Last week, Microsoft released extension support for Edge browser as part of an insider preview build, and developers have already started porting their add-ons to work with the app. However, a lot more could find their way to Edge if Microsoft sticks to a plan for porting Chrome extensions to its browser.
Turn Off the Lights practically tries to deliver a somewhat cinematic experience when viewing videos on a web page without having to take the video full screen. It does so by dimming the rest of the web page's contents, making the active playing video pop out visually. Available on both Chrome and Firefox, Turn Off the Lights is perhaps the first extension to land on Microsoft Edge outside Microsoft's first three.
Presently, extensions need to be manually downloaded and sideloaded, and this is the case of “Turn Off the Lights” too. Instructions on how to get it working are available onGitHub.
For now, the rather unguarded, and perhaps insecure, method leaves the door open for experimentation.
The success of Microsoft Edge's extensions, and consequently the browser itself, will depend on how many extensions will be available and how easy it will be to get them. Microsoft once promised, or at least let on, that Chrome's extensions would be supported. Jabob Rossi from the Edge engineering team confirmed on Twitter that such was still the plan and a porting tool is still being developed. That said, he does caution that not all APIs are supported, so don't expect feature parity.
He also revealed that the first set of extensions that will be fully available from the Store, by the time extensions launch publicly, will be limited to "top scenarios", opening up more in the future. Microsoft perhaps isn't expecting or preparing much from its browser extensions, which could be fatal for Edge.
More information on extensions will be provided by Microsoft at the BUILD 2016 developer conference that kicks off this month while the public debut is expected to take place in June with the Redstone update.
Source: Softpedia, Windows Central, Slashgear
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