After announcing its plans to rebuild its Edge browser from Google's Chromium in December, Microsoft released the first public previews today. Just as you'd expect, the new browser acts a lot like Google's Chrome.
There are some key differences though, and in some slides uncovered by leakster WalkingCat, Microsoft notes a whole bunch of Google features that were turned off or replaced. Many of them have to do with Google services, such as Google Now, Cloud Print, Chrome OS device management, Google Cloud Storage, Google Maps Time zone, and more.
Naturally, Microsoft also made its own improvements to the browser. One of those is PlayReady DRM, which allows for support for 4K streaming, such as from Netflix. Edge has always been the only browser to support this. There are some issues with PlayReady noted in the slides, such as Chromium killing the renderer after pausing the video for one minute, or sites getting confused since Edge is the only browser to support PlayReady and Widevine.
The slides also show areas of focus for the new browser. These include things like ARM64, battery life, editing, fonts, layout, scrolling, security, tooling, touch, web standards, authentication, and accessibility. If you download the new browser, the launch page will show that some of these things are coming soon.
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