Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

I&#x27;m still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it:<p><i>stick it to Google [0]</i><p>I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Quantum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Quantum</a>) or WebKit (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org</a>), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have sufficed as an Electron replacement that they could drive forward, but I suppose they own Electron now with Github acquired)<p>For its not Apple anymore and certainly not Mozilla that is the prime competitor nowadays to Microsoft, its Google (With Chromebooks in the schools, and their small business and cloud offerings) and Amazon&#x27;s Web Services division that are their main competitors now.<p>While I don&#x27;t know how all the business logic went into this and ultimately came up with this being the best calculation at hand, I think this would have played better in the media too (especially if they leaned on Mozilla)<p>[0] I know Chromium != Google, but its pretty hard not to see that most of Chromium&#x27;s development is downstream from Google and Google employs and&#x2F;or otherwise has had some direct influence over the core team

I&#x27;m assuming I&#x27;m not the only one who&#x27;s afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they&#x27;ll follow what&#x27;s Chrome-compatible.<p>It&#x27;s still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we&#x27;re going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).

If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it? I mean there was this &quot;startup growth hacking&quot; kind of craziness from a corporation and sudden admittance of defeat... It&#x27;s very confusing.<p>Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don&#x27;t we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It&#x27;s not like they stopped the aggressive marketing for a few years and now saying that they can no longer keep up. They probably are doing it now still and implying that Edge is better. Is the marketing really so uninformed about such big decisions?

Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux&#x2F;POSIX as well.

I&#x27;m a bit sad by the announcement. I quite like edge, and now the browser ecosystem is getting narrower.<p>What should Mozilla do now? Should they just give up? Now that everywhere except ios&#x2F;macos is blink (and v8 i think, i&#x27;m not sure after reading the announcement) why should anyone care for firefox?<p>Should also Mozilla start using chromium as a base? Mozilla will still be able to add quite the value in term of functionality, and with a bigger focus on privacy than google. I&#x27;m honestly not sure anymore.<p>Maintaining a browser is a hard work and it&#x27;s getting harder, so it&#x27;s (i think) unlikely a new player will ever enter the game, and having one engine where to test thing will make the job of creating websites and webapps simpler, on the other hand a monopoly can be a very bad thing for the web.<p>I like firefox a lot, and it&#x27;s my daily driver, but if tomorrow they change the engine, i probably won&#x27;t even notice, and not having to maintain the entire stack may allow them to better focus on other area, like decentralization, privacy, addons and services (firefox send is amazing), and may even allow a easier experimentation with new webapi.<p>I&#x27;m really not sure how to feel about this...<p>On a side note: I really do hope they make chromium and especialy CEF more modular. it&#x27;s amazing to embed a web browser inside a app, but it&#x27;s very hard to override some of his behavior, for example: while it&#x27;s easy to have a custom cookie management system, there are no api to override localstorage or the chronology, only some workaround.<p>In a past work project we needed to build a thin client for a intranet and one of the requirement was, basically, an encrypted browser profile, custom CA management, client certificate and some other things, doing that using cef was very hard and it used a lot of hacks.<p>edit: correct some grammar

Honest question: what is the population of committers (not contributors) on Chromium? Is there any significant number outside of Google?<p>Is Chromium de-facto controlled by Google, or more community driven?

A lot of you guys are lamenting this decision.<p>I&#x27;m insanely excited about it!<p>I&#x27;ve been working on a new reader and documentation manager for PDF and cached web content:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s based on Electron and targets Chromium.<p>What I&#x27;m hoping happens here is that this means more focus on Chromium and potentially more work on Electron + Carlo.<p>Electron is amazing but it&#x27;s pretty bloated per app. If it&#x27;s made lighter weight and something like Carlo can just use the OS installed browser in an isolated process you&#x27;ll have the best of both worlds.<p>You can use web standards to build your apps and at the same time dock into native OS features without the massive bloat.<p>Right now Polar is about 100MB to download and uses about 200MB of RAM. Not the end of the world but also not super fun.<p>There&#x27;s the issue of one central monoculture but there&#x27;s still the opportunity to fork if chrome&#x2F;edge gain too much market share.

I feel like I should be happy as a web dev to hear that I no longer have to support a browser engine made by Microsoft (which has been a huge pain and despite this will be a huge pain for a while due to people still using old browsers) but this feels bittersweet. It feels like we&#x27;re taking the engineering out of everything because companies can make more money by not innovating.

