Microsoft is Building a Chromium-powered Web Browser That Will Replace Edge on Windows 10: Report (windowscentral.com)

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and is building a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium, news blog Windows Central reported Monday. From the report: Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 back in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but launched with a plethora of issues which resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain any traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser. Codenamed Anaheim, this new web browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.

Comments

This is McDonalds breaking down & serving whop

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no you DON'T just get to quietly admit defeat, there has to be public shaming! THEM'S THE RULES!

Really? That won't help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoiler: The rendering engine is not the reason I don't trust your web browser, nor will switching to Chromium get me to actually use it.

Re:Really? That won't help.

[jma05]

They are probably not doing this to gain your trust.

It is probably either or both of
1. Rendering engine is not the differentiating feature of browsers anymore (for me it is, plugin ecosystem, security and privacy choices in design).
2. They understand that they cannot win the browser wars and chose not to spend any further money on the most expensive part of browser development.

They did this before. Microsoft only invested money in the browser when they intended to win the browser wars, and they did with IE. After that, they downsized their dev team. The web stagnated for years until Firefox emerged.

Re: This is McDonalds breaking down & serving

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably more about someone finally realizing that, there's a high quality rendering engine available for free for them to use.

Microsoft will still have their own branded browser... But nobody is making money off of the rendering engine, and it's the hardest part of the browser to build/optimize.

Might as well leave the non-money making part to others while MS engineers focus on browser shell, money making services etc.

Re:Windows will run on a Linux kernel too

[TheRealMindChild]

There is more to Windows than being compatible with Win32. Windows is more serious about backward compatibility than Linux possibly ever was

Re:Windows will run on a Linux kernel too

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet that's horseshit.

Re: Windows will run on a Linux kernel too

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time of XP it was a joke. At the time of vista it was an amusing idea. At the time of Windows 10 it seems that things look that way. Or, at least, Microsoft is working hard to abandon OS market altogether.

Frankly, IT market would be much better without Microsoft. At this point it is just an obstacle.

Bad to have a Chromium monoculture

[aberglas]

If there ends up being only one main source for all vendors then HTML will be defined by whatever the code does rather than by any standards process. And then it will be very difficult to move on if Chromium goes bad. Which means that there will be no incentive to make Chromium good.

Re:Bad to have a Chromium monoculture

[markdavis]

>"If there ends up being only one main source for all vendors then HTML will be defined by whatever the code does rather than by any standards process. And then it will be very difficult to move on if Chromium goes bad. Which means that there will be no incentive to make Chromium good."

I agree. It is one of many reasons I use Firefox. And I suggest you do, too. And recommend it your friends and family.. It is a fine browser and deserves support. A mono culture (or near mono culture) in browsers is VERY VERY bad.... we lived through that nightmare once before.

It was not available on Windows 7 and 8

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft used to bridge between OS versions, e.g. IE6 and .NET were available for Win 9x, IE7 and IE8 were available for XP.
No such work was to run Edge on previous versions, so a billion people were not able to run Edge and had to run other browsers for years. Millions people using Windows 10 for the first time in 2017, 2018 or 2019 thus have little reason to run Edge.

I think this is a reason for Windows 8 (RT) store and apps failures as well, back then people may have had been curious about tablet-like ipad-like applications on their desktop (this was still relatively new in 2012, smartphones not universal yet, blackberry still around). They didn't backport it to Windows 7 so they left out hundreds millions users.

I'm dumbfounded by this news still. A very bad news it means Google Chrome dictating the web. Does the oligarchy divide the cake (entire globalized world) between themselves? Microsoft keeps the desktop OS and legacy Office, Google gets the web, Amazon gets retail, Facebook is the ultimate real identity verifier and anonymity killer, Atlantic Council pilots the censorship, European Union writes the laws, Finance e.g. Goldman Sachs and central banks blackmail the governments.

