Microsoft’s Edge browser may have been one of the more bare-bones components of the Windows 10 operating system, but things may finally start changing. As of late, the company is rolling out extensions to users who are a part of its Insider program.
However, to make up for the laughably small number of extensions available at first, Microsoft is also trying to take help from one of its bitter rivals: Chrome. The company is working on a developer tool to get Chrome’s extensions to run on Edge, but just when it will be available is not known as of yet.
Of course, the final product won’t likely be as feature-rich or refined as its Chrome counterpart as not all APIs are supported. We don’t know whether this extension porting program will be extended to Firefox or Opera developers as yet.
Microsoft will also make sure, at least in the beginning, to get the quality of the extensions up to a certain standard and will be cherry-picking ones which appear on the Store.
If you are a part of the Insider program, you can try them out by reaching for the top-right corner in Edge and choose “Extensions”, followed by “Get extensions”. They are only available to PC users right now.
Extensions, one of the more vital part of the browsing experience had long been missing in Edge but now that they are in clearly in the final phase of development, the end users should be able to get them soon enough. The users of the Insider program will also be able to get pinned tabs in their browsers, another invaluable browser feature.
So far I’m impressed with Edge browser performance, only shortcoming that I felt it had was unavailability of extensions, now that MS is bringing extensions, I’m sold.
Totally agreed. I was blown away by how fast and beautiful Edge is. And I’m migrating from a Macbook so I’d come with pretty high expectations.
It takes a lot of time to load (and I killed the process).
Don’t know about the performance of the browser.
using win 10 and edge from a long time due to insider prog. never felt need to use any other browser
That is lazy, instead of fixing the fundamental problem, they are basically just gonna steal the extensions. They should make it, so more developers want to develop for Edge.