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Good morning internet fans. It’s Ryan Perry. Simple Biz Support. Today is October 29th and it is Thursday. Therefore it is Internet Marketing Thursday with Virginie Dorn. Business Website Center. Good morning, Virginie!

Virginia Dorn: Good morning Ryan Perry. How are you?

RP: I’m doing fabulous. I just noticed I don’t have my little marker down at the bottom. Shame on me. I need to plug myself… Anyhow, we’re going to talk about Microsoft Edge, which is the new browser from… Well, relatively new. It came out with, what was it? Windows 10 release?

VD: Yes.

RP: Yeah. So it’s the new browser. It has some cool features maybe. I don’t know if we really need to get in the features too much. But the big concern is, obviously as a web developer, any time you are a creating a website, you have Mozilla, you’ve got Firefox, we have Edge now. You’ve got Chrome. What was old… Internet Explorer.

VD: Yes.

RP: And they all have unique little coding tidbits so part of the responsibility of being a web designer is making sure that it’s compatible. So I’m sure a lot of people are like, “Ugh, Microsoft is making another web browser. Great. What kind of bugs are they going to throw in there?” but surprisingly you’re finding out it’s really not too bad, I guess.

VD: No, not at all. We’ve been studying it for quite a few weeks now. Websites we’ve designed ourselves or other website, we’ve found no compatibility issues which was always the biggest issue of Internet Explorer, which Microsoft Edge is slowly, but surely replacing. So it’s all been great news for developers and site owners alike. What I’d like to do today is maybe spend a few minutes on a quick recap of the five main elements that Microsoft Edge brings to the table and then spend the last part of our seminar today about what it means for you as a site owner for developers out there who might be watching us.

RP: Sounds good.

VD: Alright, well lets start with the point number one. Maybe not everybody knows, but Microsoft Edge is only available on Windows 10. So you will need to upgrade to Windows 10 in order to benefit of the new browser. It is replacing Internet Explorer. What it means is whenever you go to Best Buy or Office Depot and buy a new computer, it’ll come with Windows 10, which is the new Window operating system and it comes with Microsoft Edge and you won’t have Internet Explorer as your default browser. At some point you won’t even be able to download Internet Explorer. So Internet Explorer is not being supported by Microsoft for many years and now we know why. It’s because they were working on the launch of that big browser and Edge is absolutely different from IE. It has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t use the same code. Nothing similar. Which is the great news because it’s fixed a lot of the issues that’s been going for years. Now, a couple things, you and I were talking about the cool features of Edge is you can write on web pages, actually. Either with your finger if you have that kind of screen capability, or with your mouse. You can highlight pages. You can put annotation to it. And you can set it on your computer or even share it with a friend.

VD: What’s great in our industry, and Ryan, just think about it, is if you’re developing a website and the client wants to make changes, sometimes we’ll take a screen shot and we will add content and then send it to you by e-mail. Now they can actually do it right there on the site and send you that screen shot with all the ideas. Like, “Oh, look. There’s a spelling error here. I want the spacing to be a little bit bigger.” So it’s a quite useful tool.

RP: Right. Very cool.

VD: Now, other thing, that’s the biggest subject of conversation is the reading view. Now also, you can do a reading list so you can save pages into a reading list for future reading, but there’s a reading view and what it means is you can go to a website, pick a page, and click reading view, which is an icon Microsoft Edge provides and it will eliminate a lot of the busy elements from the page. Slideshow, images, it would just focus on the text and perhaps illustrate with one image at the top and that’s about it. So it really looks like a book page.

RP: Right. Do you want to show that now or do you want to wait til later?

VD: Well, no, why don’t you show it? Ryan and I were having the giggles earlier because Microsoft Edge on my computer this morning refuses to open. So it’s not very good for Edge. Maybe you can share your screen if you’re able to do it.

RP: Yeah, I can do it. Like any good demo, it’s always going to fail when you need it most. So not a problem. So lets go ahead and we’re going to start with your page here. So this is what it looks like on a regular browser and up at the top is what appears to be a book here and if I click on that, essentially it’s stripped out pretty much all of the elements of the website. Now we click on the book again, we go back, so it even removed the image. Typically, I’ve been pulling this little image in. Lets try it now. Maybe it was during a transition and that’s why this image…

VD: We’re not seeing the transition on our screen. We’re only seeing when you first arrived there. So we’re not seeing the reading list.

RP: It’s not in book view right now?

VD: I see it now. Sorry, I had some… Few seconds.

RP: Oh, okay. Well, there must be a delay.

