Microsoft officially launches their new, faster, Chromium Edge browser

After the last year of development and several months spent in Beta, Microsoft is ready to officially launch its new Edge Chromium browser across both Windows and macOS. The new browser is available for everyone to download here, while Microsoft will begin rolling out the browser over the next few months to all Windows 10 users so that they can finally have a reason to not discard that Edge browser on the machine, but probably want to use it for a change.

Based on the Chromium open-source engine, the browser will operate and render web pages much the same way that you would expect from Google’s own chrome, except with the better efficiency and memory management that came from Microsoft’s Edge platform, meaning that you can now browse the internet without needing to use up all your RAM. It is, however, launching without some features that you might otherwise expect on Chrome with history sync and extension sync missing at launch. That doesn’t mean you have to reconfigure everything though as all your favourites, settings, password, contact info and other information will sync if you move across to the new browser. Chrome extensions will also be supported in the new Edge browser, so things should feel extremely familiar even if you have customised your experience considerably.  

The new Edge browser will also come with some minor differences in usability with the lies of Collections which allows you to collate images and content from the web and tracking prevention. Speaking of that tracking prevention, you can choose from three different levels to avoid being tracked on the web in Edge. The default setting will block trackers from sites you haven’t visited before. This makes sure content and ads are less personalised and harmful trackers are blocked. There’s also a strict setting that blocks most trackers on the web but could also mean some parts of sites cannot load or might not work correctly

Most of the obvious meat behind it lies deep within the code and how Microsoft has changed some code while removing many of the features related to advertising which has allowed it to speed up the browsing experience and reduce that ugly memory footprint. So, it might sound like something that many never thought they would hear, but now might be a good time to open Chrome and download the new Microsoft browser instead. Your machine performance will thank you for it.

Last Updated: January 16, 2020