It may have taken Microsoft the better part of a decade to get people off of Internet Explorer, but the company has a more decisive retirement plan for the previous version of its Edge browser. On April 13th, Microsoft will release a cumulative monthly security patch that will remove the legacy version of Edge from Windows 10 computers and install the new Chromium-based one, the company announced on Friday.
The version of Edge Microsoft is uninstalling is the one that launched alongside Windows 10. It uses the company’s own EdgeHTML rendering engine. In 2019, the company announced it was rebuilding the browser from the ground up to take advantage of Google’s Chromium software. In June of last year, Microsoft started rolling it out through a Windows update. Two months later, Microsoft announced it wouldn’t issue any additional security updates for Legacy Edge after March 9th, 2021.
If you already have the Chromium version of Edge installed on your computer, the update will only remove the legacy one. So for most people, who have either already moved on or switched to another browser, they probably won’t notice a change.
