Finally Microsoft Releases First Preview Builds of Chromium-based Edge Browser
Following 23 years of developing of its own browser engine, Microsoft announced late last year that the company's Edge browser would use Google Chrome (the same open-source web rendering engine that powers Google's Chrome browser.) as a base. Early builds leaked online in March, and now the first official preview builds of Chromium-based Edge Browser are available.
Microsoft is following roughly the same development cycle established by Chrome and Firefox - daily untested builds on the Canary Channel, weekly tested builds in the Dev Channel, and Beta/Stable Channels updated every six weeks. The browser is only available for Windows 10 at the moment, but support for other platforms (including Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and macOS) will come later, report said.
Edge also supports Chrome extensions and those from Microsoft's own extensions store. You'll also be able to sync your favorites across preview builds (cross-platform password and browser history sync will arrive later). Thankfully, there's a dark mode too.
Microsoft is focusing on the fundamentals right now, so there's limited language support, for instance. Spellcheck and media casting are also unavailable for the time being. Today's builds have not been optimized for promised capabilities like smooth scrolling, inking on the Web, PDF support and tab sweep are not yet enabled. Right now, Chromium-based Edge feels a lot like Chrome, except with built-in MSN news feeds.
Anyone downloading today's test build who may have installed any builds of Chromium-based Edge that leaked recently are advised to first uninstall the leaked builds before trying the ones released today. Even though the leaked Chromium-based Edge build worked fine on Windows 7 (ask me how I know), Microsoft is not releasing officially its Chromium-based Edge for Windows 7 yet.
Anyone using the current Microsoft Edge (based on EdgeHTML, not Chromium) can just continue using the existing Edge browser for the foreseeable future; Microsoft has not said when the company plans to switch users off the current Edge browser. And users of Edge on iOS and Android won't be affected, as those Edge browser apps already use the WebKit and Blink rendering engines tied to those OS platforms, not EdgeHTML.
In December 2018, Microsoft officials said on a report that they were redoing Edge so that it would be built on top of Chromium in the name of improving compatibility across the web. Chromium is an open-source browser implementation that is used as a base by a number of browser developers, including Google (with its proprietary Chrome browser), Vivaldi, Opera, Yandex, Brave, and more. Simultaneous with the launch of Chrome in 2008, Google released the bulk of Chrome's code as open source, birthing Chromium in the process.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is working with Google to help push Chromium forward. It's already contributed to the project in several areas, including accessibility, touch and scrolling. It plans to work with the "larger Chromium open source community to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers."
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