Microsoft had announced adopting Chromium for the development of its Edge browser back in December. The company’s collaboration with Google on its Microsoft Edge browser is now seeing some daylight with the first preview builds of the new browser dropping today. Developers and interested users can now download Microsoft Edge preview builds to start testing the upcoming browser.
“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,” Microsoft said. “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.”
Download Microsoft Edge preview builds for Windows 10
The first Developer and Canary test builds are available only for 64-bit Windows 10 and Windows 10 S. macOS and older versions of Windows will receive Microsoft Edge previews in the coming weeks. You can download the builds from here.
Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows, explained that the Canary builds are preview builds that will be updated daily and the Developer builds will be updated weekly. “Beta builds will come online in the future,” he added.
Belfiore said that the company has also begun to make contributions to the Chromium open source project. “These include areas like accessibility, touch, ARM64 and others,” he wrote. “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.”
Those who had installed the recently leaked builds of the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge are advised to uninstall the leaked builds before going for the officially released previews. The initial builds may feel a lot like Chrome, but things will change once the focus shifts from fundamentals to design.
