When you think of Edge, there is a good chance that you are referencing the ‘new’ version of the browser that is utilizing the Chromium engine iteration. The initial version of Edge that utilized Microsoft’s home-grown engine called Spartan has gone the way of the Zune except for one place, Xbox.

But that’s about to change as the Xbox team has started to push the new browser to Xbox consoles in the Alpha skip-ahead ring. As of the first release, it does not look like mouse support is enabled yet but this is a promising first step to replacing the aging browser on Xbox.

The legacy Edge, as Microsoft now refers to it, was quite dated on the console and I can’t remember the last time it was updated in a significant way. By replacing the browser with what appears to be the same version as Windows 10, browsing the web on your Xbox console should be a lot easier once this update arrives for everyone.

While I do not have the browser on my Xbox yet, BradWardFight on Twitter was nice enough to record a video of the new browser for me; the browser is far from stable and crashed several times while recording. It is worth pointing out that he had to stream the console to his PC to record the video because the built-in recording tools would not capture the browser. I bring this up as this may have caused more potential crashes of the browser.

Even if we all don’t have it yet, it’s good to see that Microsoft is finally moving towards unifying Edge on every platform that runs the browser. The old browser on Xbox was quite bad and desperately needed an update, thankfully this update should be hitting your console in the near-ish future.

Tagged with Console, Edge, Microsoft, Xbox