RP: So you can see that it’s really stripped out a lot of the information so if we go back to the original view, large slider, we’ve got some graphics here, a lot of different elements that are going on to highlight and showcase video that’s been removed, the side bar I think has been completely removed, and then some more images down below in the footer. All of that information has been removed.

RP: Now, it’s interesting as we talked earlier in the day that it’s not available on all websites and so this is my website that I’m in the process of upgrading and there is no book view. I don’t know what that means but you just get to see mine in all its glory all the time.

VD: Yes, and we’ve yet to define why it’s available on some pages but not others. Now the Microsoft Edge is what we call a modern browser so it’s used the newest coding techniques. So if your website’s maybe two years old, maybe that’s why it’s not available but again we’ve yet to define what’s the element and explains why Edge will display as a reading view or not a specific page. But we’re still working on it. Once we find the answer I’ll let you know one of those mystery.

VD: Now, there’s also a complication with that because we have yet as the industry to understand how it affects adwords or affiliates marketing banners you might have on your website because if users chooses to have a reading view, what does it need for your analytics? Does it mean that the analytics still counted as being the banner being viewed even though it’s not viewed? Does it counted as not being viewed at all since it’s no longer visible? What does it mean in terms of the analytics. And also long discussion among programmers, is there a way for a special type of coding to override that reading view and force a certain advertising element into the reading view. Is that possible? So, so far nobody has been able to break that cycle, but I know there’s a lot of people are working actively onto that.

RP: Yeah, and I can only imagine that Microsoft is going to be just a way a lot of things are going as far as anti-spam, I’m sure they’re going to be very diligent to make sure that people don’t and if they do find it a loophole somewhere that they close it.

VD: Yes. This is the new first version of Microsoft Edge. What’s great about it, it’s called an Evergreen Browser and what it means is users won’t have to automatically update each time there’s a new version. So just like you mentioned maybe if they find a loophole, Microsoft’s like, “Oh, we’re going to add this code to our browser to make it even better.” As a user you have nothing to do, your computer will do it automatically, which has been an ongoing issue for Internet Explorer. I still have clients who have Internet Explorer versions from 10 years ago and then they wonder why certain things, certain websites don’t work is because they have not upgraded to the newest version.

VD: So again, that Evergreen Browser is like the best news we’ve received in a long time. And what it means is as a developer, we’ll always whenever we use the newest coding technique we are reassured then it will look great on Microsoft Edge. Unlike before where we had to put sometimes old code just to cater to an older version of Microsoft Internet Explorer. We no longer have to do that. We just have to worry about, what’s the newest code available? And we code that way and it works on Edge. So it’s great news all around.

RP: All right, very good. So it actually sounds like Microsoft has done something positive here then?

VD: Yes, they actually work with programmers around the world before they launched Edge, not just their own programmers. They went to the industry, my community and asked question. We didn’t ask any personally but I know that was big in their campaign and that’s why they were able to render this modern and Evergreen Browser. It’s like finally they got it. They were tired I think being the black sheep of browsers. So they finally got it and they took care of business and got it done right too. So far, we have not found any compatibility issues for any website using newer type of codes.

RP: All right. Well, that is a good thing. So for those of you out there that have bemoaned the fact that Microsoft decided to come out with a new browser, it sounds like it’s really not that big of a deal. Actually, it’s a positive thing. There’s a lot of pros to it from the developer’s point of view. I think this pretty much wraps up this episode unless you have any end of show comments.

VD: No, it’s been great news. Again, we’re trying to poke at it everyday, just trying to find weaknesses, I’m sure there are but because it’s going to automatically update for you to the newest and best version each and every time, you don’t have to worry about it. Again, if you have an older website, perhaps something done in flash, you might still have issue with Edge but you will have issues with all the major browsers as well. I see a lot of clients with just one browsers. They might have Mozilla, they might have Internet Explorer, they might have Safari but they don’t have all of them. It’s good to have actually a Chrome, Edge, Mozilla, and Safari downloaded into your computer and maybe once a month as you test your contact form maybe, which you should do every month, you take a look at your home page on all those four browsers. Which are the most popular ones and see how your website looks. If it doesn’t look right, just talk to your webmaster and get him to fix it or her.

RP: Alright. Perfect Virginie. With that I think that’s going to wrap up this episode of Internet Marketing Thursday. As always I appreciate the time and energy that you put into the show.

VD: It’s been my pleasure. Take care.

RP: Alright, everybody. That’s it for today show. We will see you next Thursday with some more exciting information. Take care everybody.