There&#x27;s a new GitHub repository for Microsoft Edge:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;MicrosoftEdge&#x2F;MSEdge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;MicrosoftEdge&#x2F;MSEdge</a><p>The readme goes into more detail than the blog post announcement, including emphasis on Windows on ARM, information about WebRTC for UWP, and explicit confirmation that they plan to bring Edge to Windows 7 and 8 as well as macOS.<p>Also, looks like they&#x27;re using the MIT license.

Will Microsoft use V8 as the javascript engine then as well or continue to use Chakra?<p>If they won’t continue to use Chakra, what happens to that project then? It is open sourced and there’s work to make Node.js use it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nodejs&#x2F;node-chakracore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nodejs&#x2F;node-chakracore</a><p>All the more important to support Servo and Gecko – we can’t have all browsers be of WebKit origin – we rather need more initiatives like Servo, that reinvents the engine from scratch, optimized for modern environments.

When Microsoft released Edge, they claimed bugs plagued IE because they couldn&#x27;t update IE without OS updates. Edge as a &quot;store app&quot; would receive frequent updates, independent of Windows OS updates. They ended up tying Edge to Windows. And kept promising but never delivered. Instead of small frequent browser updates, we got large frequent OS updates. Maybe now that Edge&#x27;s dead, they&#x27;ll slow down the frequency of Windows update a bit.<p>In the beginning, IE was speedier than Edge. Had more features too. Edge was fragile and froze often. Updates fixed some of the speed issues. I froze my windows update so, I don&#x27;t know how it stacks up right now.<p>To increase Windows store usage, MS also decided to tie Edge extension to the Windows store. This wouldn&#x27;t have been a problem. In fact, I like the idea of getting all my stuff in one place. However, MS decided to create the annoying store app. I&#x27;m on a desktop, a real computer. Why on earth can&#x27;t I open the store on a browser and have the installer do its work in the background? This is where I drew the line with Edge.<p>I&#x27;m not surprised that Edge&#x27;s marketshare declined with increased Windows 10 marketshare. Edge is Microsoft&#x27;s second Windows 8. They are both PC software designed to please mobile users and infuriate PC or touch-less users. And both hide settings - make it a chore to change minor settings.<p>I believe throwing Windows Phone under the bus has come back to bite Microsoft in the ass and Edge is just a trailer.<p>Microsoft is still gutting Windows 10 - turning it into a phone OS for desktop users, replacing working software with incomplete toys.<p>As far as I&#x27;m concerned, Google didn&#x27;t beat MS in the browser game. MS simply frustrated IE users over to Chrome by forcing Edge on them.<p>Windows is the next software MS will abandon for Google&#x27;s alternative. All Google has to do is not mess up android.<p>If you remember Nokia&#x2F;MS&#x27;s failed fork of Android you&#x27;ll feel the chill. Microsoft now sells android smartphones in both its online and retail stores.<p>I predict MS is not done with Edge. At the end, they&#x27;ll abandon that too for Chrome. And all they&#x27;ll do is change the default search engine to Bing.

Funny that minor side project of KDE is now responsible for the vast majority of today&#x27;s Internet traffic. Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work?

EdgeHTML is also used for embedding HTML into UWP, and controls have been released for WPF and Win32. I wonder what will be the story of that. Will that be transparently changed to Chrome, can it be changed to Chrome or will EdgeHTML be used only for that?

On one hand, this creates a platform that is more or less the standard of the web. On the other hand, this only gives Google more control of the web.<p>I really wish that instead of doing this Microsoft would just stick with EdgeHTML and maybe open-source it.

What I find a bit curious is that&#x27;s a fully Chromium based browser, it&#x27;s not simply based on the Blink rendering engine. So, it will be much closer (probably) to Chromium&#x2F;Chrome than other blink-based browsers like Brave or Opera.<p>I&#x27;d really like to understand the rationale behind this choice. What they&#x27;d like to leverage from Chromium that Blink alone wouldn&#x27;t have?

It&#x27;s crazy! This is not the Microsoft from ~5 years ago. They have really changed! Opening up to linux, cross-platform apps, open sourcing tech, open sourcing their patents(!), and now using open source chromium for MS Edge? Dam. I never thought I&#x27;d see the day...

Could this be a bad thing for Firefox? Seems like Microsoft + Google is quite a rival to go against?

Excellent news. Google mostly does not have their own desktop OS to &quot;protect&quot;, so they are probably incentivised to make the browser and the apps running in it feel as &quot;native&quot; as possible, with proper access to important local resources when relevant. Considering how Apple is dragging their feet with service worker and offline support on Safari (where they have a monopoly on iOS), this is probably a good thing overall. Fingers crossed!

