Hello Insiders,

We're excited to callout a milestone for our Microsoft Edge Insider community: we now have over 10,000 members on our Insider forum! We're taking this opportunity to reflect on the past year while staying focused on the future. Continue reading to learn more about this and the special treat that we have for our Insider community.

Thanks!

Our mission is to make the web a better place for everyone, not only through technical improvements, but also by bringing more transparency and customer-focus into browser development and usage. One avenue for accomplishing that was joining the open-source community. So far, we've made over 3,000 commits to the Chromium Project codebase, and are adding more by the day. Another key aspect has been pulling back the curtain and inviting you to the table by launching our Microsoft Edge Insider program on April 8th, 2019.

We started with one preview channel a year ago, and grew; our team now continuously ships code to three channels – Canary, Dev, and Beta. In that time, you've humbled us with your collective dedication to helping us build a better browser. We are deeply grateful for all of the time that whether that means fearlessly trying new features, highlighting areas of opportunity, or diligently reporting bugs.

When we launched this community, we committed to giving you a browser that raised the bar for security, performance, and reliability. Our team has worked tirelessly to deliver results, bringing you features like Collections, InPrivate mode, and customizable tracking prevention. Making the web more accessible is also a driving force for our team, so we’ve implemented Immersive Reader, Read aloud, and increased visibility in our UI. Your feedback—on these features and others—has driven countless changes and improvements, from small UI/UX changes like recoloring the Favorites folders yellow, to large performance enhancements. Now it’s our turn to thank you for those contributions.

Exclusive swag for you

It's been a joy to build relationships with you all along the way, both as individuals and as a community. Your humor, observations, and technical prowess keep us laughing and on our toes. To show our appreciation for your contributions, we've designed twelve exclusive digital avatars just for you!

 (Caption: a dozen hyper-linked avatar images featuring animals from the Microsoft Edge surfing game.)

Recognize these tiny friends? They’re part of a host of characters from our hidden game within Microsoft Edge. As our Insiders, you were the first ones to discover and play the game, so we wanted to give a nod to that Easter Egg fun. Click each image to securely download it, or click here to access all of them together. (If you’re using them in small avatars, you can also use this version without text.)

You are welcome to enjoy them however you'd like: use them as your profile avatars on social media, set them as your desktop wallpaper, or hang them up in your office. (We just ask that you don't alter the images themselves.) So go ahead, laminate one and put it on your fish tank –  we won't judge. Show us where these sea-faring friends travel to by dropping us a line on Twitter at @MSEdgeDev.

What's next

While we appreciate moments like this, we aren’t slowing down; we’re still committed to building an even better browsing experience. You can look forward to more features on the way, like vertical tabs, a Pinterest integration, and Password Monitor, along with increased compatibility across devices. Our team is also keeping our Enterprise customers in-mind, and is working on adding more GPOs and productivity-boosting functionalities. However, we're constantly improving the nuances of our existing features – like PDFs, sync, and media casting. It's important that we truly get these right, and we greatly appreciate your troubleshooting and feedback during our iterations.

If you've come across this post from our "What's New" page, then we invite you to join our vibrant community of Insiders on this Tech Community forum. Signing up is easy, and it allows you to engage directly with Microsoft Edge CMs, PMs, and engineers. You can also join the conversation on Twitter and Reddit, where we post announcements and host AMAs.

We're just getting started and are more eager than ever to hear your voices. No matter where you are on the web, we want to make it easy to provide feedback through Microsoft Edge. You can make a feature suggestion or report a bug through the browser itself using our "Send feedback" tool, located under Help and feedback in the "…" menu, or by holding Shift+Alt+I on Windows 10 devices. So please continue to let us know what you think, and we will continue to center your needs in our product decisions.

Thanks again for being on this journey with us and we can't wait to see what the coming year brings. We hope you enjoy the avatars!

- The Microsoft Edge team