Microsoft has made a switch to Chromium code base for their Edge web browser. The new Edge web browser is available for download from Microsoft’s website. If you want to use this new Chromium based Edge browser then you have to download and install it from their website. In the future, they will bundle it with the Windows 10 operating system and you won’t have to separately install it yourself.
When you download it from Microsoft servers, you get to download only a stub. When this stub setup launcher is run, it further downloads more files from the internet. This means if you are not online, you won’t be able to install Microsoft Edge (Chromium based) on your Windows PC.
Fortunately, Microsoft allows you to download the full offline installer package so that you can deploy it to a number of computers in your organization. In order to download this full offline installer:
- Visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download in any of your web browsers.
- Select a channel and build. You can select from the stable, beta and the dev channels. For each of these channels, a few build numbers are available.
- After selecting a channel or build, you have to select a platform. You can select from Windows 32-bit, Windows 64-bit and macOS as the platform.
- Finally, you can click on the Download button to start the downloading of full offline installer.
From the same website, you can also download policy files for the selected build/version. These policy files include the ADM/ADMX files that can be copied to the %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions folder of your local storage drive so that the new policies for Microsoft Edge (Chromium based) appear in the Group Policy Editor. After this is done, you can manage the browser and its update related settings right from Group Policy Editor by launching gpedit.msc.