Microsoft quietly launched a version of Edge Canary on Android, giving enthusiasts their first peek at the promised unified codebase.
As you may recall, Microsoft revealed in early March that it was planning to bring all versions of its Edge browser—across desktop and mobile—to a single codebase. Because of anti-competitive limitations imposed by Apple, the iOS version of Edge will need to use Apple’s WebKit-based renderer, however.) The idea is to help make Edge development more efficient, and to allow Microsoft to ship new features on each supported platform at the same time, or at least more quickly.
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There’s no official announcement, but a user on Reddit noticed that Microsoft just posted its first-ever version of Edge Canary to the Google Play Store. And while the store listing says nothing about the codebase, this version of the browser matches the version of Edge Canary on desktop, and it offers a few subtle UI changes when compared to the normal version of Edge on Android.
I’ve made this my default browser on Android so I can test it, but I don’t see any major performance differences or whatever yet.
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#623453">In reply to ariana2016:</a></em></blockquote><p>The "Tracking Prevention" feature exists in the newer one, so setting that to "Strict" might help, but no, the new one does-away with the ad-blocker.</p><p><br></p><p>I'd suggest instead using Brave, Vivaldi or Opera (<em>Opera</em>, not <em>Opera Mini: </em>they're not the same thing).</p>
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#623637">In reply to gcalli:</a></em></blockquote><p>Try making sure you have the "Sleeping Tabs" feature turned-on: that will remove resources from any tab you've not used in a while, so they consume virtually no CPU or GPU. (And yes, there is an exclusions list, you any tab you want to play audio in the background can be set never to sleep).</p><p><br></p><p>Otherwise try right-clicking an empty area on the titlebar and choose "Browser task manager" and see if that can help reveal which website is causing the excessive CPU use.</p>
dftf
<p>Paul: "There’s no official announcement […]"</p><p><br></p><p>Maybe not in the form of a public press-release, no, but it was announced in an employee post on the Edge Insider Forum: techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/edge-for-andriod-releases-major-updates-%E5%AE%89%E5%8D%93%E7%AB%AF%E5%8F%91%E5%B8%83%E9%87%8D%E5%A4%A7%E6%9B%B4%E6%96%B0/m-p/2275892</p><p><br></p><p>As the "Canary" branch is essentially the alpha/daily one, I guess it makes-sense to only announce it here, rather than as a public release, given you don't want most-people on the most-unstable version going?</p>