This walkthrough will focus on using a virtual machine to run and test Microsoft Edge in OS X, which at the moment is the only way to run Edge on a Mac without using Boot Camp or a complete Windows 10 installation. At Microsoft our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.
Still trying to decide if you want to test out Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition? Well, here’s another reason to try it—we just added a pre-configured free trial of Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 to the New Virtual Machine Wizard!
Here’s how to get Microsoft Edge on Mac, so you can start testing in Microsoft’s latest browser:
1. Go to the top navigation of Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition and click on the red ||bars,
2. Select New,
3. Select “Modern.IE test environments” and click on Continue in the lower-right corner of the Wizard to access free trials of pre-configured Parallels Desktop virtual machines from Microsoft, including:
- Microsoft Edge on Windows 10
- IE 11 on Windows 8.1
- IE 10 on Windows 8
- IE 9 on Windows 7
- IE 8 on Windows 7
- IE 7 on Windows Vista
- IE 8 on Windows XP
- IE 6 on Windows XP
If you haven’t purchased Parallels Desktop yet, don’t worry—Mac users can download a free two-week trial of Parallels Desktop for Mac here. During the free trial, you can switch back and forth between Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition and Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition to determine which version best suits your needs.
Important note: to test Microsoft Edge in a Windows 10 VM, you will need to try the Pro Edition and follow the instructions above to download a free trial of Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.
With Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition, you can do even more than just test Microsoft Edge—you can also experience the power and convenience of having Microsoft’s intelligent personal assistant Cortana in Windows, as well as use it with OS X and Mac applications when running Parallels Desktop and Windows 10 in Coherence mode (which makes the Windows 10 interface invisible while enabling the use of Windows apps in OS X).
The Pro Edition is a great choice for consumers as well as power users, even if you don’t use the additional features, because it’s the same easy-to-use interface as Parallels Desktop. Bonus: the Pro Edition is also a subscription service, which ensures that you will always be up-to-date with the latest and greatest features as they are periodically added throughout the year (without having to wait for the next standard edition).
Have fun testing, discovering and experiencing Microsoft Edge and Windows 10 on your Mac, as well as putting Cortana to work for you—and don’t forget to share your experience with us in a comment, or on Facebook or Twitter.
Try Parallels Desktop for free for 14 days!
Microsoft’s embrace of the open source community has been nothing short of impressive for some devoted fighters of proprietary technology. For observers looking in, Microsoft appeared to have not only softened its stance on open sourced software but embraced the necessity of its involvement in advancing the tech community.
To that degree, Microsoft recently open-sourced a garage full of its systems, services, and programs. Among its newly open-sourced projects is its ChakraCore, the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers the Microsoft Edge browser for Windows 10 and its Universal Windows Platform.
Taking it a step further, Microsoft announced at the NodeSummit today, which its efforts in exposing its ChakraCore to the open source community has helped it develop, the first experimental implementation of the ChakraCore interpreter and runtime for x64 Linux and OS X 10.9+. An additional experimental Node.js. Node-ChakraCore) has also been developed for x64 Linux. The Linux testing of the ChakraCore’s have been primarily housed in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but the Microsoft Edge team believes the work should easily be translated to other modern Linux distributions.
In a post written Limin Zhu and Arunesh Chandra of the Edge Developer team, interested parties are given examples and tips to building cross-platform applications with ChakraCore and how the team managed to get Node.js working in ChakraCore.
Bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X is all about giving developers the ability to build cross-platform applications with the engine. The JavaScript Runtime (JSRT) APIs to host ChakraCore were originally designed for Windows, so they inevitably had a few Windows dependencies – for example, Win32 usage of UTF16-LE encoding for strings, where other platforms might use UTF8-encoded strings. As part of the enabling cross-platform support, some of the JSRT APIs have been refactored and redesigned to allow developers to write platform-agnostic code to embed ChakraCore. Maintaining backwards compatibility is a core principle that we follow – so applications written with the previous set of JSRT APIs on Windows will continue to work as is. You can build the engine and write a Hello-world app to get started with ChakraCore on the Windows/Linux/OS X.
According to the Edge development team, there is plenty more planned for ChakraCore and cross-platform support. As for now, the team seems primarily focused on ensuring non-Windows ChakraCore users are afforded the same top-tier JavaScript performance Windows users currently experience.
NodeChakraCore
Per the nature of open-source development, the Edge development team appears eager to receive as much feedback as possible on their progress as well as their planned schedule. For those interested in providing either useful suggestions or critical feedback, head over to the Node-ChakraCore repo or reach out to the development team via the Twitter handle @CharkaCore.
Further reading: ChakraCore, Cross platform, Developers, JavaScript, Linux, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Node.js, Ubuntu