I figured out why Edge still uses Material Design: it's a strategy, not laziness.

Iron Contributor

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:

 

2 Replies
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)

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