Microsoft Edge will not be updated to version 81 for the time being

The Chromium-based Microsoft Edge will not receive its update to version 81 on the Stable Channel for now. This is due to ‘the current circumstances’. Security and stability updates to version 80 of the browser are still being released.

Which poses the Microsoft Edge Dev twitter account. The move is closely related to the upstream pause of work on Chromium. That project and the related Google Chrome are also temporarily suspended and only maintenance updates to version 80 are released there. The development team will announce more in the coming week.

While the Edge development team doesn’t say it explicitly, the measure is likely related to the coronavirus. Many employers have released their employees or let them work from home. However, the latter can hinder productivity, making it desirable to adjust goals.

Other Chromium-based browsers include Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi. There are no signs of the work being temporarily down yet on the communication channels of those programs, but it makes sense that a limited or completely absent stream of updates from Chromium would affect browsers based on it.