Firm said to consider making Edge available cross-platform

Oct 4, 2017 04:31 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making Edge a powerful browser for Windows 10 users and a worthy alternative to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but statistics show that for the time being, it’s still lagging behind all of its rivals in terms of adoption.

One of the reasons for not gaining bigger market share is the limited availability of the browser, but it appears that Microsoft might be working on dealing with this in the long term.

A report from French website FrAndroid indicates that Microsoft wants to bring Edge browser to iPhone and Android devices in an attempt to make the application cross-platform and fill the gap caused by not having a mobile platform to provide desktop Windows 10 users with cross-device experiences using its own ecosystem.

If Edge arrives on iOS and Android, features like bookmark and history synchronization would certainly be among the highlights, though right now rivals like Google Chrome already boast such functionality.

Bing integration would obviously be offered too, and there’s a chance that Cortana would also be a key part of the browser – Cortana is currently available on both Android and iOS, and Microsoft could use this for better integration with its apps.

Microsoft previously said no

While at some level bringing Edge browser to rival mobile platforms does make sense for Microsoft, such a plan has previously been denied by the software giant, who said that it first wants to get the application right on its own platform and only then consider expanding availability to other operating systems.

If Microsoft does think that Edge browser has reached its maturity and can be released to other mobile platforms, such a plan can indeed get the green light, through porting it to iOS, in particular, can be quite a challenge. Despite parts of the Edge engine already available cross-platform, Apple requires browser developers to stick with the Safari rendering engine in order to work on iOS, so Microsoft might have a lot of work to do in this regard.

For the time being, however, it’s safer to just take this as speculation and nothing more, as Microsoft is yet to say a single word on such a project. But given the company’s focus on Android and iOS apps, new mobile versions of Edge wouldn’t be entirely surprising.