Microsoft has announced that the Microsoft Edge browser will be coming to the Mac platform natively, meaning you won’t have to run Microsoft Edge in a Windows 10 virtual machine if you don’t want to, instead Microsoft Edge will run as a regular app on the Mac. Microsoft Edge for Mac is built off of Chromium and is actively under development, and while in beta there will be two builds available to try out for users who are interested; a nightly changing Canary build, and a weekly changing. Microsoft Build Barely Showed the Mac Version of Edge. Microsoft Build is well underway, and the company used its keynote to announce a Linux Kernel for Windows, a real command line, and new features for the Edge browser. While talking about Edge, Microsoft tucked a blink-and-miss teaser of Edge for Mac in a YouTube video. It didn’t provide a date, timeline, or any substantial information at all beyond a quick screenshot.
Microsoft announced Edge for Mac at Build 2019. This new Edge is a revamped version of Microsoft’s browser in which they are replacing its underlying framework with Chromium. This means that it will look and work a lot like Google’s Chrome browser but with Microsoft’s own features on top. It also means that Microsoft will be releasing a browser for macOS after 15 years. We got our hands on a ‘leaked’ build of Edge for Mac and played around with it. Here’s a preview of what to expect when it makes its way to the general public.
The last time Microsoft released a browser for Mac was Internet Explorer for OS X, 15 years ago. At that time, Internet Explorer was actually a really good browser on Mac. Infact, it was the default browser for OS X for sometime, until Apple created Safari.
Edge was Microsoft’s attempt at resurrecting their browser efforts with a new name and design. There were also technically fundamental changes due to its usage of EdgeHTML as its rendering engine which was a fork of Trident, Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. However, it was based on modern standards and performance was as good as WebKit. Or so it seemed.
Microsoft Edge never became a fan favorite, thanks to Google Chrome’s benefits over it. Performance, perfect support for Google’s websites and bleeding edge of web standards meant that Chrome would be the favored browser by a majority of the users, despite Edge being Windows 10’s default browser. Tycoon games for mac. This is one of those instances where Microsoft’s power of default apps did not succeed. Tweetdeck for mac.
Oh, and let’s not forget that unlike Edge, Chrome was available everywhere: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux. Edge was released on smartphones 2 years after its desktop version, but never released on Mac. Free draw software for mac. Until now.
Something unexpected happened this year. Microsoft announced that it will be moving Edge to Chromium, the open source project on which Chrome, Opera and many other browsers are based on. Microsoft also shared their intentions of bringing the browser to as many platforms as possible, including Mac.
Edge for macOS
On first launch, you could easily confuse Edge as Chrome with a theme. Placement of tabs, menu button and many other items is very similar to Chrome. However, when you look closely, you realize that the browser is very much Microsoft’s.
Microsoft has gone ahead and customized every part of the browser. From the icons, to menus, to settings and even adding Bing to places where nobody asked for it, Edge already has a lot of polish for an unreleased browser. Whatever feature you can find in Chrome, it exists in Edge and then some. You will find support for notifications, Chrome extensions, dark theme, profiles, background sync and more.
As expected, Microsoft has released Google Sync with Microsoft account. Even Google search is replaced by Bing. If you are testing out Edge, you might want to head over to Settings > Privacy and Services > Address Bar to switch to Google. You can also chose to use DuckDuckGo if you are privacy conscious.
Microsoft has even replaced Google’s Safe Browsing feature with their own Microsoft Defender Browser Protection. Sigh, many things change but Microsoft’s love for long product names wont.
One of the stand out features is the home tab page. Microsoft has three different types of layouts available for users. The first is focused, which is very similar to Chrome’s new tab page. A search bar and quick links to your most visited websites. Unfortunately, even with a dark theme, you get a light background on this layout.
The next layout is called Inspirational. It is the same as Focused, except with an image of the day by Bing.
The third layout is called Informational. If you love sponsored content and ads, this layout is for you. It has some clickbait and some useful content, powered by Microsoft News. It can be personalized with topics that interest you but I don’t find it interesting to have new tab pages with links to content.
There’s also a custom option which lets you toggle on or off different parts of the page including Bing background images, news feeds and even your most visited websites.
