Microsoft Announces Move to Chromium For The Edge Browser
by Brett Howse on December 6, 2018 7:25 PM ESTToday Microsoft has officially announced it is going to abandon its EdgeHTML and Chakra scripting engines, and move to Chromium for their first-party web browser, Microsoft Edge. This is big news for the company that once dominated the web browsing market. There’s a lot of reasons for this change, and the move is a good one, but it’s also a little sad for the web as a whole.
Despite being the built-in browser on Windows 10, which is installed on around 700 million active devices, Edge owns just a tiny fraction of the desktop browsing market. Google Chrome is far and away the leader here, and with Google’s relentless update schedule, there is no indication of this reversing anytime soon. I recall when Google Chrome was first launched, and wondered if the world really needed yet another browser, and clearly the answer was no. The only thing was the no was not for Chrome.
With such a small share of the market, and Edge only available on Windows 10, developers would often never even see if a website worked on Edge or not. Even though Edge was the most standards compliant browser Microsoft ever shipped, that still was not enough for a perfect web experience on every site. If users ran into an issue, they would just move to Chrome even if they had given Edge a chance.
The move to Chromium as the underpinnings of Edge should improve the situation quite a bit. As well, Microsoft will be releasing versions of Edge based on Chromium for Windows 7, Windows 8, and even macOS, in addition to Windows 10. This should help developers who use those platforms test Edge if they need to.
In addition, Edge has been powered by Chromium on Android already, so the team is at least somewhat familiar with what it can do.
Goodbye EdgeHTML - we hardly knew you
Microsoft is has been heavily involved in open-sourcing its own software lately, and with Edge it will now join the Chromium community with their own contributions. Microsoft has committed to still advancing web standards, and bringing the current advantages from Edge over to Chromium, such as the accessibility and security features. By embracing Chromium, they will be having a much larger impact on the web than they ever could have maintaining their own code, so it should be a win for people who never even use Edge.
It’s sad that the web has evolved into this, and although you can’t really compare the world of IE6 to today, there are similarities there that can’t be forgotten, but for Microsoft and its users, this is a good move, and we look forward to seeing how the project evolves.
Source: Microsoft Edge on Github
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smacfe - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
Hate to be Captain Obvious here, but Edge is automatically selected as the default browser on every Windows 10 installation. Therefore hundreds of millions of people have chosen to trash Edge for some other browser solution. Based on the epic statistics alone, Edge is one of the worst products ever created by mankind. Personally, I would vote for the automatic paper towel dispenser as the worst ever, but the world has spoken.zodiacfml - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
I think this is for upcoming Qualcomm SoC for laptops. They probably want the least friction with users as the browser is the most important app in a laptopmkozakewich - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
So, I'm a bit confused. Isn't Chromium the open-source browser (before Google branding turns it into Chrome) using the Blink engine? Is Edge moving to the Blink engine, or is it fundamentally a Chromium reskin?I use a high-contrast theme to get dark-mode web pages, and so far it seems Edge and Firefox are the only ones to honour those settings. I hope Edge still continues with that.
Brett Howse - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
It'll be using Blink and V8 replacing EdgeHTML and Chakra.rahvin - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
The title of this should be, Microsoft admits it can't create a reliable browser and surrenders to Google.damianrobertjones - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link
"I recall when Google Chrome was first" .... Pushed onto millions of computers via java and adobe updates. Without being asked.