14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft confirmed at BUILD 2015 that the new Edge browser, which will be part of Windows 10, would also receive support for extensions, but there’s one little thing that everyone should have in mind when planning to give up on Chrome or Firefox and move to this new browser.
Microsoft Edge won’t come with extension support from the very beginning, as Microsoft is still working on this feature, as the company also confirmed at BUILD, so if you want to try out extensions in the new browser, you need to wait a little bit longer until they become available.
Redmond hasn’t provided any specific deadline for this new feature, but it said that development would take a little bit longer because it also wants to give developers the power to bring their own extensions to Microsoft Edge with only small tweaks.
In Windows 10, any extension designed for Google Chrome should also work on Edge with just a few code optimizations, and this is one of the reasons Microsoft needs more time to bring extension support in the new browser.
Extensions also coming on the phone
Another important announcement made by Microsoft on the sideline of BUILD 2015 is that Microsoft Edge extension support will also work on phones powered by Windows 10, so yes, the browser that we’ll get on our handsets will come with a high level of customization.
But as is the case with the standard extension support, it could take a while until this feature arrives on mobile phones because Microsoft needs to bring it to the desktop first and only then switch focus to handsets.
Developing extensions for mobile phones also needs more time because some of them are changing the default UI of the browser, so additional optimizations are needed. Extension support will arrive on phones, that’s for sure, but this could only happen in late 2015 or early 2016.