In all likelihood, the change absolutely will improve the lives of the folks who 'just click the blue E' in the long run, though. Meanwhile, the people who have actually been actively using Edge likely won't notice much of a change-unless Microsoft bobbles something in the user data import functionality when they push the official, non-beta version out through Windows Update later this month. Pushing the new Edge as something to look forward to right now is difficult-we suspect most people who really care about their browser will continue using Chrome, Firefox, or whatever less-well-known variant they've found and learned to love. This is described as a temporary problem in the 'Known Issues' page, and it may even be fixed already in the production version launching today. We don't want to see the full-on Google Chrome become any more indispensable than it already is-but we don't think Microsoft trading in its own fully proprietary, closed-source HTML-rendering engine for one of the two biggest open source rendering engines is a bad thing.Ĭhromium-based Edge is still missing a couple of obvious features to compete with the full Google Chrome experience-most notably, browser history and extensions don't sync between devices yet. While there is some validity to worrying about one company 'controlling the Web' and one of Google's biggest competitors now becoming a Google downstream, we don't think those concerns add up to much. Edge didn't have the breadth of extensions or the user-base enthusiasm of Chrome or Firefox-and it was no better than they are at running crusty old 'Internet Explorer Only' websites and Web apps. It's not so much that Edge was a bad browser, per se-it just didn't serve much of a purpose. We've seen one take waxing nostalgic for the old, purely Microsoft developed version of Edge, but we don't think many people will miss it much. There were just a few rough edges as far as installing extensions, logging into them, and the like. The new Edge project began with a complete and fully functional Web browser-Chromium-so it worked fine for browsing the Web. The beta was still pretty raw then-but 'raw' is a relative term. We covered the beta version of Chromium-based Edge in November.

But will anybody use it?As of Wednesday, January 15, Microsoft will make the non-beta version of its new, Chromium-based version of the Edge browser to Windows 10 Home and Pro users. Further Reading Microsoft Edge is coming to Linux.

Ms edge chromium version