In short. Edge engine is dead. Based on Chromium. Not an UWP. Will be on Windows 7 and Mac.

Aww man... I can&#x27;t help but reminisce about how it would&#x27;ve been if they&#x27;d decided to become significant contributors to Gecko.

So the web is now going to be even more Chrome-centric than it is...<p>I wonder if they thought about picking Gecko instead.

Another &quot;if you can&#x27;t beat them just join them&quot;? In fact Edge is 99.9999% irrelevant at least to me, all my time with Edge added up to be less than 5 minutes over the years, I only need it to download chrome(or firefox).

This is actually great for the web. Having two competitors like Google and MS contributing to a single rendering engine, and competing on the actual browsers means less fragmentation without the single-entity-control problem.

I think Microsoft made already a deal with Google about the control of chromium. It would be endless naive otherwise.<p>Do not forget that this is a full development stack within Windows. UWP has a JavaScript&#x2F;HTML runtime and Microsoft&#x27;s recent pwa visions both need to earn money.<p>My bet is that Google will announce in the next weeks or at the next io a foundation for dealing with chromium. The only thing which itches me with that a bit is ChromeOS. But maybe that is more a plugin thingy.

Some people are saying this is not good for competition.<p>I see it as a positive for keeping Google in check.<p>Chrome&#x27;s marketshare is insane. Google could autoupdate Chrome overnight push out some wild update like requiring you to sign in to use their browser or something else like default rendering everything to AMP wrappers for example... who knows &#x2F; tinfoil hat time.<p>Now there&#x27;s a solid and non-disruptive quick switch default that is already installed (sorry FF, Brave) on Windows machines similar to what Apple has with Safari.

Wasn&#x27;t an original idea of Edge that it would have several different quirks modes where it would use the old IE renderer to work with old corporate websites and such to be extremely backwards compatible? Could this break things for some companies with old IE-only internal websites etc? (Not that I don&#x27;t think these should have all been made to work with chrome long ago.) If they are going to try to maintain some kind of quirks mode, would that be open sourced?

I&#x27;m wondering why they decided to keep the Edge brand. It seems dropping it and the &quot;e&quot; logo all together would be ideal. The logo beit IE or Edge has negative emotions for many users. I am excited for this though, because I will probably make the Microsoft browser my default once it launches since it will finally have access to the vast Chrome extension library. But, I still think they will struggle with adoption just from a branding standpoint.

Really wish Microsoft would open source the Edge renderer.

Good development. Now we need more open source collaboration in MS gaming branch. Let MS back Vulkan instead of continuing DX12 lock-in.

I am super excited about this. I work on an open source tool to automate chromium browser <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;getgauge&#x2F;taiko" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;getgauge&#x2F;taiko</a> and the Chrome Devtools protocol makes it really easy to do so. With edge using chromium Cross browser testing will suck less.

Recipe for success: Take chromium and make it super private. Put a moat up for identity, add a VPN (if that makes some people feel better), encrypt traffic etc.<p>You could even charge people for the heavy duty version that might use some Azure services. The only issue with this is charging people requires tying their browser to the payment method.

I hope this move changes the hostile amount of google services that are baked into Chrome and Chromium. Not saying MS is any better, but at least there will be more choices for users and where before everything was hardcoded, now there will be an option to select and potentially expose more customization for us morals.

WebKit Scrollbars by attrition rather than specification is an odd way to go about things, but I for one will take it!

They could&#x27;ve chosen to go with Safari webkit. Since on the desktop it&#x27;s pretty standards compliant. &amp; it&#x27;s pretty fast &amp; power efficient too. But they chose Chromium, because they now own Electron. Also fuxk apple for having Safari on iOS being shitty, but good at protecting privacy

My problem with Edge is not the rendering engine, it is the application it self, it is clunky &amp; buggy, after a while with multiple application windows with multiple tabs, shortcut keys just stop working in some windows &amp; some windows just freezes for a while.

Any chances that with this move, Windows adopts Chromium instead of Internet Explorer as embedded browser for Windows applications?<p>That will remove plenty of IE rendering issues and also the need to link a whole CEF to get Chromium rendering in your application.

Wow a new Microsoft web browser for the Mac! Haven&#x27;t seen one of those in 15 years.

No offense meant to anyone, but don&#x27;t engineers at Microsoft feel humiliated over the fact that their employer chose an open source project that was started by their rival viz. Google?<p>I am just curious how competitiveness works in FAANG.

Does anyone know what the extension ecosystem of this new Edge will look like?

It&#x27;s funny that when you go to select your country, depending on the privacy laws in said country you have to agree to their terms of service using a checkmark&#x2F;no checkmark.

