Microsoft has officially released their Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser for the Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems. This will allow a wider range of Windows users to test out the upcoming chromium-based Edge browser and report bugs that they may encounter.
With the initial release, Microsoft is only making the Edge Canary build available, with the Dev version coming soon. Like all Microsoft Edge Insider builds, this one can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft Edge Insider site.
In their announcement, Microsoft has stated that this build’s feature will be pretty much the same as those found on Windows 10, but without Internet Explorer Mode. That feature will be coming at a later date for Enterprise customers.
“You will find the experience and feature set on previous versions of Windows to be largely the same as on Windows 10, including forthcoming support for Internet Explorer mode for our enterprise customers.”
Microsoft also indicated that there are known issues with this Canary build.
“The first Canary builds do have a few known issues, including the lack of dark mode support and no support for AAD sign-in, which we are working to resolve soon. If you need help or support, just press F1 from within Microsoft Edge Canary or Dev to visit our support website.”
Windows 10 Edge installers work on Windows 7
While this announcement makes only the Edge Canary build officially available for these operating systems, users have known that the Windows 10 Edge downloaders also work on Windows 7, and possibly other older versions of Windows.
For example, using Windows 10 Edge installers I installed both the Microsoft Edge Dev and Microsoft Edge Canary versions on Windows 7 Ultimate as shown below.
It is not known if the Windows 10 versions are different then the Windows 7 versions, but they both have the same Canary version number of 77.0.195.0.
