Microsoft explains on Limited No of Extensions for Edge

It’s a little bit more than a year now since Microsoft enabled extension support for Microsoft Edge, and there are just over 70 extensions worldwide. Compared to Firefox, and Chrome these numbers are nothing, but then Microsoft Edge Team defends these numbers as handpicked, and they made sure the quality was no compromise.

The team has worked closely with the popular extension makers including Adblock Plus, LastPass, EverNote and many others to make sure the extension doesn’t mess up with the experience. IMO, it’s more about being a lot careful with the new browser which IMO is still in pretty much in making. Microsoft never had a great experience with IE, and now it’s making sure that the ecosystem is solid enough.

There is another side of this. Microsoft never had a great experience with Extensions. In fact, you can almost count it to zero. There was a lot to learn to not only develop a great browser, which already has strong competition but also make sure they understand what extensions can do. No, I am not saying the team doesn’t know what they are doing, but when you are developing a product where Microsoft had always been bashed, you have to be careful.

Edge Team shared:

Before we could enable a wider ecosystem of extensions for our customers, we needed to improve the capabilities of our extensions platform to allow new categories of extensions and more features for existing extensions. Over the past year, we’ve been focused on a few key engineering investments to add new capabilities:

Native Messaging (supported from EdgeHTML 15) allows an extension to communicate with a UWP application installed on the system, enabling apps to integrate with more sophisticated functionality outside of the browser, which enables more advanced password management and other features.
Bookmarks (supported from EdgeHTML 15) allowing an to access your favorites (with associated permissions.)
Improved APIs – In addition to new APIs like bookmarks, we improved and fleshed out the existing API classes already supported, which combined meant we support over 30% more APIs than in the initial release.

Fundamentals – Astute observers of our release notes and active testers in the Insider program may have noticed that some preview builds break extensions temporarily. The Insider program is key for us to see how experimental features are working on a build with real users, including helping us where we were falling short. We have used that data to improve the reliability and performance of our extension platform and will continue to focus on improving these fundamentals in future releases.

This means, they are still working to make sure Edge does well, and it’s not left around like any other product. At least, they are serious about it.