How should a company gain fans? By actually listening to its users? Sounds obvious, right? Microsoft is certainly taking this to heart, with programs such as Windows Insider and its Edge browser.
Microsoft has been taking feature requests from users over the last several months for Edge, and ZDNet managed to get a look at the road-map of updates planned. First on the list is support for third party extensions, something that’s available on major web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Support was announced ages ago and users on the Insider builds already have the browser with extension support.
One of the most popular extensions on both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox is Adblock Plus. This extension allows users to browse the web without annoying advertisements and pop-ups, some of which have been found to deliver malicious content. More recently, Apple built content blocking into iOS 9, which allowed developers to create apps to block ads. This was received mostly positively by the online tech community, as studies found that ad-blocking has become fairly mainstream. So it’s no surprise that Adblock Plus has already been confirmed for Edge.
However, it might become redundant. According to the aforementioned ZDNet article, ad-blocking is going to become a native feature of Edge. It’s listed as a feature request and is supposedly targeted for release with the next version of Edge.
Ad-blocking has more implications. Ads tend to be heavy scripts which often slow down the websites noticeably. They are also data hogs and can cause issues in regions with metered internet connections. Here at Techaeris we follow an ad limited model to provide a better reading experience to the user, but here is a reason ads are so prevalent on websites across the Internet. Running a website can be an expensive affair.
There’s no question the desire for ad blocking is on the rise, and a few months ago Darius Kazemi created the Ethical Ad-Blocker, which completely blocked websites which were powered by ads.
Native ad-blocking is certainly the biggest feature on the road-map for Edge’s development, along with support for third party extensions. However, it also has several other interesting features such as Bing Translator built in, a better mechanism to download files, and a better Favorites manager. All these features should help Edge compete better with other major browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Do you use Microsoft Edge? What do you think of the planned features? Let us know, in the comments below, on Google+, Facebook, or Twitter.
[button link=”http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-tip-find-any-setting-in-seconds/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: ZDNet[/button]
