In a new blog post, Microsoft has revealed some more details about its new Edge browser, which will replace Internet Explorer as the default browser in Windows 10. The browser’s developers deleted more than 220,000 lines of code and more than 300 APIs from Internet Explorer and added 300,000 new lines of code and 49 major new features.
Among the items axed in Edge is ActiveX, which has been a part of Internet Explorer since 1996. “The need for ActiveX controls has been significantly reduced by HTML5-era capabilities, which also produces interoperable code across browsers,” said the blog post. “Microsoft Edge will support native PDF rendering and Adobe Flash as built-in features rather than external add-ons.”
In addition, the new browser will render JavaScript up to three times faster than IE 11. “With the preliminary asm.js support, Chakra and Microsoft Edge now perform more than 300 percent faster on Unity Benchmark, and around 200 percent faster on individual tests like zlib, which features in Google’s Octane and Apple’s Jet Stream benchmarking suites,” noted the blog.
