Keeping things on track. The Chromium based version of Microsoft Edge officially launched earlier this year, and has since then grown on to become one of the finest web browsers on the market.
Unsurprisingly, it not only makes use of the Chrome engine, it also follows its release philosophy.
In that Edge is maintained as part of several channels that are updated like clockwork — save for when the company wants to keep things aligned with the Chromium project itself.
The stable updates are linked with Chromium releases, and we got a couple of signs of this recently.
First when Microsoft decided to skip the release of Edge 82 when the Chromium team decided to do the same due to the global health crisis that had most developers working from home. And then a few weeks back when the company paused development of two of the channels to keep things on track.
Speaking of which, the software titan has put up a release schedule for Edge, and has also shared a handy little product roadmap for the web browser.
This is to ensure ease of development in large organizations, as enterprise customers asked the company to detail information on the features that were coming to the browsers.
Microsoft says:
“Since releasing the new Microsoft Edge, we’ve heard feedback that customers, especially in enterprise environments, need more visibility into our feature roadmap and release schedule so they can plan deployments and prepare for upcoming changes.”
The release schedule shows the targeted weeks that versions of the web browsers will be released in the Stable and Beta channels.
It goes up to Edge 89, which is expected to land in the Stable channel the week of March 4, 2021, with a Beta lined up for the week of February 1, 2021. So, the two channels are basically a month apart, and it lines up with how they are updated every six weeks.
These are target dates, of course.
And as mentioned above, Microsoft develops Edge along with Chromium release schedule. Meaning, it that changes, then so will the one for Edge.
Understandably so.
