Microsoft bows to reality, directs Edge Add-ons browsers to Chrome Web Store

When it comes to their Edge browser, Microsoft has become a lot more pragmatic in recent years, starting with the adoption of the Chromium rendering engine, and allowing users to install extensions from the Chromium Web Store.

Now Microsoft has gone one step further by directing users looking for extensions in the Edge Add-ons store to check out the Chromium Web Store.

The link, which can be seen above (and found under edge://extensions), is found in the Edge Canary and Edge Dev versions of the browser, and informs users they can either “Get extensions for Microsoft Edge” or “You can also find great extensions in the Chrome Web Store“.

To use these extensions from the Chrome Web Store users will still need to enable the “Allow extensions from other stores” setting.

This is the first time Microsoft explicitly links to the Chrome Web Store, but the addition should smooth the journey for new users to Edge, which is slowly but steadily gaining market share. It does, however, raise a concern about being dependent on Google’s largesse, but given that Chrome has near-monopoly status on the web Google will likely try and behave themselves in the short term.

Via Techdows