Early Look At How Extensions Are Managed In Edge

Sometime this year, likely in the near future, extensions will officially be supported with Microsoft’s new Edge browser. While the company has not shown off much about the feature, thanks to the latest Windows 10 build released to Insiders, we can start to understand how the extensions will work and how you will manage them.

With the latest version of Edge released to Insiders, Walking Cat was able to turn on some of the extension functionality that shows how the browser will manage these add-ons. In the image below, you can see the window that will be used to add and remove extensions from the browser. The ‘Get Extension’ link currently takes you to an internal Microsoft address that cannot be accessed.

If you do want to try this feature out for yourself, you need to open Resource.pri with a hex editor and replace the Unicode string “ExtensionsVisible” with “LaunchIEVisible”. Just be aware that you should not try this unless you know what you are doing as you can corrupt your browser if you change the wrong variables with the editor.

At this time, it doesn’t appear that you can load extensions either, a few weeks back, a couple of extensions for Edge were leaked but those cannot currently be loaded into this version of the browser.

Unfortunately, this is about all we have when it comes to the feature for Edge; extensions were initially promised to be released last year but never arrived. Seeing as components of the feature are starting to show up in the browser, it can’t be too long until Microsoft enables the functionality.