Back in December 2018, Microsoft announced that they would be building their Edge browser based on the Chromium open-source project (as Google’s Chrome is). Well, that day is here…sort of.
We’re working directly with the teams at Google and the broader Chromium community on this work and appreciate the collaborative and open discussions.
Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows
On the one hand, it’s quite an exciting change because…well, Edge has always kind of sucked in comparison. So, adopting an already established, better, the base is not necessarily a bad idea – albeit it somewhat redundant one?
Is there a need for another Chromium browser?
It’s no secret I’m a fan of Chrome – so when I heard that the ‘new’ Edge would be based on Chromium, I was keen intrigued to try it. And I wanted to be fair (which was hard because I’ve never liked Edge) – so this whole article (research, artwork and writing) and my daily driver browsing have been written in the Canary release of the Edge. While that is far from scientific, it’s actually not an unpleasant experience – which, did surprise me.
The sync option is there for bookmarks, but not yet for anything else (this is coming though). Other than that, it does for the most part ‘steer’ like Chromium – so I don’t know what has been tweaked – but will continue to play with it.
We look forward to people starting to kick the tires and will be refining the feature set over time based on the feedback we receive.
Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows
This flavour of Edge is available now as a canary release. So if you’re excited to give it a whirl – consider yourself an early adopter – or just nerdy enough to want to “kick the tires”, you may want to check this out.
What is a Canary build?
Canary builds are very early releases of programs that are interesting for early adopters – but should not be assumed to be stable (it’s pre-beta).
You should expect daily updates in this version (there is a separate developer (weekly update)).
It’s a good idea if you want to take it for a test drive – and although I have had no negative effects to report – you shouldn’t rely on it (in this release) as anything mission-critical.
Do you fancy giving it a go?
You can grab the preview releases by visiting Microsoft Edge Insider.
