Users of the original version of Microsoft’s Edge browser have until April to upgrade before the tech giant kills if off completely.  

Support for the desktop application, now dubbed ‘Legacy Edge’, will end on 9 March before it is replaced by the new Microsoft Edge browser a month later. 

This move will not come as a surprise to many, as the to kill off the old browser was originally announced in August 2020.

The original version of Microsoft Edge, which first launched in 2015, failed to persuade users to ditch Chrome and Firefox and struggled to live up to the early success of Internet Explorer, which also lost popularity to rival browsers. 

Edge 2.0, however, is built upon the Chromium open source project – the same web rendering engine that powers Google Chrome, as opposed to EdgeHMTL that underpinned Internet Explorer. The decision to use Chromium was to create a browser with better web compatibility for users and less complexity for developers. 

As such, the Legacy Edge browser will now be put to rest completely, first with an update in March that removes support, before it’s ultimately replaced with the new Chromium-based Edge browser in April.
 
“To replace this out of support application [Legacy Edge], we are announcing that the new Microsoft Edge will be available as part of the Windows 10 cumulative monthly security update – otherwise referred to as the Update Tuesday (or ‘B’) release – on April 13, 2021,” the tech giant said. 
 
“The new Microsoft Edge offers built-in security and our best interoperability with the Microsoft security ecosystem, all while being more secure than Chrome for businesses on Windows 10,” the company added. 
 
Microsoft has stressed that Edge won’t suddenly become the default browser if you’ve set Chrome as the preference, but there is no mention, as yet, about automatically migrating browser-related data, such as history or bookmarks.