In December, we announced our intention to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop. Our goal is 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.
Today we’re embarking on the next step in this journey – our first Canary and Developer builds are ready for download on Windows 10 PCs. Canary builds are preview builds that will be updated daily, while Developer builds are preview builds that will be updated weekly. Beta builds will come online in the future. Support for Mac and all supported versions of Windows will also come over time.
In these first builds we are very much focused on the fundamentals and have not yet included a wide range of feature and language support that will come later. You’ll start to see differences from the current Microsoft Edge including subtle design finishes, support for a broader selection of extensions and the ability to manage your sign-in profile. 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.
Along with what’s visible in the browser itself, we’ve also begun to make contributions back to the Chromium open source project. These include areas like accessibility, touch, ARM64 and others. We’re working directly with the teams at Google and the broader Chromium community on this work and appreciate the collaborative and open discussions. We look forward to continued engagement with the community to progress Chromium in these areas and others.
We hope those of you who are comfortable testing early software or are part of the open source community developing browsers will use these builds at least a little bit every day. Ultimately, we’re looking for your feedback – what’s working well, what’s not working and what things you’d like to see in the final product. The more you use early builds and give us feedback, the better we can make the final product. In fact, your use at this early stage helps us find bugs that we can fix for not just the next version of Microsoft Edge, but other browsers built using Chromium as well.
If you’re ready to participate, we invite you to visit the Microsoft Edge Insider site and download now. You can also read more about the new preview builds and our participation in the Chromium community on the Microsoft Edge Developer Blog.
As a reminder – people using current Microsoft Edge who don’t feel comfortable trying out early software, there’s nothing you need to do now. The Microsoft Edge you use today isn’t changing. However, if you’d still like to follow along with the latest, check out the Microsoft Edge Insider site.
Thank you to everyone who is engaging with us on this work. We look forward to sharing more details and updates as we continue on the journey.
Thanks,
JoeB