Microsoft is looking to unify its new Edge browser a bit. As spotted by Neowin, and as discussed during a session at Ignite 2021 the company has mentioned that it is working on a common codebase for Edge across both desktop and mobile.
The full details on this can be seen in the video below, at around the 6:16 mark, but it comes down to ways to ease up the development process for Microsoft. With a unified codebase, as the video discusses, Microsoft could be able to improve the engineering process, share features on Edge Desktop with Edge mobile, and innovate on the browser, too.
Currently, the coding has to be done three times for iOS, Android, as well as desktop, which ends up slowing down development and misaligning things. That’s why Microsoft has been working on the common codebase for a year now and even mentioned that a public beta will be coming to Android and iOS in the coming months via the Google Play Store and iOS Test Flight. The change is still primarily catered to enterprises, though, and helping them roll out the browser in their operations.
“When these are available, please download them and install them. This is going to allow us to innovate faster on mobile, as well as allow us to bring features on desktop where it makes sense. We’re really excited and we want you all to watch out for it.” said Darryl Brown, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Edge.
We hope that the unified code base would indeed mean that more features come to Edge on mobile at a faster rate. Currently, the mobile browsers of Edge are well behind the desktop counterparts. Edge on iOS is stuck at version 46.1.10, and Edge on Android at version 46.01.24.5145. Even Microsoft indicated in its video how tough it was to roll out the Collections feature from Edge Desktop to Edge on iOS and Android, so we hope these changes mean more cool new features across all the major platforms.
