Microsoft’s new Edge browser shows a lot of promise, and at its core it seems to be a fast and attractive browser. Currently, however, its features are very bare-bones. It doesn’t support Internet Explorer’s extensions and plugins, either, meaning that there is no real way to add these features. A solution is in store, however, in the form of Chrome-like HTML-plus-JavaScript extensions, which Microsoft has promised for the browser.

Those extensions were widely expected to be included in the first major update to Windows 10, which will arrive in November. Unfortunately, while the update will include some new features for Edge (most notably, it will show previews of each tab’s contents when hovering the cursor over the tabs), extensions will not be among them.

The company has issued a short statement that confirms that extensions won’t be supported until 2016 at the earliest:

We’re committed to providing customers with a personalized web experience, which is why bringing extensions to Microsoft Edge continues to be a high priority. We’re actively working to develop a secure extension model to make the safest and most reliable browser for our customers, and look forward to sharing more in a future Windows 10 update in 2016.

This news is disappointing but perhaps not altogether surprising given the company’s near total silence on extensions until now. Developers are yet to receive the information they would need to build extensions for the browser. The Insider preview releases have also not included any early iterations of the extension support.

Other features that will be included in the November update are some small visual changes—colored titlebars, the option of extra columns of tiles in the Start menu—and a more convenient install process for ugpraders. The November release will allow the direct use of a Windows 7 or Windows 8 license key for installing and activating. The release will also include numerous bug fixes, including support for more than 500 Start menu icons.

Source: Arstechnica.com