For those who know how painful using Internet Explorer is and even for those who did not had pleasure of experiencing it, there is a good news. Microsoft is deprecating Internet Explorer for all modern platforms. An another good news is that with release of Microsoft Windows 10, user can now use Microsoft’s new flagship browser, Microsoft Edge. This is a huge change in the world of web development. So it is vital to know what this change is and how it is going to benefit world of search engine optimization.
Birth of Edge
Microsoft Edge started as a project to improve the rendering engine inside of Internet Explorer. For those of you who don’t know what a rendering engine is, it is a part of web browser that converts all the source code of a webpage to the beauty you see on your device’s screen as a webpage. IE’s rendering engine, Trident which is almost 20 years old. Over the years it grew humungous packaging inside it old technology and browser bugs. If you know any web developer then just ask him how he feels about developing for IE. Tell you what, his response is going to be something like, “#@&&^#@(*@#%@$$”. No kidding!
So the story is Microsoft decided to improvise rendering engine, which is like equivalent to ‘replacing core of the browser’, it finally became ‘development of a new and modern browser’. And this indicates that Edge and its capabilities will directly affect performance of SEO professionals in the years to come.
Improvements
One of the major difference and primary benefit of Edge or IE is ‘better standards support’. IE has always lagged behind its competitors in providing support for web standards. This lead to the need to having special trickeries to be performed so that IE could render the content properly. Developers have developed tons of JavaScript polyfills in order to make IE render content correctly to overcome the issues. This list of trickeries also includes IE conditional comments, Extra <div> or <code><span> nesting tags to work around CSS bugs, Using the X-UA-Compatible header to target specific IE render modes, Quirks mode triggers, to name a few.
But now this will be no longer required with Edge as it will come with better support for standards and bug fixes. This means now you can focus more on writing your content rather than making it look proper on IE. A lot of time and headache is saved.
Better Mobile Support
Today’s mobile market is mostly covered by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, both of which use mobile browsers based on WebKit rendering engine. Because of this developers prefer to develop website with this in mind via user agent string comparison. This actually led to the fact that IE for mobile was sensed as desktop browser and desktop version of webpage was sent to the mobile device. The result, webpage was less readable.
But now Microsoft is actually impersonating both Apple’s Safari browser and Google’s Chrome browser in its user agent string. Which means now mobile Edge browser will be treated as mobile browser and will be sent with proper webpage to render. Now you won’t lose customers because of this.
Faster Update Frequency
One other quite major issue was the lack of updates for IE. It took IE years to provide updates for things for which its competitors would provide in a month or two. Remember how developers had to conjure various tricks to overcome IE’s lack of support and bugs. Even though Edge is coming with support for standards, it is required to be in timely manner. Since Edge will be completely new browser with modern technology it will be possible for Microsoft to release support for web standards in real time and bug fixes faster than before.
This means you don’t always have to waste your time in looking for workarounds to make something work as it was the case with IE. So you can spend your time in writing better content than squandering to fix rendering issues.
Moral of the Story
With IE out of the picture and Edge becoming the flagship browser for Microsoft, you can now rest assured that your content will look same as it does with other major browsers. It yields in efficiency for writing actual content than making it look proper (beauty is a long stride) on IE.
Happy SEOing!