Microsoft Edge now runs natively on Apple's new M1 chips

By Sean Endicott
published

Microsoft Edge with support for Apple's M1 chips is now generally available.

Macbook Air M1
Macbook Air M1 (Image credit: Daniel Bader / Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Microsoft Edge is now available with support for Apple's M1 chips.
  • M1 support means that the browser can run natively on Apple's new hardware.
  • Microsoft Edge with M1 support has gradually worked its way through several Microsoft preview channels, and is now generally available.

Microsoft Edge now natively supports Apple's new M1 chips. If you go to Microsoft's page for Edge (opens in new tab) and select "Download for macOS," you will see options to get the browser for a Mac with an Intel chip or a Mac with an Apple chip. Native support for Apple's M1 chips means that Edge can fully utilize the new hardware and that the browser doesn't have to run through emulation.

Apple's newest hardware, including its MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini run on the company's new silicon. If an app doesn't natively support the new chips from Apple, they can still run on the computers through Rosetta 2, but they won't run as well as apps with native support.

In addition to having native M1 support, Microsoft Edge his "designed to feel at home on a Mac," according to Microsoft. The browser lets you sync passwords, favorites, and settings across devices and platforms.

Microsoft Edge steadily worked its way through Microsoft's preview channels over the last few months, so the company has had some time to work with it on Apple's new chips.

Edge is also available on iOS, Android (opens in new tab), Windows (opens in new tab), and even Linux in preview, so if you like Microsoft's browser, you can use it just about anywhere.

Microsoft Edge LogoDownload it now

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Microsoft Edge

A worthy browser.

The new Microsoft Edge runs on Chromium, supports popular extensions, and regularly gets new features from Microsoft. Now, there's a version of it with native support for Apple's M1 chips.

Sean Endicott
Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

2 Comments
  • Microsoft take themselves too seriously when it suits them.. but not when the customer needs stable software. Why would an app running in a protected mode GUI of an OS need to know what processor is in the motherboard! This doesn't make sense. A modern GUI OS is tasked with managing hardware and allocates resources to apps as required.
  • At some point in the layers of a computer program, something has to know what processor it's running on. You don't give an English speaker a book to read that's written in Chinese. They wouldn't know what to do with it. Same principle here, you don't give an ARM processor code that was compiled for x86. The 1s and 0s are arranged differently, because things are done differently on the chips. And this runs in the computer OS itself, unlike a java program, as example. Those run inside the Java Virtual Machine, which is a bit like a translator from Java to some other language. Like if you wrote in Russian and hired a translator to write versions in English and Chinese, to really stretch that example. At best, there's nothing Microsoft really needed here to do besides click a button that says "produce something written in ARM instead of x86". But that's best case, and nothing is ever best case.