But, all this doesn’t matter much. How is the performance, you may ask?
Really good.
New tabs open in an instant. Websites load as fast as they do in Chrome. YouTube works great too. I installed my favorite extensions which include Pocket, 1Password X and Onetab and they worked perfectly fine. I did have one or two memory usage hiccups where Edge was creating too many processes, but it’s not as if Chrome doesn’t eat my Mac’s memory like it’s a buffet.
I also had an issue with Microsoft sync but it seems to have started working fine. It only syncs favorites for now. I also noticed that the bookmarks bar either stays always visible or always hidden. Unlike Chrome, it doesn’t show in the new tab page, despite being hidden. I hope Microsoft fixes this soon.
Lastly, Netflix does not play in 1080p resolution in Edge on Mac. You still have to use Safari for that.
It is important to mention again that Edge is still a work in progress. A number of features are not fully implemented yet. Microsoft also announced a number of new features like Collections, Privacy dashboard and Internet Explorer mode, none of which are currently available in canary and development builds.
Download Edge for Mac
If you are an early adopter and cannot wait for to try out the new Edge browser for Mac, you can download the development or canary builds (Thanks to WalkingCat for tweeting theselinks). The difference between development and canary builds is that canary builds are updated more frequently and might have bugs. In terms of stability, this is the order you should remember: public builds > beta > development > canary.
Note that Microsoft has not put up these links on their Edge Insider website yet – their website still says ‘coming soon’.
I, for one, am happy to welcome Edge on macOS. Chrome is awesome but it’s a bloated mess now. Safari is good but it’s slow and using multiple tabs on it is just not as fluent as Chrome. I’m hoping that Microsoft somehow takes the best of both these browsers and creates one that convinces users to switch.
Update: Microsoft has officially released the Canary Channel build to all users which can be downloaded from the Edge Insider website.
Feature
By William Gallagher Wednesday, May 08, 2019, 08:58 am PT (11:58 am ET)
There are solid features in Microsoft's new Mac browser - and significant ones still to come - but for Edge to be a compelling browser for Apple users, it's got to offer you more than you're getting with Apple's own Safari.
On Monday, Microsoft announced that it officially released a test version of Microsoft Edge for the Mac. It's a remarkably, surprisingly solid app even in this pre-launch edition. Even that we already know that its missing a couple of key features, still you can get a feel for whether Microsoft Edge is worth replacing Safari as your main browser. A key reason that this early version is so robust, though, is the same reason that Microsoft has made this move at all. The company didn't set out to make a Mac browser, it set out to convert its existing PC Edge into using Google's Chromium system. That gets it a solid base that happens to also give it a Mac version. And it's what makes the Mac version of Microsoft Edge look very like the Mac version of Chrome. If you were thinking of moving from Safari and didn't want to risk a pre-beta developer version of Microsoft Edge, you could download Chrome and you would get pretty much the same feel.
Not measuring specs
This is about how Edge feels in comparison to Safari, it's not about benchmarking or measuring anything. That wouldn't be either fair or even all that useful given how unfinished this release of Edge is. That said, you can make some broad comparisons that are interesting. For a browser that looks like Chrome, for instance, Microsoft Edge currently takes up around a third less disk space than Google's offer. But then if you're tight on space, Safari is a head-scratching is-that-really-right ten times smaller than Edge. Safari is also less CPU intensive than either the currently-shipping Chrome or this developer Edge. We all tend to describe our preferred browser, whichever one it is, as feeling light and responsive and fast compared to the others. The key word there, though, is feeling. If you were checking out Activity Monitor while running these browsers or if you are on a MacBook with little space, you'd unquestionably say that Safari was the lightest.
Microsoft Edge showing AppleInsider's front page.
You're supposed to say that Edge is the fastest. That's a key promise from its Windows version, that Microsoft Edge will be faster than any of them. So far, we're not seeing that. We have no complaints about how quickly it loads any website we tried with it, but we haven't been knocked out either. That speed, along with the final disk space requirement, is something we'll have to come back to when this ships. There's good reason to hope that a final release will be quicker, but there's also reason to expect that it will be bigger, too, because this version of Edge is missing a couple of features.
