Internet Explorer will soon be joining Geocities, AOL and MySpace in the dustbin of internet history.

After decades of dominance through proprietary lock-in and anti-trust-busted software bundling the monster lurking in web developer nightmares will no longer be the default browser for Windows 10. 

Instead Windows 10 will use Microsoft's new Edge browser.

Fear not IE fans, the browser will still be around for "compatibility" reasons. Which means if you have some kind of ActiveX-reliant spaghetti code nightmare of an intranet site that only works in IE 8 and below, there will still be able to access it with IE in Windows 10.

For everyone else though upgrading to Windows 10 will mean moving to Microsoft Edge and that will hopefully turn out to be a big win not just for users but the web at large. Well, assuming people actually upgrade to Windows 10.

Microsoft Edge has been released in limited preview form and based on that and statements from Microsoft, is seems safe to say that Edge is everything IE is not -- fast, more secure and considerably more compliant with the HTML standards that define the web.

Microsoft is clearly looking for a pat on the back with regard to Edge's web standards support, but at this point you don't really get those. 

Supporting web standards is a foregone conclusion on today's web. In fact ever since Firefox first started pushing web standards support as a feature, only one browser has failed to get all the way on the standards bandwagon. 

Developers who adhere to web standards can safely ignore Edge. Which is to say that if developers adhere to web standards then their websites will work with any browser that comes along between now and the demise of the internet as we know it, Edge included. That is, after all, the entire point of web standards. 

Microsoft has improved IE's standards support over the years, but it still lags behind all its competitors. Edge has a lot of new features for users, like a built in reader mode, integration with Microsoft's Siri-like "intelligent personal assistant", Cortana, and some other great user-oriented tools that put Edge way ahead of IE. From a developer perspective though Edge isn't quite as appealing. 

It is after all built on a fork of the Trident rendering engine that powers IE. Microsoft says it's stripped out all that legacy code and certainly early benchmarks would seem to indicate they've found a way to speed things up, but when it comes to the standards support developers are accustomed to, Edge reveals its Trident underpinnings.

The <a href="http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html">html5test.com</a> suite currently lists Edge as supporting 402 of the 555 items in the test. That's respectably better than IE 11 which scores just 336 on the same test. At the same time it's a long way from Chrome and Firefox, which score 530 and 467 respectively. 

Edge's standards support for CSS is a bit more dismal. Comparing Edge to the current shipping versions of Firefox and Chrome reveals some <a href="http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+Edge,firefox+39,chrome+43">significant gaps in Edge's standards support</a>. Perhaps most notable for a browser that will be the default on Microsoft's mobile OS is Edge's lack of support for the HTML5 Picture element. 

Edge does have partial support for the related "srcset" attribute on the good old img tag, which means developers can target high resolution screens with larger images, but Edge lacks support for the bandwidth-saving "sizes" attribute, which seems like a serious oversight for a browser targeting mobile devices. Though, to be fair, Safari Mobile also lacks this feature and Microsoft's development tracker says Edge's support is "In Development."

The only time developers are likely to run into problems with Edge are if you're using cutting edge features like the Picture element, but in most cases you'll run into the same problems with Safari, Mobile Safari and (to a lesser degree) Firefox. 

In short, while Edge is a giant leap forward for Microsoft when it comes to web standards, it's more a small step when compared to its rivals.

As developers build ever more sophisticated apps in the browser the far more interesting news just ahead of the final release of Windows 10 and Edge may be Microsoft's claim that Edge beats Chrome and Safari at their own JavaScript benchmark suites. That is, Edge is faster than its competitors. 

Provided that's true, Microsoft may have done the web the biggest favor since Mozilla forked Netscape to create Firefox, namely creating some good old healthy competition for the current darling of browser developers -- the WebKit project. 

The WebKit rendering engine, and Google's fork, Blink, together account for all the traffic on the web today that's not IE or Firefox. On mobile that comes very close to being all traffic period. That means there's very little competition out there and that in turn leads to stagnation. 

Some developers recently called out Apple for its lack of progress with Safari Mobile, including one developer who made the inevitable and apt comparison to IE: <a href="http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/">Safari is the new IE</a>. Regrettably, since Apple doesn't allow other browser rendering engines in the App Store there will never be any real competition there (there are other *browsers* in the App Store, but they all use the same WebKit rendering engine), but on the desktop and other mobile platforms Edge just might give WebKit/Blink a much needed kick in the pants. 

Chrome, while it continues to have excellent standards support, is looking considerably less svelte than it did back when it first launched. Indeed, if Edge can really beat Chrome as handily as it seems to right now, Microsoft has an opportunity to beat Google at its own game -- making the web faster for everyone.