18 PCWorld DECEMBER 2019NEWS 10 BIGGEST IGNITE REVEALS
solve, said Yusuf
Mehdi, corporate vice
president in charge of
Microsoft’s Modern
Life & Devices Group,
in advance of Ignite.
Mehdi recounted the
problems Microsoft
was trying to solve:
How do you protect
privacy and still
maintain
personalization? How
do businesses bring together the web and
their own knowledge into a cohesive whole?
How does Microsoft apply its own tools, like
Edge and Bing, to those goals?
Microsoft will lay out many, many new
features across Office, search, and the cloud to
do just that. We’ve had a look at them, then we
whittled them down to the 10 new things we
think you’ll want to know about.THE NEW MICROSOFT EDGE
IS OFFICIAL
The big addition is what Microsoft has
dubbed the “new” Edge, or the “next”
Edge: a Chromium-based version of its
browser that has a new logo, too.
Announced earlier this year, the new Edge
browser feels fresh and fast (go.pcworld.
com/frsh). Mehdi said a release candidate
(go.pcworld.com/rlcn) will be published at
Ignite, with a final version slated for January- Edge development is decoupled from
Windows, so that new versions of Edge will
be released on its own timetable.
Microsoft’s goal is to meet or even out-
hustle Google, with new versions due every
four to six weeks for “every platform that
matters,” Mehdi said: Android, iOS,
MacOS, Windows 7, and Windows 10.
New PCs will, at some point, simply be
pre-loaded with the new Edge. Microsoft
hasn’t quite specified how existing PCs will
be handled, but it seems that one will simply
replace the other.
“Between January and March, we’re going
to do a lot of testing to see if we can upgrade
people’s Edge on the desktop for existing PC
builds,” Mehdi said. “That’s the plan. We’re
going to do some testing, and just like
Windows updates, we’re going to try and get
that right.”
At Ignite, Microsoft will also show off
Microsoft’s new Edge browser, showing off the new tab page.