I got an email update from Microsoft on their upgrading of Bing Rewards to “Microsoft Rewards”, which includes using Microsoft Edge as another way to earn rewards. My first thought was that that wouldn’t be too bad for web developers who use multiple browsers, anyway. But, of course, Edge is quite a bit more advanced than the Internet Explorer versions that people are still using.

So I was curious how each browser stacked up, and went to html5test to check on current compatibility.

Browser versions:

• Chrome Version 51.0.2704.106 (64-bit)
• Firefox 48.0
• Safari Version 9.1.2 (10601.7.7)
• Edge (Okay, I haven’t figured out how to find version info on Edge yet)

HTML5Test overall scores (all features in categories are given pretty much equal weight)

• Chrome: 492/555
• Firefox: 461/555
• Edge: 433/555
• Safar: 370/555

While Firefox looks like number 2 overall, the form elements features in HTML5.

• Chrome: 64/65, only missing Directory Upload support (no browser listed has it)
• Edge: 58/65, missing an output element, input type=color.
• Firefox: 44/65, but missing all the date type inputs, including type=date itself.
• Safai 39/65<, with similar gaps + datalist element./li>

I also decided to run all four against Acid3:

• Safari: 100/100, mostly smooth
• Edge: 100/100, but pregnant pauses and artifacts in the intermediate stages.
• Firefox: 99/100, completely smooth until it stopped.
• Chrome: 97 – 99/100. One artifact in the upper left corner, inconsistent results.

Conclusion:

There probably won’t be much benefit in using Edge as far as uncovering problems traditionally associated with IE, but it is yet another browser that behaves “differently”, yet not nearly as frustrating as old Microsoft browsers.