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Microsoft (Briefly) Reveals New Extensions For Edge, Including Reddit and Pinterest (thestack.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the take-a-look dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A now-inactive page at a Microsoft Azure development sites shows a page that reveals the first two extensions for the Microsoft Edge browser to be Pinterest and a port of the Reddit Enhancement Suite for Google Chrome. The page was identified by Twitter user H0x0d, and is now only accessible via Google Cache.

8 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. What makes this legitimate? by brantgurga · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is nothing in the page's content or about its place of publication that suggests it to be potentially legitimate. I could have easily come up with a page published on Azure that had been unpublished to have this situation. This could be a hoax. I wouldn't trust anything about it until properly acknowledge or published by Microsoft.

    --
    Brant Gurganus http://gurganus.name/brant
  2. Anybody actually using Edge? by RogueyWon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A genuine question (though possibly not one best directed at Slashdot) - is anybody actually using Edge?

    I've moved to Win10 Pro on my home machine and am mostly pretty happy with it (having disabled or blocked the phone-home nastiness). But Edge in its current state seems fairly shocking. It lacks basic functionality that we've taken for granted in other desktop browsers for years. You can't even change the folder it saves downloads to without manual registry editing. All told, it feels like an attempt to do a lightweight phone/tablet browser on the desktop (and I thought MS had learned that desktop/laptop users don't like that crap after the Windows 8 start menu fiasco).

    Given that there's nothing to stop you using other browsers (including Internet Explorer) on Win10, I just can't imagine why anybody would be using Edge right now.

    And don't get me started about the Windows 10 mail client, which is, if anything, even more primitive than the one on my phone. Why on earth they replaced the perfectly serviceable Windows Live Mail with that catastrophe I have no idea.

    1. Re:Anybody actually using Edge? by Tx · · Score: 3, Informative

      I was wondering the same thing. Tried it when first upgrading a couple of machines to Windows 10, ignored it ever since. From a quick search, Edge seems to be roughly in the 1.7-2.8% market share range (e.g. netmarketshare) this month, which actually seems seems high to me; since Windows 10 has 9% of the desktop OS market share for the same timeframe, that means fully a quarter of Windows 10 users are finding Edge good enough to stick with it. Then again, I guess for basic web browsing by non-technical users, it probably does the job; that segment of users probably wouldn't know about or use the features that Edge is missing even if it had them, so that's probably reasonable.

      --
      Oh no... it's the future.
    2. Re:Anybody actually using Edge? by damnbunni · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have a Windows 10 tablet, and Edge is the primary browser I use on it.

      It's the only browser that even comes close to having a touch-capable UI. Both Firefox and Chrome removed their touch UIs.

      Touch UIs suck on a desktop but they're rather important when you're using a, you know, touch device.

      If I'm using my tablet with a keyboard and mouse I usually use something else because Edge lacks adblock, but that's not a terribly common situation.

      Of the non-Edge browsers I've tried, Opera comes closest to being usable on a 9" touchscreen, but it's still pretty rough.

    3. Re: Anybody actually using Edge? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Exactly.

      For the majority of people who just use a browser for email/facebook/YouTube/reading the news, edge is more than good enough. And it just works, so the users don't even look for anything else.

      Edge is the perfect bundled browser. Good enough to do everything Joe Average wants to do, yet simple enough to not overwhelm him. And if advanced users want IE/Firefox/Chrome, they will know how to get them.

    4. Re:Anybody actually using Edge? by dave420 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I use it quite a bit on my media PC, as the PC is rather underpowered, and the entire Edge rendering is hardware accelerated, including flash video. Chrome is nearly as quick on that PC, but it just doesn't have the hardware acceleration that Edge offers. The lack of extensions is very noticeable, as is the lack of quite a few other standard browser features, but that will improve over time.

      So yes, people are using Edge, because it already can do some things other browsers can't.

  3. Re:Appification by kwoff · · Score: 2

    Yeah, until mobile devices there was a trend toward single web application running in any browser. Now every company has not only web devs, but also IOS and Android devs. There needs to be an equivalent of an "app browser" to run "apps" everywhere.

  4. Re:Sounds like the Microsoft plan by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Step 1 - embrace...

    Seriously? How exactly does this sound like "embrace, extend, extinguish"? What are they embracing? What have they extended (other than their own browser)? What could they possibly extinguish?

    According to the cached document, the extensions were attributed to pinterest.com and redditenhancementsuite.com - who were also the authors of the same extensions for all the other browsers. Do you just see the name Microsoft and blinding spout out FUD even though there is not a single similarity to the old EEE scenario?