Re:Windows will run on a Linux kernel too

[dunkelfalke]

That was a good one.
In reality, just changing compilers is often enough to break software.

Won the war failed the objectives.

[jellomizer]

Back in the late 1990's Microsoft won the browser war against Netscape. However they had failed to reach the objective of such war.
Microsoft never really liked the World Wide Web. With Windows 95 it came with rather limited IE browser (in essence a tool to download Netscape) but at the time they really didn't care much, because they were pushing MSN service to compete against AOL. These services at the time were less an ISP but a large multi-node BBS with graphics. That was the direction they wanted to go. The internet and WWW was just for academic and those looser who had those Unix based servers.

However the Web Grew in popularity, and Netscape was getting big, and showing a future of an OS independent system, where the browser was king. This future was a threat to Microsoft, however it seemed inevitable. So Microsoft started the browser war by beefing up IE to compete with Netscape (Which was a bold move at the time, as most applications that come with the OS were just small tools that just barely get the job done, eg. notepad, wordpad, calc, paint ). Now Microsoft is on its EEE strategy. Embrace the Web, Extend it with its own custom html commands and http protocol changes, then being able to kill it, because what everyone is using is so far from the normal web, there isn't any point to it anymore.

With Windows 98 and the embedded full feature browser. It fully Embraced the web, and basically killed Netscape. Then they were in the process of Extending, with some ideas that are still common such as CSS, and others that are just a bad idea such as Active X, and Sliverlight. However Microsoft got stuck on IE 6 for way too long, and the Active X became a security nightmare. Microsoft extensions made people to not trust Microsoft, as their systems were getting hacked, often working around firewalls and all the other best practices at the time, because a trusted sight may had a less then trustful advertiser which would run applications on your PC.

This security problem brought in a new lightweight browser called Firefox. Which supported the standards much better then IE, was faster and didn't use the stuff that allowed people to break into the computer. Then Firefox grew where it started to be too big, that is where Google Chrome came in (at around the same time Safari came in for Apple also based on WebKit)

Now the growth of the WebKit based browsers, now meant for browsing the Web, it really doesn't matter if you are using Linux, Windows, MacOS or even some of the lesser known OS's such as the BSD's. And Netscapes vision of nearly all your applications being web based is nearly true today. Now Microsoft is having to fight to keep its market share, and having to deal with mobile devices with Apple and Google based OS's. Microsoft is still going strong, but they had to change their business model a lot.

So they had won the browser war but failed the objective. Now with them trying to put effort into a rendering engine is just wasting resources. Going to a WebKit chromium browser will probably just let them focus more on what they really want to focus on and less on trying to get a better HTML5 support score.

Re:Won the war failed the objectives.

[Junta]

While it may have been ill-advised, realistically netscape was screwed by the gigantic disadvantage of having to be downloaded in a time when 57 kbit was the typical internet bandwidth.

So they suffered from two things:
-Microsoft bundling it into the OS meant that *everyone* had a serviceable browser
-Netscape did not manage to overcome this through getting the OEMs to bundle their alternative (Hardware vendors wouldn't do this without getting paid to do so, and MS stood there with always deeper incentives for OEMs to *not* bundle Netscape).

There's no amount of doing the technology part of the browser better that could have saved them.

Re:open sourcery FTW

[jellomizer]

I like Linux and Unix systems and they are my preference when I can use them. However with Windows being turned to a *nix OS like OSX we will no longer have much diversity in Operating Systems, they will all be Unix or Unix Like OS's.
20 years ago, We had Windows, *Nix, VMS, MacOS...
A slew of OS's all with their own advantages and disadvantages. Going to one Style OS we are loosing options.

Re: This is McDonalds breaking down & serving

[cyber-vandal]

I know but the world's most popular browser is Chrome so privacy is not why people are avoiding Edge.

Re:open sourcery FTW

[gtall]

Relax, MS will only screw it up so it really won't be nix.