Microsoft Edge will use Adobe Acrobat as rendering engine for managing PDF files. The integration will happen in future versions of the web browser, which will be released next month for Windows 10 and Windows 11. A year later, in March 2024, Microsoft will remove its own engine.

The main web browsers on the market, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, have integrated support for PDF and it is a good way to view this type of document due to its speed and low resource consumption. Microsoft for Edge is basic, like the other built-in browsers, but it works really well.

Change should be understood as a Expanded business partnership between Microsoft and Adobewhich is already present in other products of the Redmond company, such as Microsoft 365, SharePoint or in the communication service Teams, which also has an integrated Acrobat reader.

Microsoft Edge will use Adobe Acrobat

Acrobat is the de facto standard because it was Adobe that originally developed the PDF format. Acrobat Reader It has a free version as well as an extension for browsers like Google Chrome. It will be available by default in Edge from March “improve the PDF experience and value users expect from Microsoft Edge by enhancing the integrated PDF reader with the Adobe Acrobat rendering engine”. Adobe says in the ad.

The new features coming to Microsoft Edge with this integration are described in the video below, where Adobe highlights it “will provide users with a unique PDF experience that includes richer rendering for more accurate colors and graphics, better performance, strong security for working with PDFs, and better accessibility, including better text selection and reading aloud.”.

Adobe says so “these abilities will remain free”Although it’s not hard to imagine that the ultimate goal is for users who need features other than just reading, such as editing text and images, converting PDFs to other file formats, or combining files, pay for a subscription from Adobe and – of course – some goes to Microsoft as a result of the aforementioned trade association.

We will see how the integration will be done. The current Edge engine is efficient for the essentials, reading. Certainly Acrobat will be more capable, but we will have to see the resource consumption and if the page loads as fast as before.

In conclusion, let’s say that browser extensions are just another way for PDF files and are not the most complete. It’s a convenient and effective method, but many of us don’t use it because of the load on the web browser that has it like any add-on you install. And they only offer read functionality. If you need something else, use a dedicated PDF application. You have some of them in this guide and for free.