Microsoft Working on Tool to Port Chrome Extensions to Edge

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a new Windows 10 build for Insiders that, among other things, brings support for extensions to Microsoft Edge. There aren't many extensions to play with currently, but a Microsoft engineer says the company is working on a tool to allow developers to bring their Chrome extensions to its store. "Lots of questions on this," tweeted Jacob Rossi. "Yes we're working on a porting tool to run Chrome extensions in Edge. Not yet finished and not all APIs supported."

Comments

Re:Obligatory

[MightyMartian]

Having upgraded about three quarters of our office to Windows 10, I've found Edge to be a very flaky browser. I'm getting a good many remote procedure failed errors, with baffles me greatly. Thus far, I'm not terribly impressed with the browser's stability, and many users have just switched over to Chrome or Firefox, or keep using IE.

Bootstrap Desperation

[WheezyJoe]

Microsoft seems to be trying to co-opt every other platform to fill the empty user space that is Windows 10-exclusive. They're supposedly rigging a way for iOS apps to run on Windows 10 (aka "Islandwood"), and they had a plan for Android apps (aka "Astoria") to run on the platform but recently dropped it in favor of Xamarin.

Astoria enabled Android apps written in Java to run on Windows, sometimes with no modifications at all. Xamarin allows developers to share a large proportion of their code between Android, iOS, Windows, and beyond, but it requires that all that code must use .NET, and typically C#.

This seems a little desperate. In the short run, maybe more stuff makes its way into the Windows Store, and salesmen can say "Windows 10 does that!" for any reason you'd stick with another platform. But if the quickest way to develop for the broadest market is not to develop for Metro but instead target a different platform and port it later, wouldn't Metro (or Modern or Windows 10 mobile or Edge, whatever) always remain an afterthought, last to get ported and last to receive bug-fixes?

Microsoft appears to admit that apart from Win32, Windows 10 is a Johnny-come-real-real-lately, but isn't interested in doing the work to develop any killer apps on its own.