What's missing
There's nothing missing that you actually need in a browser, nothing that isn't working. What's missing are some extra features —but these could be what makes you decide to move to Edge. Arguably the most appealing is a feature called Collections, which will help you save and organize material that you find on the web. It's going to be like Safari's reading list, but rather than that bookmarking kind of feature, Collections will be a research tool. You'll be able to drag images and text into it, and then share some or all with others. Less thrilling, but possibly needed for people in corporations, is IE Mode. This will be the whole, horrible, long-forgotten Internet Explorer built into Edge so that, if you need it, you can use in-house sites that require the old standard.
Taste
Even before we get any of these, though, there is a feature that might tempt you away from Safari, and it isn't Bing. While that search engine is, unsurprisingly, promoted on the startup page of Edge, if you scroll down, you also get news. A collection of headlines and stories from Microsoft News is right there in your browser's main page. Microsoft News is fine. We've compared it before to both Google News and the basic, non-subscription tier of Apple News. Here it's just a little extra touch, and ultimately it's the little things that make the difference. Features are great, and are also easy to compare, but it's the feel of a piece of software that matters. That's got to be more so with browsers than with just about anything because you will spend so much time using it. In theory, every browser should render every website perfectly, but you know they don't. This isn't a reason to switch browsers, but it is a reason to always have two on your Mac, and on your Windows box too. Beyond that, though, every browser does render every website in a different way. The buttons and controls are different and if you're used to seeing a site in Safari, it is noticeably different when you try it in Firefox.
Microsoft Edge displays its settings in a web page. Separately, you can always see the source code for any site you visit.
Free Microsoft Browser For Mac
We would never argue that the color of a button or the shape of a slider is vital, but we will always maintain that overall this look and feel is extraordinarily important. In which case, the look and feel of Microsoft Edge gives away its origins. This is a very Chrome-like browser, but it's also a rather Windows-like one. Where every Mac app has its preferences in a separate kind of window, Edge —and Chrome —have all their settings on a web page. It looks like a web page, it takes up a tab, it is shown in the main window of the browser. The only difference is that instead of beginning with http:// and being a remote website, it's a local one whose name begins edge://.
You're not very likely to type edge://settings/appearance into your browser tab, but you could. Maybe if you're a more technically-minded person, maybe if you're spending a lot of time adjusting settings, you'd find that faster and friendlier than clicking through buttons and tabs. And you can easily imagine a situation where you create TextExpander snippets to make entering them fast and convenient.
Microsoft Web Browser For Mac
We did get a peculiar issue when we wanted to search the web having just been in a settings window. Edge attempted to search for 'local curry restaurant', but prefixed it with edge:// for no reason that we could fathom —or, actually, reproduce that often. This is a very early beta, after all.
Safari
This look and feel makes Edge seem about the same as Chrome to us. It's lighter than Firefox, though we just tend to get exasperated by how we launch Firefox because a site isn't working just right in Safari and we have to schlep through its constant updating. Edge feels more full-featured than Safari, yet that's just an impression we get from how many settings are thrown at us. In another very Windows-like move, Edge comes with choices for how your tabs look and because the options are there, you must be shown them and you must be shown them immediately. Unable to really judge how the different tabs look until we used them in anger, we picked one in a shrug and haven't gone back. There are more useful, and oddly less in your face, options to set up profiles where your Office 365 account is linked to your browser, but we've muddled through with Outlook online on Safari without issues.
Microsoft Edge Web Browser For Mac
Microsoft Browser For Mac
Then Edge, and Chrome, also make more of a meal about downloads. It's as if Safari expects you to download something now and then, where Edge thinks you're in this to do a lot. So where Safari has a download icon, which only appears when you've actually downloaded something, Edge presents a download manager.
Microsoft Edge Browser For Mac Download
To swap or not
Intellectually, we know that it's going to be the forthcoming Collections feature that should sway us. That's the part that has the most use, that makes Microsoft Edge the most different from Safari. And yet those of us who happen to prefer Safari to, for instance, Chrome, already know that we aren't really that likely to make the move to Edge, either. It's good that we have the option, though we have to be aware that it's practically an accident of birth that means we get a Mac version of Edge only because there's a Mac version of Google's Chromium system. Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.