Forum Discussion
I figured out why Edge still uses Material Design: it's a strategy, not laziness.
New Edge uses a blend of Google's Material Design and Microsoft's Fluent Design. (Clarification on where Material Design can still be seen is at the bottom of this post). But I now think this is a strategy, instead of laziness (as I initially thought).
The more that Edge looks like Chrome, the more people think "it's just Chrome, but uses less RAM." As evidenced by this thread (and basically anywhere Edge is mentioned), that's what consumers think about Edge.
So although I've seen plenty of people try to convince the Edge dev team to switch the browser to Fluent Design (and as much as I would like it), I don't think it's ever going to happen--not because they're lazy, but because it helps the reputation of the browser (even if it doesn't have any unique identity).
Where Material Design can be seen:
Menus (like right click menus and the "..." menu) fade into view instead of slide in. Tooltips don't have any animation (like they do in Fluent Design), so they still look like Chrome.
Some of the loading wheels have been changed from Chromium (like in the tab when a page is loading), but others (like in the Update page of Settings, and even in Collections (which is weird since it's a feature that's unique to Edge)) retain the loading wheel found in all of Google's products. This means that all of these menus resemble Material design menus instead of Fluent design ones.
The scrollbars look like Chrome's instead of any Fluent Design app.
When hovering the mouse over items in the toolbar, there is a delay on the items being highlighted. This is from Chromium and doesn't match any other default Windows app, where they either have the "reveal" effect or they just are highlighted immediately. This delay also has the added detriment of making the browser feel a little more sluggish.
I'm positive that we will see Fluent design elements more in Edge in the future. it's much better than Material design. for me personally the transparency matters the most.
there are lots of awesome things happening. all of them enabling multi-platform compatible native UI.do you think they will use and implement them?
Project Reunion
.NET 6 MAUI
Win UI 3
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/
https://github.com/microsoft/ProjectReunion
https://github.com/dotnet/maui- Interesting ... but Material Design could be the default design when installing the browser and Fluent Design could be an option that the user could activate in Appearance (Settings)
