Google Chrome is renowned for its speed, range of extensions and accessibility on iOS and Android devices in addition to desktops.
Microsoft Edge is a competitor to Chrome but has so far been more fragmented and has worse web compatibility when compared to Google’s offering.
Microsoft evidently released this and announced it was developing a new version of Edge using the Chromium open source project last year.
Chromium supplies myriad code to Chrome and is one of the reasons the Google browser performs the way it does.
In a blog post announcing the new version of Edge back in December, Microsoft said the decision was taken to “make the web experience better for many different audiences”.
The firm went on: “People using Microsoft Edge (and potentially other browsers) will experience improved compatibility with all web sites, while getting the best-possible battery life and hardware integration on all kinds of Windows devices.
“Web developers will have a less-fragmented web platform to test their sites against, ensuring that there are fewer problems and increased satisfaction for users of their sites.”
Although a final build of Microsoft’s new version of Chrome has not yet released, the firm has now debuted Canary and Development builds of the software for Windows 10 users, giving them a chance to try it out early.
On its Microsoft Edge Insider site, the firm explained the Canary version of the new Edge browser is less stable, but will be updated “almost every night” to ensure the newest features arrive as fast as possible.
The Development version of the new Microsoft Edge was said to be “generally more stable” than Canary but users will need to wait slightly longer to test fresh functionality.
Discussing the Edge variants, the American tech behemoth stated: “Want to see what we were working on yesterday? Canary will be released automatically almost every night to keep you up to date on our progress.
“Our dev builds are the best representation of our improvements in the past week. They have been tested by the Microsoft Edge team, and are generally more stable than Canary.”
As noted by The Verge, the new version of Edge has support for extensions, meaning your favourite add-ons for Google Chrome will work with it.
The outlet has already tested Edge running in Chromium and has praised it for running fast and smoothly.
Unfortunately, only Windows 10 users are currently able to download Canary and Development versions of the new Edge.
However, Microsoft intends to allow Windows 8, Windows 7 and macOS users to take advantage of such builds for Edge soon.