Edge browser uses now Chromium

Carlos Morales • 2018-12-17

Last week, Microsoft announced their flagship browser will use the Chromium engine, the announcement focused mainly on the open source collaboration: ”Microsoft Edge: Making the web better through more open source collaboration“.

Reactions

Across all frontend developers this was big news. Although almost all of them were negative. It was received as the result of a Microsoft failure, from the product to the technology. As an example, this blog entry focuses on the problems Edge experienced: Edge dies a death of a thousand cuts as Microsoft switches to Chromium the summary says ”(Edge) suffers major version fragmentation. Contrast this with Chrome, where within a few days of a new version coming out, almost the entire user base is migrated.“.

Although the majority of reactions on Internet were very critic. I think that is very unfair, to be honest, but also wrong. :unamused:

Implications

The main implication is browsers become similar in terms of underlying rendering compatibility. This does not mean the same for the end-user, I expect the user experience will remain different.

On the contrary of internet reactions, I believe it is a very smart movement for these reasons:

• Losing control of the rendering engine is not necessarily bad. Although I am a techie, the technology is only a mean to build great products, not the contrary. Microsoft can still focus on what brings more value, like integrating their browser with their operating system, password management, bookmarks, etc,
• Contribute to open source project. Microsoft developers will for sure improve Chromium, an open source project. We all benefit.
• Faster releases, Chromium is well known for frequent releases, almost every month they have a new release. I expect Edge will follow similar release process, which will be very beneficial.
• Better cross-browser compatibility all frontend developers will experience less platform fragmentation across browsers, this is really great :boom::boom:.

Good news and well done Microsoft! :clap::clap::clap::clap::clap:

Update - January, 2020

On January 2020, Microsoft finally rolled out the stable version of their new Chromium-based Edge browser, version 79. In this update Microsoft finally shifted from the EdgeHTML engine to the Chromium engine.