Today at Build 2019, Microsoft is unveiling a slate of new features that it will include with the company’s new Chromium-based version of the Edge browser. The biggest of the new additions is Internet Explorer which will be directly built into Edge in the future.\
What does this mean? Essentially, it eliminates the need to open Internet Explorer to navigate to older websites. Right now, if you try to open an older site in Edge that’s based on ancient technologies, IE 6 will open in a new window. Microsoft wants to stop this. That’s why in a future version of Edge Chromium, the company will build IE into the browser so that when you open an older site, it’ll open in Edge but use Internet Explorer”s technologies. A small “E” icon in the tab will indicate when IE is being used.
Microsoft will be marketing this feature mainly to businesses as to convince them that Edge is an all-in-one browser that’s worth adopting for their enterprise since there as still so many IE-based corporate websites. Consumers, of course, will still get the feature.
With Edge Chromium, Microsoft will also introduce a customizable New Tab page that businesses can use to link frequently-visited websites and display company logos. A new Collections feature will allow you to take notes with drag-and-drop support for web images and text. These can later be exported to Word or Excel. In addition, Edge will adopt much more aggressive security measures in the form of three separate modes that can block different types of content.
Most of these features will likely go into testing for Edge Canary users in the near future. Right now, though, there’s no word on when the first build with these features in tow will arrive.
