Microsoft last week unveiled preliminary versions of its remade Edge browser for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.
The preview builds for the older operating systems were marked as from the "Canary" channel, the least polished of the four eventual versions Microsoft will support. Two other more reliable channels - "Dev" and "Beta" - will lead to the production build, dubbed "Stable."
When Microsoft first told users it would ditch Edge's home-grown browser technologies and replace them with those from the Chromium open-source project, the company promised to craft editions for not only Windows 10, but also its predecessors as well as macOS. Going cross-platform was, Microsoft contended, one of the benefits of jumping aboard Chromium, the project whose rendering and JavaScript engines also power Google's Chrome, Opera Software's Opera and several niche browsers.
