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Microsoft Explains Why Edge Has So Few Extensions (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: It's now a little more than a year since Microsoft first brought extensions to Edge. After so long you would expect the selection of addons to be overwhelming -- but that's far from being the case. In all, there are only 70-odd Edge extensions available, and Microsoft has been moved to explain why.
In a blog post, the company almost apologetically explains that it is "building a thoughtfully curated ecosystem," citing concern over quality and a fear of diminishing the user experience. What some might describe as "slow," Microsoft refers to as a "purposefully metered approach" to new extensions, and you probably shouldn't expect things to speed up a great deal any time soon.
Colleen Williams, senior program manager for Microsoft Edge, says "We want Microsoft Edge to be your favorite browser, with the fundamentals you expect -- speed, power efficiency, reliability, security." She also adds that "Astute observers of our release notes and active testers in the Insider program may have noticed that some preview builds break extensions temporarily."
In a blog post, the company almost apologetically explains that it is "building a thoughtfully curated ecosystem," citing concern over quality and a fear of diminishing the user experience. What some might describe as "slow," Microsoft refers to as a "purposefully metered approach" to new extensions, and you probably shouldn't expect things to speed up a great deal any time soon.
Colleen Williams, senior program manager for Microsoft Edge, says "We want Microsoft Edge to be your favorite browser, with the fundamentals you expect -- speed, power efficiency, reliability, security." She also adds that "Astute observers of our release notes and active testers in the Insider program may have noticed that some preview builds break extensions temporarily."
You're probably too young to remember this, or maybe they didn't have computers in Canada back then, but Internet Explorer used to run on classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. And Internet Explorer used to run on Solaris and HP-UX, too. So Microsoft porting its web browsers to Mac and UNIX platforms isn't without precedent.
Maybe you're also ill-informed about how Microsoft has released .NET Core and has ported it to Linux and macOS. And maybe you're also ill-informed about how Microsoft's Visual Studio Core product runs on Linux and macOS. And although you probably don't know what SQL Server is, the reality is that Microsoft has been porting it to Linux, too.
I know it will fuck up your really shallow and pathetic world view, but Microsoft has a long history of porting their software to other platforms. It's quite reasonable to think that Edge could be ported to Linux and macOS at some point. If that did happen, it probably would mean the end of Firefox.