Latest Release Preview build hides Classic Edge when the new Edge browser is installed

Yesterday Microsoft released the new Release Preview build for Windows Insiders. The build bumped the OS version to 18362.266 and brought a tiny little change to the way Windows 10 handles two different Edge apps.

Back in December of 2018, Microsoft announced that the company will be using the Chromium framework to develop a brand new Edge browser. After the development was complete, Microsoft released the Canary build of Edge browser following by Dev build to test the waters and capture user feedback. At Build 2019, the Edge team said they plan to replace the classic Edge app in the future but there’s no timeline as to when that might happen.

Now, Windows Latest spotted that Microsoft is slowing removing the old Edge to transition users to the new Edge browser. On the latest Release Preview build, if a user installs Edge Canary/Dev, Windows 10 will automatically hide the old Edge app from Windows search as well as the app list. The old Edge browser can still be accessed by typing “microsoft-edge:” in Windows run. This is similar to how users were transitioned from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge.

The new addition is just limited to Release Preview at the moment but Microsoft is expected to roll it out to everyone in the future. We expect Microsoft to roll it out to everyone with 20H1 in the Spring of 2020. That said, it could be that Microsoft is testing the waters at this point and might expedite or delay it based on the feedback from Windows Insiders. Overall, the new Chromium-based Edge is pretty good but it is still missing some of the features of the classic Edge so it might be wise to allow users to have both the classic and the new Edge. Once the new Edge is ready, Microsoft can easily swap it with the classic Edge.