Microsoft Edge has, confusingly, been replaced with a new browser with exactly the same name last year. The new version of Microsoft Edge is powered by the same open-source Chromium code that fuels Google Chrome – the most popular browser on the planet, accounting for almost 65 percent of all desktop web traffic. In less than a year since Microsoft started to roll out its new-and-improved Edge browser as part of a routine update to Windows 10, the browser is now comfortably the second-most popular available.
Clearly hoping to capitalise on this early success, Microsoft is now moving to purge the previous version, which was built on the company’s own technology and was notoriously slow compared with the likes of Chrome and Safari, from PCs across the globe. From April 13, Microsoft will release a monthly security patch for Windows 10 that will uninstall the previous unpopular Microsoft Edge from any PCs that still have a copy lying around on their hard-drive.