Antón Molleda, the program manager for Microsoft's new Edge browser (formerly known as Project Spartan), announced in a blog post yesterday that the Edge developer program site is now officially launched—and now includes test virtual machines for Windows 10 and Edge alongside VMs for every version of Internet Explorer back to IE 6 on Windows XP.
The virtual machines are available in disk image formats for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux platforms, including VirtualBox, VMware, and Parallels. "By popular demand, we’ll also be supporting new formats for VMs, starting with Vagrant boxes (with VirtualBox) and QEMU," Molleda wrote.
Not yet updated is Microsoft's Azure-based testing platform, RemoteIE; the RemoteApp-based testing tool, which allows webpage experience testing from mobile devices and other operating systems, still only offers up Internet Explorer 11. Molleda said that the Edge team is "continuing to work on making Microsoft Edge available via Azure RemoteApp and will provide further updates as we make progress."
The site now includes what Molleda described as a "faster, clearer platform roadmap" for Edge, including the status of features proposed for Edge—ranging from "supported" for those already implemented, to "Under Consideration" or "Not Planned" for those that haven't made their way into development. And there's also a new FAQ page for Web developers looking to make their sites Edge-compatible. (To save you some time: Yes, Adobe Flash is supported as a built-in feature. No, ActiveX, Java, and SilverLight are not—fall back to IE 11 for legacy apps.) And many of the demo sites that were available previously on the Dev page have now been moved to the Microsoft Edge GitHub page. On the upside, they're now open sourced.
