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Microsoft Edge On Windows 10: the Browser That Will Finally Kill IE
An anonymous reader writes: Windows 10 launches today and with it comes a whole new browser, Microsoft Edge. You can still use Internet Explorer if you want, but it's not the default. IE turns 20 in less than a month, which is ancient in internet years, so it's not surprising that Microsoft is shoving it aside. Still, leaving behind IE and launching a new browser built from the ground up marks the end of an era for Microsoft. “Knowing that browsing is still one of the very top activities that people do on a PC, we knew there was an opportunity, and really an obligation, to push the web browsing experience and so that’s what we’ve done with Microsoft Edge," Drew DeBruyne, director of program management at Microsoft told VentureBeat.
And then Chrome turned around and finished Firefox.
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The browser UI is new, but the rendering engine is still based on Trident. They just removed all the legacy stuff, and focused on clean implementations of the standards without worrying so much about backward compatibility. Edge will puke about as badly as Chrome or Firefox will if fed code and markup intended for IE7, instead of falling back to IE7's rendering style.
Which isn't to say there aren't going to be security bugs, of course. But then, the same is true of all the big browser vendors.
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IE hasn't been integrated with the shell for a decade. If you type a URL into an Explorer window in Win7 or 8, it just launches your default browser, which may not be IE.
No it's written in WinRT which is to say it's sandboxed from the rest of the operating system using the WinRT app model. One of the annoying things about developing for WinRT is just how low privileged an application in WinRT is without any means to escalate except by explicit user permission. Shell access is impossible. COM is nearly non-existent. The only way to get data to and from the application in the WinRT framework is through a specific API contract that makes Soviet Russia look like a libertarian paradise by comparison.
In short, by writing Edge in WinRT they automatically picked up a lot of security features automatically. I would be really surprised if in its current state it could be used to modify system files.