At Ignite 2019 last week, one of Microsoft’s biggest consumer-fronted announcements was the launch date for Chromium Edge. The company revealed the new version of its web browser will leave preview on January 15, 2020. However, the browser will arrive without some features, among them ARM support.
While Microsoft did not offer a date on ARM support for Chromium Edge, we can now roadmap it a little easier. That’s because Microsoft has now started testing ARM on Edge.
Testing is underway on the Canary development channel. If you’re unfamiliar, the Chromium Edge preview has three channels: Canary for unstable builds, Dev for more feature releases, and Beta for stable previews.
With Canary being the first step of ARM testing on the browser, Microsoft says the ability will come to the Dev and Beta channels “soon”.
Other abilities not making the Chromium Edge launch build include support for HoloLens and Xbox One. The latter is not a major issue as not many people use the console for browsing. Microsoft not making support a priority makes sense. Elsewhere, some application tools are also not coming to Edge at launch.
ARM Problems
Microsoft’s Surface Pro X arrived last week as the company’s first Windows 10 for ARM hardware. However, there are problems with the ARM concept as an app gap has emerged. That’s because the device does not support 64-bit Intel applications.
We reported previously how the Microsoft Store was not flagging which apps are not compatible with the device, a situation Microsoft has only partially remedied.
Microsoft is working to solve this problem through an emulator. Sadly, early reports suggest that solution will not be available until Windows 10 20H1 in the first half of 2021.
