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Hope everyone had an enjoyable Labor Day In addition to the benefits listed above, this
weekend! And, welcome to football season and transition will address issues that Windows
milder temperatures. business users have raised (especially those
still using Win 7 & 8) and should help improve
We are now three months past the most recent the Chromium engine as well. Here is a link to
Windows 10 upgrade, and I’ve not seen any- an article from The Verge that provides more
thing in the popular or technical media about any insight: https://
significant problem(s). That’s good news! If you www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128648/
have put off installation of the May 2019 up- microsoft-edge-chrome-chromium-browser-
grade because of uncertainty about its reliability, changes
it seems safe to move ahead.
While not yet ready for prime time, MS has re-
Speaking of Microsoft, you may have seen men- cently made EdgeChromium available to Win-
tion of Microsoft’s collaboration with Google to dows Insiders for user testing and feedback. If
change over Microsoft’s Edge browser from you are interested in giving it a try, here’s a link
HTML to Chromium (first reported late last year). to a How-To Geek article that tells you how to
(Chromium is an open-source program from download and install this new version of Edge:
Google that underlies their Chrome browser. It https://www.howtogeek.com/410575/download-
is also the foundation for Opera, Vivaldi and a try-microsoft%e2%80%99s-new-chromium-
number of lesser-known browsers.) It seems based-edge-browser-today/
clear from information on the Web that this move
is being driven by Edge’s very low market share There are a number of caveats – (1) the current
in the browser market (about 4%). Here is a link version is for 64-bit Windows 10 only; (2) the
to an MS blog from December 6, 2018 announc- most stable build (Beta) is not available; of the
ing their plans for Edge, and explaining their rea- remaining two options the Developer (Dev)
soning: https://blogs.windows.com/ channel is the more stable version; (3) Be-
windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-edge- cause this is a work in progress HTG recom-
making-the-web-better-through-more-open- mends that you not use this browser for any-
source-collaboration/ thing important just yet.
The advantage to Microsoft in switching Edge The following link is included in the HTG article,
from its proprietary EdgeHTML engine to a but if you would like to go directly to the MS
Chromium engine is two-fold. First, the new website for information about downloading the
Edge will be faster. (Prototypes have been as current version of EdgeChromium, here is a
fast or faster than Chrome on a variety of bench- link: https://blogs.windows.com/
marks.) Second, it will support Chrome exten- msedgedev/2019/04/08/microsoft-edge-
sions after the official launch, thus giving users preview-channel-details/
access to a much larger extension universe #HzAbspiQ4poHQRVc.97
(while still offering access to all current Microsoft
Store apps, at least initially). Since Edge is al- I have just downloaded and installed Edge-
ready optimized to work well with Windows 10, Chromium. (It runs alongside the original Edge
these added features should make it quite at- already installed on my PC.) So far, I have
tractive for Windows users. been able to sync my Chrome Bookmarks Bar
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