Microsoft may have taken nearly a decade to get people out of Internet Explorer, but the company has a more decisive retirement plan for the previous version of its Edge browser. On April 13, Microsoft will release a cumulative monthly security patch that will remove the legacy version of Edge from Windows 10 computers and install the new version based on Chromium, the company announced on Friday.
The version of Edge that Microsoft is uninstalling is the version that came with Windows 10. It uses the company’s own EdgeHTML rendering engine. In 2019, the company announced that it was rebuilding the browser from scratch to take advantage of Google’s Chromium software. In June last year, Microsoft began implementing it through a Windows update. Two months later, Microsoft announced that it would not release any additional security updates for Legacy Edge after March 9, 2021.
If you already have the Chromium version of Edge installed on your computer, the update will only remove the legacy version. Therefore, for most people, who have already switched or switched to another browser, they are unlikely to notice a change.