Microsoft now lets you test its Edge browser in a Windows 10 virtual machine

Microsoft today announced the availability of a virtual machine of Windows 10 that comes with the new Microsoft Edge browser.

You can use run the VM on Windows (with Hyper-V 2012, VirtualBox, and VMware), Mac (Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMware), and Linux (VirtualBox only). Vagrant and QEMU support it, and Edge’s availability in Microsoft’s Azure RemoteApp service will come later.

“With this release, we have automated the process we use to create the virtual machines, so future updates will be available more quickly as the platform is updated,” Microsoft Edge program manager Antón Molleda wrote in a blog post.

Edge is Microsoft’s answer to modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox. It’s one of the biggest features in Windows 10, which shipped on July 29. (Read my colleague Emil Protalinski‘s deep dive on Edge here.)

You can download the new VMs here. You can find VMs for current and previous versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser there, too.

Note that the new VMs expire in 90 days. “We recommend setting a snapshot when you first install the virtual machine which you can roll back to later,” Microsoft states when you drill down to a specific VM.