Microsoft today released the first Edge builds based on Google’s Chromium open source project, the same browser that Google’s Chrome is based on. Microsoft is even adopting the same naming scheme that Google uses for Chrome development: It is debuting Canary (preview builds that will be updated daily) and Developer builds (preview builds that will be updated weekly) today. They can both be installed alongside the old Edge as well as each other. You can download these builds now from the Microsoft Edge Insider site.

In December, Microsoft embraced Chromium for Edge development on the desktop, announced it is decoupling Edge updates from Windows 10 updates, and said that Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. The company also promised that the first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge would arrive “in early 2019,” and while it is starting to deliver on that today, the first builds are only for Windows 10 64-bit in English. Microsoft confirmed today that Beta builds are coming “in the future” and that support for 32-bit, other languages, and other operating systems “will also come over time.”

Microsoft gave us access last week to an early build of Chromium Edge. The browser feels snappy and stable for a preview. That said, don’t expect it to outperform Chrome or even the old Edge.

“In these first builds we are very much focused on the fundamentals and have not yet included a wide range of feature and language support that will come later,” Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president in Microsoft’s operating systems group, said in a statement. “We look forward to people starting to kick the tires and will be refining the feature set over time based on the feedback we receive.”

The Verge