Following hot on the heels of the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), Microsoft is releasing a major update to it’s Edge browser on January 15th, 2020. This change will reverberate across the analytics and marketing tech landscape as the year continues to advance.
A Change in View
Edge has historically been built into windows and used it’s own custom rendering engine, known as EdgeHTML. That ends on the 15th, as Microsoft has been spending the last seven months migrating Edge to use the Chromium Back End, ditching EdgeHTML in favor of the Blink rendering engine.
In practical terms, this means a few things for analysis.
- Edge will no longer be part of Windows following the operating system patching on January 15th, it’ll become it’s own software package.
- Edge is becoming cross platform, meaning you may see device/browser breakdowns with Edge running on Windows, MacOS, Android, or iOS going forward.
- There is a change to the User Agent string, which may confuse tooling if the rules for parsing are not up to date.
- Updates will be more often, as they intend to keep pace with the Chromium code base, which may result in updates as often as every six weeks.
- Webpages should appear very close to what they look like in Chrome as they now use the same underlaying Rendering engine.
A Eye toward Privacy
Back in July, Microsoft announced plans to introduce Anti-Tracking tech into Edge by default. They’ve continued to refine this feature and released another update in December.
Based on the above, the current plan for how it works is as follows:
- They will be combining their Trust Protection Lists with the list provided by Disconnect (the same service that powers Firefox and Brave) to determine which services to block outright, or restrict access to storage.
- The system will also use a on-device measure of site engagement. Once a user has engaged with the site enough to reach a score of 4.1, access to storage will be allowed for the restricted services.
- It should be noted that Site Engagement scores decay over time.
- Clearing history will reset Site Engagement.
- By Default – this feature will be enabled in the ‘Balanced’ setting.
Balanced has the following effects
- Access to Storage is Blocked for:
- Content
- Advertising
- Social
- Other
- Access to the Network is blocked for:
- Fingerprinters
- Cryptomining
Note: Known Analytics Implementations will be allowed access to Storage.
Denying access to the storage data of services can have major impacts in how they perform. Given the interaction with Site Engagement that Microsoft has introduced it’ll be important to develop a consistent interaction with the users if you want your site to work as intended going forward.
A list of URLs which are attempting to access Storage (and are blocked from doing so) will be visible in the Developer Console. So if something isn’t working as expected that’s a good place start investigation.
The Future that spans before us
Microsoft is not stopping with the above – they plan to keep in sync with the Chromium changes, which means the following changes are coming in a future releases:
- Referrer Policy: Default to
strict-origin-when-cross-origin– Meaning that cross-site referrers will be downgraded to the domain name only. If you are using referrer for critical business logic that’s going to stop working as expected (and is slated for removal in Chrome and was recently removed from Safari). This may impact attribution analysis for analytics. - Cookies default to
SameSite=Lax– this change follows what Chrome is launching in Chrome 80 (Slated Feb 2020). It changes the default cookie behavior to reduce risk of Cross Site Request Forgery attacks. Note that changing cookies to be compatible with this change may result in unexpected behavior on known incompatible clients.
So we’re going to see a faster updating, more privacy focused, blink based browser from Microsoft from here on out. That’s two major privacy changes on the books for 2020, and we’re only on the first two weeks of the year. One can safely expect more over the next few months.