Microsoft’s revamped Edge browser is still trying to win over Windows users who favour Google Chrome, and now it wants to win you back by making Chrome extensions usable on its browser.
The Edge browser is undeniably better than its predecessor, Internet Explorer, which was so disliked by those who used it that it became an internet meme, but it is still struggling to attract regular users away from Chrome.
In fact, as of February 2016, there are still nearly eight times as many regular users of Internet Explorer worldwide compared with Edge and 16 times as many Chrome users, which shows the struggle it is facing.
Now, however, a tweet from one of the engineers on the Microsoft Edge team, Jacob Rossi, has revealed that he and his colleagues are working on developing a means of porting Chrome extensions over to the Microsoft browser.
@jacobrossi extn's in Store will at first be a carefully selected set covering top scenarios and API coverage, opening up to more in future
— Jacob Rossi (@jacobrossi) March 18, 2016
This isn’t an entirely new announcement from Microsoft, though, with the company suggesting after the launch of the new Edge browser last year that the then bare-bones browser would be looking to allow cross-platform use.
This was soon pushed back to sometime this year, but now Rossi’s tweets would appear to show that a slow rollout of cross-platform Chrome extensions will begin trickling out in the near future.
The likely outcome is that more will be revealed in two weeks time at the Microsoft Edge Web Summit taking place on 4 April.
Edge browser image via T.Dallas/Shutterstock