This announcement is about 6 years late, but yeah, it makes sense!<p>Now, there may be some point in the future where I open a Microsoft browser and do more than barf on myself and download Chrome.

Recent discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18595069" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18595069</a>.

Hey Joe, can&#x27;t you just stop nagging users to use your browser and stop overriding the users choice of browser? No need to repackage anything, just move on.

This bit is probably the most interesting to me:<p>&gt; We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS.

The most exciting thing here is that, hopefully, we will get a version of Chromium on Mac without spyware.

Will Mircosoft use V8 or Charka Core?

it seems like a lot of people don&#x27;t know this but the current Edge engine is Open Source. look here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;ChakraCore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;ChakraCore</a>

I would rather not install Chrome at all on my windows machine. I use Brave (a chromium based browser) and with right extensions, I can see myself using the new Chromium based Edge. I bet that will be the thought process for a lot of general people using browsers. Chrome will loose its market share to Edge for sure.

If the UI is going to be just as terrible as it is now, I will still refuse to use it.

Whilst this basically declares the Browser wars over and crystalizes Chromium as the Web&#x27;s browser engine it&#x27;s reassuring it&#x27;s in the hands of the company with infinite resources, talent and a vested interest in seeing the web platform succeed with Google benefiting when more people spend more time on the Web (essentially the business case in starting Chrome to push the web forward, quicker). The only rendering engine that stands a chance at competing against Chrome is Safari&#x2F;WebKit (thanks to iOS) and Apple would rather see native iOS Apps succeed to re-enforce their walled garden they have complete control over.<p>So whilst it&#x27;s a dark day for browser engine diversity, I don&#x27;t see it as a blow against the Web overall (i.e. as a popular platform to develop for) as Google&#x2F;Chrome is the driving force behind making Chromium more powerful to close the experience vs native Apps with initiatives like PWAs of which a side-effect is we&#x27;ll be able to use new APIs sooner and increase web developer velocity by having 1 less browser engine we need to test against.<p>A lot of people see browser wars as a gauge for the health of the Web but I consider the biggest threat to the &quot;open web&quot; is native mobile Apps which needs to become more capable in order to be able to deliver the same integrated experiences. In that light I don&#x27;t see the competition of more browser engines making the Web better. Chrome wasn&#x27;t created in reaction to competition, it was created because there was none left with MS leaving IE6 (and the main interface into the Web) to wither and die. IMO competing browser engines are holding the Web back with not being able to use new APIs as they&#x27;re available, needing to cater for the lowest common denominator and having to test and support against a matrix of different browser engines and versions.<p>It would be a different story if I thought Google would pull back investment in Chrome after they achieve total dominance, but I don&#x27;t see that, their current strategy is winning where they benefit in a faster, stronger more popular Web and have been lifting the state of the art browser development since Chrome&#x2F;V8&#x27;s inception. Of course we now have to worry about Google thwarting the direction of Chromium to their benefit to the detriment of their users, the best way to minimize that is to have multiple collaborators committing to the Chromium project like MS Announces suggests they&#x27;re doing. IMO it would be in Firefox&#x27;s best interest to also switch to and collaborate on Chromium as well. Their market share is fading into irrelevance and after Edge&#x2F;Chromium I see less developers investing their time to test on FF. I believe their efforts would be best spent on innovating on the browser&#x27;s UI and function as I don&#x27;t see how maintaining an alternative browser engine is a competitive advantage, IMO it&#x27;s one of the reasons for their decline in market share. They should still be able to achieve their objectives the same way Vivaldi and Brave are doing with their added privacy protections in their Blink forks.

Are they gonna put chakra into chromium or use v8?

The name.... reminds me of &lt;blink&gt;Annoying Text&lt;&#x2F;blink&gt;

So, Microsoft finally realized that they can&#x27;t develop the web browser inside the single company.<p>I wonder what they realize the next. A Compiler?

I always though Mozilla should be the one doing this, let google do all the hard work and focus their resources in increasing market share and having better privacy, if they have the resources to maintain firefox then they have the resources to maintain a chromium fork.

This is HUGE!<p>Microsoft throwing away the IE engine in favor of one more or less standard rendering engine is a huge win for web developers everywhere!<p>It&#x27;s also something that would have been unimaginable in the Steve Ballmer era.<p>Thank you!

&gt; As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge — but other browsers as well — better on both PCs and other devices.<p>&quot;Embrace, extend, and extinguish&quot;? At this point, with google, I&#x27;m not even sure if it&#x27;s a bad thing, if true.