The way Microsoft likes to shuffle project teams, it's a bit of a ship of theseus. It's a very strange philosophical debate if the Edge team is the "same as" the IE10/11 team. The Edge team is definitely not the IE7/8/9 team, that I'm sure of. The Edge team can't possibly be the IE6- team, because that team was entirely disbanded. The IE10/11 team inherited the mistakes of the IE6- team by way of a need for backward compatibility and the backward compatibility plan put together by the IE7/8/9 team. Does that backward compatibility arc define what was the IE team? If so, then the Edge team is definitely not the IE team, having for finality killed the backward compatibility story of IE7/8/9.

The point is that the criticism applies regardless of which specific product or people because it is all the "microsoft web browser" group.

And let's not forget the worst thing about this: __Edge can't be installed on windows 8.1 or less__

By far, this is stopping most users from leaving IE.

No one is using Windows 8.1, statistically speaking anymore, and Windows 7 only has 3 years left of security fixes remaining.

we have 7.5% IE11 traffic on our ecommerce site (US, diy home remodeling). more than Edge which is ~5%.

7.5% is a huge number.

IE11 traffic includes Windows 7 users. Windows 8.1 users is a tiny fraction of that 7.5% as most of that is likely Windows 7 since that's the new Windows XP that corporations will use for as long as it has security support because they are afraid of change.

ETA: Plus the people that missed the Windows 10 free upgrade for Windows 7 (intentionally or accidentally).

Well, if Microsoft would quit spying on people and quit intentionally breaking things they might not have to fight to get people to upgrade.

As things stand, Windows 7 is probably the last Windows several companies I know are going to use unless Microsoft coughs up something before they get forced to upgrade. Win 10 is sufficiently different that they are actually considering Linux.

And, with the fact that everybody is moving to WebApps (hack, spit), it probably doesn't matter.

The Ghost Stories of Windows XP we will tell around the campfire for decades to come seem to indicate that companies will always hard-headed stick with Windows versions beyond their useful lifetime. "Quit spying" seems like a red herring in that regard, because if that wasn't the easy excuse there are more right behind ("our apps don't work"; "the new app system is hard"; "we hired a VB6 programmer once in 1999 and we know this app is critical to our business but we don't expect to put our money where our mouth is and hire someone to update it for 2017"; etc).