Microsoft is working on porting Google Chrome extensions over to its Edge browser. It won’t cover everything available to Chrome, as it an engineer from the Edge team said that not all APIs are supported; although we have no idea how extensive the port will be.
@jacobrossi extn's in Store will at first be a carefully selected set covering top scenarios and API coverage, opening up to more in future
— Jacob Rossi (@jacobrossi) March 18, 2016
To be fair, nothing is known about the programme aside from a few tweets from Microsoft employee Jacob Rossi. It looks like the tool is still in very early development and Microsoft itself has little to reveal about the matter. However, Microsoft Edge Programme Manager Kyle Pflug had earlier revealed that there will be talk about building extensions at Build 2016 and the Microsoft Edge Web Summit 2016.
Oh yeah, and if you want to talk about building extensions, come to Build or Web Summit 🙂 https://t.co/hEtka3ZxIm Tiny handful o seats left
— Kyle Pflug (@kylealden) March 17, 2016
This wouldn’t be the first time that Microsoft has announced a tool to port apps from other platforms over to its own products. Project Astoria was a programme that would allow developers to port Android apps over to Windows 10 Mobile. Despite showing promise, the project was eventually canned. Conversely, Project Islandwood – which ports iOS apps to Windows 10 Mobile – is still active.
Microsoft has been adopting a strategy of being platform agnostic, porting its apps to just about every popular operating system. It also looks like the company is not waiting for other people to play the same game and will get third party apps going on its own products one way or another.
[Source: Jacob Rossi (Twitter)]
