by Martin Brinkmann on June 14, 2019 in Internet Explorer – 10 comments
Microsoft’s Edge development team held an interesting AMA on Reddit yesterday. AMA, for those who don’t know, is a questions and answers type of thread in which Reddit users post questions or remarks to individuals, teams, or company representatives.
Microsoft is working on a new version of the Edge browser that is based on Chromium code; that’s the same basis that Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, or Brave use for their browsers.
The browser is available as a preview for Windows and Mac operating systems but it is only a matter of time before it replaces the current version of Microsoft Edge that is only available in Windows 10.
One of the questions that Microsoft’s Edge team was asked repeatedly was how Microsoft plans to react to Google’s extension changes in the Manifest V3 that would impact ad blockers if released right now.
The team noted that it was still evaluating Manifest V3 and that it was not ready to release an official comment about it at the time. It noted, however, that it recognizes that ad blocking is important to a lot of users and that the team started several things to address this.
Besides being a member of the Coalition for Better Ads, Microsoft’s Edge Development Team noted that it was “committed to a strong extension ecosystem” and that this included ad blocking. Microsoft would not “artificially restrict ad blocking for business reasons related to advertising” and that the company got requests to integrate an ad blocking experience into the Edge browser.
Microsoft’s stance in regards to that is that it believes that extensions offer the best option right now, but that it would love to hear from users who think ad blocking should be built-in.
Finally, we occasionally hear requests for a built in ad blocking experiences in Edge. For most users, we find that extensions (combined with strong defaults around tracking prevention) are the best option here because you can choose from a variety of experiences and defaults, but we absolutely want to hear from you if you think this should be built in.
While that does not mean that Edge will get built-in ad blocking, it is certainly a possibility and not outright rejected by Microsoft.
Integration of an ad blocker could certainly improve the browser’s chance of becoming more successful than the classic version of Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer. The new Edge offers some features already that set it apart from Google Chrome.
Now You: Would you like to see ad blocking built-into Microsoft Edge?