Microsoft Edge to get WebAssembly Browser Preview soon

With the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft plans on adding a bunch of new features to Microsoft Edge. There’ll be a lot of new features for the browser itself, but Microsoft will be adding a handful of new features to the browser engine with the update. Today, Microsoft announced that the company is actively working on bringing WebAssembly Browser Preview to Microsoft Edge. WemAssembly, for those unfamiliar, it “is a new, portable, size- and load-time-efficient binary compiler target”. WebAssembly essentially provides a much better experience on the web — according to Microsoft, it provides a “near-native” experience on Edge. Here’s a video showing off WebAssembly in action on Microsoft Edge:

Microsoft says it is close to shipping the browser preview of WebAssembly on Microsoft Edge and ChakraCore (Microsoft’s open sourced, cross-platform JavaScript engine for Edge). Limin Zhu, the program manager of Chakra stated:

We’ve been hard at work developing support for WebAssembly in Microsoft Edge at the open-source ChakraCore project repo. Microsoft Edge and ChakraCore are close to shipping the browser preview, which we expect to come when the full JavaScript APIs are implemented. Over the next couple of months, our team will be focused on bringing the browser preview to Microsoft Edge.

It is worth noting that the software giant is working with Google, Mozilla, as well as Apple on WebAssembly.