Right now, when you install the Edge preview builds, you get the option to choose your new tab layout. There are a few points of integration with Microsoft’s other services available already, though. For now, this is very much a first preview and meant to give web and extensions developers a platform for testing their sites and tools.

That will change over time, though, with more integrations into the Windows ecosystem. On the other hand - at least at this stage of the project - there’s also very little that differentiates Edge with Chromium from Google’s own Chrome browser. That’s a good thing, in that if you’re a Windows user, you could easily use the new Edge as your default browser and would be just fine.

It’s a browser and it (with the exceptions of a few bugs you’d expect to see in a first release) works just like you’d expect it to. Maybe the most remarkable thing about using Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge browser is how unremarkable it feels. I used the most recent builds for the last week or so.

With that, we’re now down to two major browser engines: Google’s Chromium and Mozilla’s Gecko. The company first announced this project last December and the news obviously created quite a stir, given that Microsoft was abandoning its own browser engine development in favor of using an open-source engine - and one that is still very much under the control of Google. Over time, you’ll also be able to opt in to the beta channel and, eventually, the stable channel. The canary builds will get daily updates and the developer builds will see weekly updates. You can now download the first developer and canary builds here. Microsoft today launched the first official version of its Edge browser with the Chromium engine for Windows 10.

Microsoft edge chromium download