Microsoft"s Build 2020 developer conference starts today, and as always, there"s a bunch of news around its brand-new Chromium-based Edge browser. There are a bunch of new features on the way, but perhaps more significant is that the company finally confirmed that it"s going to begin rolling out Edge within the next few weeks.
You might recall that the team actually announced general availability back in January, promising a slow rollout. Slow isn"t actually the right word though, because it never actually rolled out. Users have had the opportunity to download a stable version of the browser, and then in February, it started rolling out to beta testers on the Windows Insider Program"s Release Preview ring. In other words, other than beta testers, exactly zero people have received this as an update.
While the blog post doesn"t explicitly say this, it seems likely that it"s going to arrive as part of the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, which is already available for developers and coming later this month. While the browser is going to be pushed to your machine via Windows Update, updates to the browser will not.
As mentioned, there are a bunch of new features as well. Collections is getting Pinterest integration, as Microsoft has partnered up with the company. If you"re unfamiliar with Collections, it allows you to take images, texts, and links from around the web and store them in groups. Now, you"ll see recommendations from Pinterest at the bottom of a Collection. You can also export a Collection to Pinterest. This feature is coming to Edge Insiders within the next month.
There"s also a new sidebar search option coming, so you"ll no longer have to open a new tab and lose your focus to search for something on the web. The search results will appear in the sidebar as well. This feature is arriving for Edge Insiders in the coming weeks.
Edge improvements naturally go hand in hand with Bing improvements. There"s a new Work page that"s included in Bing search results. It"s just another tab along with images, shopping, news, and so on, and it will appear if you"re signed in with a work account. The idea is to give Microsoft Search"s capabilities to look within your organization its own area, so it will include files, people, internal sites, and so on. Power BI integration is coming by the end of June.
Finally, Microsoft is releasing a preview of WebView2, which is part of its Project Reunion efforts to unify Win32 and UWP. WebView2 is based on Chromium, so developers can include that in their apps instead of the original EdgeHTML WebView.