Microsoft Is Building Another Bridge, Port Chrome Extensions To Edge

Edge hero

Last year at Build, Microsoft made a lot of noise about the ‘bridges’ it was building to make it easier to port applications to the Windows environment. While one bridge has fallen, the company is currently building another to make it easy to bring extensions to Edge.

With the latest Windows 10 Insider release that shipped yesterday, Edge now supports extensions. While there are only three officially available from the company at this time, they are going to make it easy to port Chrome extensions to Edge.

Jacob Rossi, an engineer working on Microsoft Edge, stated on Twitter, “we’re working on a porting tool to run Chrome extensions in Edge. Not yet finished and not all APIs supported.”

What this means is that for developers who have already built an extension for Chrome, they will be able to easily port it over to Edge. When the feature does launch to all Windows 10 users later this year, there should be a wide selection of extensions to install. As of today, only those participating in the Fast ring have access to extensions.

The way Microsoft has implemented extensions makes a lot of sense; rather than trying to reinvent the feature, they are allowing developers to utilize their existing products to make it as easy as possible to bring them to Edge. Because of this, Microsoft should not have an issue with making sure its browser receives the same attention as Firefox and Chrome from third party devs.