Microsoft Edge Beta available to download now for Windows and macOS

Four months ago, Microsoft released official Dev and Canary builds for its Chromium-based Edge browser, and has been rolling out regular updates for them ever since, with new features and general improvements.

However, it’s the Beta release that many people have been holding out for, and today Microsoft has finally made it available for all supported versions of Windows and macOS. If you’ve been wanting to try out the new browser but haven’t fancied installing buggy preview builds, then now's your chance.

SEE ALSO:

• First official builds of Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser now available to test
• The first Microsoft Edge preview build arrives for macOS -- this is why you should care
• How to enable dark mode in new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge
• Chromium-based Microsoft Edge pretends to be different browsers by switching user agent
• Microsoft releases Chromium-based Edge for Windows 7 and 8.x

Announcing the release, Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows, says:

Our goal with Microsoft Edge is to create better web compatibility with better performance for our customers while ensuring less fragmentation of the web for all web developers. Our community has been with us on this journey from the beginning and your feedback is making it possible to rapidly improve. To date, there have been more than one million downloads of our preview builds, across all supported versions of Windows and Mac, from which we have received more than 140,000 individual pieces of feedback. Thank you! 

The Beta offers a number of ways to personalize your experience, along with support for 14 languages. New features include:

• New tab customization -- Customize and choose what you want to see when you open a new web page by selecting Focus, Inspirational or Informational layout.
• Tracking Prevention -- Personalize your experience further by enabling tracking prevention, a feature designed to protect you from being tracked by websites that you don’t visit. When enabled, a user will be able to choose from three levels of privacy -- Basic, Balanced and Strict.
• Collections -- Gather, organize, and share information as you search the web and export to apps like Excel without comprising the organization of your content. Collections is available for testing in the Canary channel today.

In addition, there are many of the commercial features that Microsoft announced at its Build conference earlier this year:

• Microsoft Search -- Now built-in to Bing, this feature will reduce the time spent looking for things at work by intelligently connecting an organization’s people, documents, sites, locations and conversations.
• IE11 mode in Edge -- Streamline your experience of viewing the web through two different browser by bringing Internet Explorer 11 compatibility directly into Microsoft Edge.
• Windows Defender Application Guard helps to isolate enterprise-defined untrusted sites, protecting the company while employees browse the Internet.

You can download and try the Beta build now.

Let us know your thoughts on it in the comments below.