Users of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system may notice a big change later this month. The company will be pushing out their new version of Microsoft Edge to all users in January. This isn't an incremental update, it's a wholesale rewrite that marks the end of an era for the firm.
This new version of Microsoft's internet browser will be made available on January 15th. The most notable thing about the update is that the guts of the browser is now identical to Google's Chrome browser. Chrome is based on an open source browser called "Chromium", and this new version of Edge also uses this as a starting point. Therefore, for the most part, it will work identically to Chrome - certainly in terms of how web pages are displayed.
Microsoft have struggled to get people to pay attention to their browser for years, having lost huge amounts of market share to Google some years ago. For most people, the only indication that something has changed will be change to the blue "e" logo that has been Microsoft's portal to the internet for years (both Internet Explorer and the previous version of Edge used this).
However, Microsoft is hoping that this new version will win people back. They're certainly going all out to make it compatible with devices of all shapes and sizes. While Edge would previously only run on Wndows 10 devices, this new version is available on iOS, Android, Mac and even Linux.
Some of us have been using a beta version of this for a while, and we're reasonably impressed so far. It is unsurprisingly very Chrome-like, but it seems a bit more responsive. Those using Windows 10 and / or Office 365 will also find that there's some nice time saving integrations with the browser that may provide reason enough to give it a try.