TRY NEW EDGE FEATURES BEFORE THEY’RE RELEASED
Microsoft releases beta versions of new features and tools for Edge on a regular basis. You don’t need to be a developer to download and use them, but you do need to accept that what you’ll be working with is not the finished article, so you may experience the occasional bug or PC crash.
There are four versions – or ‘channels’, as Microsoft calls them – of Edge: the Stable Channel (the main version that is already be installed on your PC), along with three development versions. The most up to date of these development versions is the Canary Channel, which is released at the end of every working day. Although this gives you access to the very latest Edge tools and features, it’s also most likely to contain bugs (Microsoft relies on users reporting these, then releases fixes).
The Dev Channel is updated weekly. Again, you’ll be a long way ahead of the curve if you use this version, but you’ll have the peace of mind that the seven-day delay in updates will have given Microsoft’s Edge team time to test them properly and fix known bugs. In Microsoft’s own words, these releases “are generally more stable than Canary”.
Finally, the Beta Channel receives a major update every six weeks, so you’ll spend less time updating and, as well as benefiting from more extensive testing, will be running code that has been improved several times over.
Install development versions
To download one of the three development versions of Edge, go to www.snipca.com/34347, then select the one you want (see screenshot above right). The installer will be saved to your Downloads folder. Launch it, wait for it to download and install the latest code from Microsoft’s servers, and the version of Edge you chose will now load.
Development builds are able to synchronise your data in exactly the same way as the main Edge release. When we installed the Canary version, for example, it detected the existing settings in the main version of Edge we’d already been using and logged us into our Microsoft account automatically. Better yet, it ran without problems alongside our existing Edge browser – meaning, if we encountered problems with a particular web page in the Canary version, we could simply switch back to the main browser and pick up where we left off
Edge and Coronavirus
The Coronavirus pandemic has caused Microsoft (and the developers of other browsers) to rethink its release schedules. Although Microsoft has confirmed updates to the three development versions will continue as normal, it has revised the update schedule for the main version of Edge.
After originally pausing all updates on 20 March (when Edge was in version 80), Microsoft released version 81 on 14 April – some four weeks later than planned. It has since announced it will skip version 82, and instead go straight to version 83 (which promises improvements to the Collections and Immersive Reader tool) in “mid May”.