Redmond getting ready to release browser extensions

Mar 15, 2016 12:54 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is getting ready to roll out extension support for Edge browser in Windows 10 preview builds, and a page that has gotten leaked earlier today confirms that work on these add-ons is advancing fast these days.

Previously, Microsoft said that it wanted all Google Chrome extensions to work in Edge with little to no modifications at all, and it turns out that the company’s plan to achieve this is heading in the right direction.

Bavo Luysterborg has looked into the extensions published on the recently leaked page and discovered that all Microsoft Edge add-ons are nearly fully compatible with Chrome. Truth is, Microsoft wants this to work the other way around, but it’s very clear that cross platform compatibility is an important step in Redmond’s plan to bring as many extensions as possible on Edge browser.

Very similar code

“It’s currently impossible to get these extensions working in Edge (in Insider builds that is), but since the upcoming extension system in Edge is rumoured to be compatible to Google Chrome’s system I decided to try to load them in Chrome to find out just how compatible they really are. Turns out they’re nearly 100% compatible,” Luysterborg writes.

Part of Microsoft’s project to bring extensions on Edge was to allow developers to use most of the code implemented in their Chrome extensions, and it looks like the two versions are indeed very similar.

“The source code for these Edge extension pretty much looks like the original Chrome code with some additional code to replace ‘chrome’ with ‘msBrowser’ and 2 minor additions to manifest.json.”

While extensions will soon debut in Microsoft Edge for insiders, users who are still running the stable version of Windows 10 have to wait until June to get this new feature. That’s the time when Microsoft is expected to release the Redstone update for Windows 10, which is very likely to bring extensions too.