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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
I know but the world's most popular browser is Chrome so privacy is not why people are avoiding Edge.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.