This tweet says it all. Holy cow. Did not see that coming.
It's definitely good news for web devs. I also wonder if the move is to help push forward Desktop PWAs on Windows?
What are your thoughts on Microsoft's move?
Microsoft is building a Chromium based browser! 😲
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Top comments (35)
This is terrible news for devs. Microsoft developing a Chromium browser completely ruins the engine diversity that Edge brings to the ecosystem. I'm very upset by this news.
I was going to bring this up in the initial discussion post, as the issue has arisen before when people were afraid of an all Chrome world, but i figured someone would bring it up. 👋
For web developers, I still think it's good though. The more we can focus on building applications the better.
I think your point is more about stifling browser innovation?
I'll leave these knowledge nuggets here:
So long as Chromium does not stagnate as a result of its market share, then I would agree it's a good thing.
As long as Firefox is still serving a good amount of the market, things should only keep chugging along with Chromium.
I got a notification from one of my above comments and with the new chrome manifest announcement my trust in Firefox only grows stronger
Isn't future versions of Chrome powered by Blink, a Chromium fork?
Blink is the HTML rendering that they replaced their initial usage of WebKit (apples property) with.
They didn’t switch completely away, as Blink is a fork of the WebCore component, a part of WebKit.
I disagree with your statement, writing web applications as a developer would be way easier because they all share the same APIs and core, this will reduce the usage of poly-fills. This would be an significant improvement! :)
I agree. The only time this becomes worrisome is if Google ever gets to a point in the future where they do "okay, the web is good. we're done now" and then everyone's on the same engine so browser diversity and innovation come to a halt.
I don't know how to feel about this.
It's also going to be yet another browser to support, it's not like it's going to be identical to Chrome or that Edge and IE are going to disappear overnight :D
I wonder why they didn't choose Firefox's Gecko though
My guess is marketshare. Kind of like what Brave is doing, Brave Unveils Development Plans for Upcoming 1.0 Browser Release, Including Transition to Chromium Front-End.
That's a reason to go against the current! Otherwise all browsers will be the same browser in the end.
There's value into building platforms on top of the same rendering engine but there's also value into not having one single rendering engine :D
I understand the choice Brave made because they have few resources, but Microsoft is huge :D I just hope someone will write an article about the choice so I can better understand it. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that I don't have a fully formed opinion.
Gecko remains pretty damn impossible to embed into anything else. I suppose it's not like Microsoft wouldn't theoretically have the resources to make it happen anyways, but why put the extra effort in when it'll be less compatible and the compatibility is a primary reason they're doing it anyways?
"It was updated a very long time ago" it's definitely not a good start :-D
Yeah I guess
True, it's just that we risk having basically only single browser engine with just different shells.
I read people on Twitter speculating that MS will probably end up forking Chromium a few years down the road and manage their own version. Likely for the same reason why Blink was forked from WebKit.
Electron. They have So many Apps using Electron. When MS integrates Electron in Windows (as they do with EdgeHTML for Store Apps) they would need to contribute to two engines.
Right, I forgot about that. They already have a lot of in house knowledge around Chromium because of Electron.
I wonder if this new browser will be cross platform :D
That's what I hope for, also take in mind that winui has been made open-source yesterday so we might be able to see more "fluent" cross-platform interfaces some time in the future, including (hopefully) this browser
Honestly, I'd rather have EdgeHTML made open source than ditched altogether. What's the point of this move, especially when we're talking about the modern, Nadella-driven Microsoft?
Many complain about the loss of diversity, but on the other hand Edge has done basically nothing to let us enjoy the results of such diversity:
In short, Edge had the potential to become a bigger player but Microsoft had to commit. What's happened? Maybe they never signed enough engineers to move the project forward at an adequate speed?
From an economic point of view, keeping Edge probably made little sense to Microsoft, as it just doesn't make money, directly or indirectly.
So a reduced effort it is, but as a result it has never been enough to push Google, Apple and Mozilla to try harder. A missed chance.
Well, an engine less to worry about, at least.
I think it’s gonna be a step forward for the following reasons:
IE will still be around haunting us somehow though. I still dread having to occasionally try to get its dev tools open; crashes the browser pretty easily.
Honestly, if IE was killed off after IE6-8, the Internet could have improved quite a bit. Too bad it only just happened 3 years ago. If it happened earlier however, It’d surely be pretty much gone by now.
If a book were written on this topic, maybe it could be called "Tales of a Stubborn Software Company".
now only if they released an OS update which would uninstall IE from all existing computers. a man can dream, right?
Problem is that they can’t just do that, as some apps still depend on IE to display HTML.
And transfer all of their browser data so they don't know the difference.
As frontend developer I would say an ideal world would look like all big players contribute to one browser foundation which is free of any business interest. The whole render process should be the same for every browser in my eyes. Everything else just makes the life for application developers, browser developers and users harder. Browser developers have to implement everyhting again even if another browser already supports the feature x. Application developers has to work around missing features and users suffers from the conflict.
So in my eyes a basic browser where everyone contributes to would be very nice and lead to Firefox and Edge finally are on the same level as Chromium regarding feature support. I mean they didn't manage to support Shadow DOM API at all and Firefox just disabled service worker support again, how can that be?
From these base everyone can do what he wants and implement trackers or tracker blockers as he likes to do^
I consider diversity vs one browser platform has its ups & downs.
Diversity Advantages is
Diversity Disvantages is
One platform advantage is
One platform disadvantage is
Until I figure out exactly "why" Microsoft making the move,
I won't know exactly what to think of it.
So my stance is that, I will use those ups & downs to my advantage.
Whether you like it or not, builds of the new Edge are now available.
An article from CSS tricks for those interested. Edge Goes Chromium: What Does it Mean for Front-End Developers?
This definitely needs a read no matter how you feel about this move.
I also dropped this tweet which may see some action.