to its development team.
In a highly technical blog post this week, Microsoft stated:
Over the past year the Microsoft Edge team has been hard at work on a new browser engine that will be better than ever at correctly, quickly, and reliably rendering the Web. As a user, your favorite web sites will just work, and as a web developer, you will find that Microsoft Edge should just work like other browsers, making it easier than ever to create a site that works everywhere."
One of the reasons this will work is that the Edge team has designed the browser so it works much like ones that use the WebKit engine. It's used on Apple's Safari and Google uses a forked version for its Chrome browser. Microsoft says:
"We recommend that web developers avoid UA sniffing as much as possible; modern web platform features are nearly all detectable in easy ways. Over the past year, we've seen some UA-sniffing sites that have been updated to detect Microsoft Edge… only to provide it with a legacy IE11 code path. This is not the best approach, as Microsoft Edge matches 'WebKit' behaviors, not IE11 behaviors (any Edge-WebKit differences are bugs that we're interested in fixing). In our experience Microsoft Edge runs best on the 'WebKit' code paths in these sites. "
Microsoft says their ultimate hope is that all web browsers and sites will eventually "align to a single well-defined well-designed behavior" so that they all work with each other without any special coding needed.
Source: Microsoft
