kylealden

Have you used a Surface recently? The touchpads have been great for a long time, and the newer ones have advanced haptics that Macs don't have yet.

Worth noting that this feature is limited to installed PWAs, so you'd either have to convince the user to install a PWA via the URL bar affordance (which already requires real HTTPS and respects the LOD), or to manually install a site-as-app through the browser's (relatively buried) UI, at which point you get the same site you're already on, but with a new titlebar. That seems like a pretty unrealistic vector and is much less complex then just getting users to install an .exe.

That said, even with the Window Controls Overlay, the minimal browser controls (close/restore/minimize) are mandatory, as is the browser-owned "..." menu which includes basic trust information for the site as well as app controls (uninstall, permissions, etc.).

If you're interested in exactly what data is collected and what it is used for, this whitepaper is fairly exhaustive: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/privacy-whit...

This was fixed more than a year ago, FWIW.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that GDPR doesn't apply to operating systems.

You can control every facet of your diagnostics in Windows settings, see every bit of data collected about you (both locally and on the cloud), and delete it all.

"teh" is a basic spelling error, but I bet you've let it slip through somewhere before

Good example! Though, for the record, WebVR 1.1 is shipping in EdgeHTML 15. Fair to call it a preview, since consumer headsets won't be available until later this month with the Fall Creators Update, at which point end-to-end support will work out of the box.

Per the blog post, we're not localized broadly in the preview, but will be adding more locales/languages as we head towards a stable release. Hope you'll try it again!

The version of Edge you're linking to on HTML5Test there is two years and four major versions out of date. Edge 16 is more than 100 points higher on HTML5Test.

More generally, there's a lot more to making the web great than a blind sprint to adopt every API. Just because it isn't shipping doesn't mean Microsoft isn't a (very) active participant in the standards conversations, testing behind flags, etc. That is a huge part of moving the web forward.

Take Grid as an example - we were the last browser to ship the updated spec, so you could say we "held it back." But we also originated the first version of the spec and worked closely with the community, standards bodies, and other browser vendors on making sure what ultimately shipped cross-browser this year was great, useful, and interoperable. Is that holding the web back?

(Disclaimer: Edge employee)

Settings -> Notifications -> "Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows" is the main one. If you want to really dial it in you can also disable notifications for individual apps like Office or Edge on that page.

Note that if you're on Insider builds, there have sometimes been build-to-build update issues that reset some settings, which can result in this toggle being reset. IMO that's a serious bug you should report, but (hopefully) wouldn't make it to a stable release.

(disclaimer: MSFT employee on the Edge team)

Curious if you've tried a Surface Book? I find the touchpad feel and gesture quality to be nearly indistinguishable from a Mac.

This is a bit confusing. Your comments are factually incorrect (there are no forced-full-screen apps in Windows 10, and the default PDF reader is Edge, which is windowed by default and was designed from the ground up for Windows 10, never for Windows 8 or "Metro"), or at least outdated.

It's a bit of a blemish that there are two control panels, but almost no users are ever exposed to Win32. You can do virtually everything (from updates to domain join to adding/removing Windows components) from the modern Settings app. The legacy control panel is just that, and is irrelevant for most users. I'd love to see it modernized, but there are many much better uses of resources (security! performance! battery life!) than modernizing 90s-era utilities that few customers are ever exposed to.

Edge platform team employee here. A couple thoughts on methodology, focusing on our scripted test (under "stay productive longer" at https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/06/20/more-...), which is most comparable to Opera's test; nobody seems to challenge our Netflix results:

* We did not enable ad blockers, because we were testing the efficiency of the network stack, browser rendering pipeline, etc.; if you cut off ads, you're effectively skipping half the assignment. This is a valid way to improve the user experience, but not a valid way to measure browser efficiency, especially because it will disproportionately impact some sites (like the news sites that Opera's test focused on) and have no impact on other sites (like Netflix, where Edge demolishes the other browsers). It's basically skipping a lap of the race and then bragging that you finished faster.

* It's also worth noting that the ad blockers are often detected by many news sites and will actually prevent the main page content from loading at all. Not sure if Opera's test accounted for this.

* Our test was designed to mimic real-world behavior: Watching YouTube (foreground and background), shopping on Amazon, browsing the Facebook news feed, searching on Google, opening email in Gmail, and reading Wikipedia. To reduce variability, we used WebDriver to instrument the tests (supported by all four browsers tested) and made sure each task was timed rather than just a loop of consecutive tasks (which could disadvantage or advantage browsers depending on other factors like pageload performance or network conditions, in a way that doesn't reflect user experience, which is likely to linger on a page once it's loaded). We then used the Maxim 34407 power instrumentation built into the Surface Book (which is why we chose the Surface Book for this test) to measure actual instantaneous power consumption at the hardware, sampled once per second and then averaged across the duration of the test. We feel strongly that this is a highly scientific and defensible test setup which mimics typical user behavior and, significantly, measures the same markup and the same duration, on the same hardware, in every browser.

We get great feedback from users who discover the feature and want it to be discoverable without being obtrusive. If you haven't seen the animation, you might be overestimating it - it's extremely subtle and tasteful, just a tiny flip of the pages in the reading mode button when it goes from an inactive to active state.

It's been true for a while on Windows, going back to IE9: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2011/03/28/browser-power...

We chose the Surface Book because it's instrumented with a chip that allows direct measurement of instantaneous power consumption, which most OEM devices don't have, and because it has lots of battery for a fun run-down video :)

It's a hint to users that reading mode may provide a better experience. When we introduced it, reading mode usage went up; without the (very subtle) animation, users weren't aware when the feature would be useful.

Actually the tests in the post linked from the Edge blog we're on current stable bits; Brandon's post details additional improvements coming soon. In our testing we're considerably more efficient than Opera.

Notably, Opera turned on their (off-by-default) ad blocker for their power efficiency measurements.

Edge implements ORTC, working on WebRTC 1.0 for interop.