The new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge is slowly but surely approaching the launch date for production devices, but at the same time, Microsoft is also working on other fronts for its browser.

Right now, Microsoft Edge can be installed on Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and macOS, and the upcoming stable release will target these platforms exclusively. Linux support is also coming, but no ETA is available just yet.

In the meantime, Microsoft is also pushing Microsoft Edge towards ARM devices, and today the company announced the first build supporting these chipsets in the Dev channel.

“For our ARM enthusiasts, we’re bringing our native ARM64 builds to the Dev channel today! These builds have been in Canary for the last few weeks, and we’ve ironed out most of the major issues during that time. There’s still one known issue though: certain DRM video on some websites doesn’t play properly,” Microsoft explains.

An ARM version of Microsoft Edge comes with a long series of benefits, including performance optimizations that would allow the browser to take advantage of the available processing power without a significant impact on battery life. X86 emulation, on the other hand, sometimes reduces battery life dramatically, so a native ARM version resolves this problem.

Microsoft Edge on Windows

While work on this ARM version has already started, don’t hold your breath for the public launch. The development process will take a while, and the ARM version won’t obviously be ready in time for the January 15 launch of the stable Microsoft Edge browser.

Microsoft Edge will replace the current browser in Windows 10 as the new default, and Microsoft will use Windows Update to push the new version to all devices. The company is also offering a toolkit to block Chromium Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.