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Microsoft today launched the first beta versions of its new Chrome-based Edge browser for Windows and Mac. The new beta channel, which will be updated about every six weeks, will join existing channels for developers and canaries, who will continue to receive daily and weekly updates, respectively.
In the last few months of preview versions in existing channels, Microsoft has collected about 140,000 comments. Thanks to this – and to a sufficient amount of telemetry also received from early users – the company now has the feeling that it knows enough about Edge's efficient operation on a wide range of machines and that it is stable enough so enthusiasts, web developers, and business users can try it out before it is released.
"The beta is the most stable preview channel because features are not added to the beta until you've done the quality testing in the Canary channel, then in the Dev channel," Microsoft says in its announcement. "Major updates can be expected about every six weeks, as well as periodic minor updates for bug fixes and security."
At this point, Microsoft has also put in place all the necessary infrastructure to update the browser and tested it thoroughly throughout the preview phase. If necessary, this means that the team can publish an unplanned beta release when it discovers a bug and knows that its update systems will work perfectly.
Just like Chrome, Firefox and most other browsers, Microsoft will continue to test the new features of the canary and developer versions before activating them in beta versions. The current version of Canary, for example, has a very useful global media control button that lets you control YouTube, Spotify, and other music and video services without having to switch tabs. Features like this will be available on the beta channel in the coming months.
Microsoft tracking prevention features are also available in the beta, but currently behind a flag. Soon, the beta will also be supported for collections, the modern design of Microsoft bookmarks, As far as I know, this feature has not yet been enabled in Canary and Developer editions. (Correction: it was put online in the canary version with this update). Other new features that will soon be available for the beta include Internet Explorer for businesses that still use legacy applications that rely on Microsoft's pre-Edge browser.
With this release, Microsoft is also launching a security reward program for Edge. Security researchers who discover and disclose all vulnerabilities that have a significant impact in the beta and dev versions of the dev channel are eligible for rewards of up to $ 15,000.
As a Microsoft spokesman said in an interview before today's release, the team is also very pleased that it has now contributed over 1,000 commits to the Chromium project. This project is mainly run by Google engineers, but it's good to see that Microsoft's plans to increase its contributions are paying off. By switching to Chromium, Microsoft has stopped developing its own engine. At the time, the company argued that continuing to invest in a few-user engine was not really helpful in maintaining the health of the entire web ecosystem and that it could have more impact by working on Chromium. It seems that this work is beginning to bear fruit now.
As the team said, so far, much work has been done to bring the Edge to the beta and to ensure that all the basic features work. This means that the browser does not have many features that really differentiate Edge from the competition (collections are a good example here). As these essential features become more stable, the team will focus more on the tools and features that differentiate Edge from Chrome.
Personally, I moved to the new Edge shortly after the first versions of developer and Canary, and since then I have been on the daily update channel. Despite its preview status, the browser is very stable under Windows 10 and Mac. Some versions were better than others, but I did not encounter any major blocking bugs, and Edge proved to be a fast and stable browser. This bodes well for the beta program.
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