A new tool for Windows 10 from Microsoft, the Edge Extension Toolkit, aims to make it easier to convert Chrome extensions to Microsoft Edge extensions.
Microsoft Edge Extension Toolkit’s goal is to allow the porting of Chrome extension to Microsoft Edge with little or no modifications. According to the official description provided by Microsoft, “the tool creates the necessary JSON manifest entries and bridges the chrome.* APIs to the browser.* APIs supported on Microsoft Edge”.
Indeed, Microsoft Edge supports an HTML, JavaScript, and CSS-based extension model that is similar to Chrome’s. Still, the Microsoft Edge extension API is not yet complete and a number of API endpoints are known to be incompatible with the corresponding Chrome’s API endpoints. This makes it hard to say how effective the new Microsoft tool is to port Chrome extensions to Edge at the moment.
Edge extensions are only available on Windows 10 Anniversary Update for PCs. Support for extensions on mobile devices was officially part of Microsoft’s roadmap for Windows, but a recent update to the roadmap site removed it altogether. As Microsoft’s representative stated at BUILD 2015, extensions on mobile can be tricky, since they can sometimes be resource intensive and bring instability. As a matter of fact, neither Apple Safari nor Google Chrome include support for extensions on their mobile versions at the time being.