Back in last December, Microsoft announced their move to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge, completely ditching their years of work and trying to start over again. And today, April 8, 2019, the first Canary and Developer build of that version of Microsoft Edge is ready for download on Windows 10 PCs.

Now, let’s head over the Edge Insider page and click Download Dev Channel to start. The installation file is only 1.5 MB and takes less than a minute to install.

Right off the bat, it found all my Chrome bookmarks and imports them automatically without my consent. And the first bug I found, ticking off the option “Show Favorite Bar” didn’t actually hide it.

But the browser is fast. It feels much lean than Chrome to launch. Flipping through pages on a few sites I tested is pretty instant.

It’s still in early stages – the builds released now are focused more on fundamentals with more feature support coming later. It’s also worth mentioning that the support for Mac and other supported versions of Windows will also come over time.

Happy browsing…