It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine

The Register ^ | Dec 6, 2018 | Thomas Claburn

[dayglored]

RIP: The Edge is dead... as in the EdgeHTML layout code

Microsoft on Thursday said it intends to use the open-source Chromium browser engine in the desktop version of its Edge browser, promising the two per cent of global internet users who favor Edge an improved web experience.

Joe Belfiore, corporate veep of Windows, announced the plan, which was reported earlier this week. "Ultimately, we want to make the web experience better for many different audiences," he said.

One of those audiences may be macOS users, who despite not clamoring for Edge should have access to Microsoft's browser at some point: Belfiore said the company expects to bring Edge to other platforms like macOS.

Web developers have the most to gain. They can expect fewer incompatibility issues, which continue to bedevil the web ecosystem. As can be seen from caniuse.com, a website that shows which features are available in which browsers, there's still a lot of fragmentation and quirky browser behavior.

As the same time, the emerging Chromium monoculture could have a downside. Vulnerabilities in the open source project may affect a broader set of browsers and innovations developed for Safari and Firefox may not be adopted elsewhere. Chromium is the foundation of Google Chrome, though the open source project is distinct from the company-owned browser.

In a slightly cheeky tweet Sean Lyndersay, principal lead program manager for Microsoft Edge, pointed out that his team needs new developers for the browser.

I feel like this may be an appropriate time to mention: We're hiring. :) https://t.co/nq0y10jRgF — Sean Lyndersay (@SeanOnTwt) December 6, 2018

Open up

The new Edge won't be a Universal Windows Platform app in order to make it usable outside of Windows 10, which accounts for about half of all Windows installations. Instead, it will be build in accordance with the Win32 API, for compatibility with Windows 7 and 8 as well as 10. A preview release is planned for early 2019.

Microsoft's decision to change browser engines in mid-flight demonstrates the difficulty of matching the pace of active open source projects. Once Edge shifts to a Chromium foundation, the company intends to deliver browser updates for all Windows versions "on a more frequent cadence."

Students of web history may recall Mozilla in 2011 did something similar, shifting to a shorter release cycle for Firefox in response to Google's rapid-fire Chrome updates.

Microsoft's decision to shift Edge to Chromium is less surprising in light of Edge for Android and iOS, which run on the Blink rendering engine from Chromium and WebKit (the basis of Apple's Safari browser) respectively.

The Register asked Microsoft what this shift means for ChakraCore, its Edge JavaScript engine which the company has been trying to integrate with Node.js via its Node-ChakraCore project as an alternative to Google's V8 JavaScript engine. A company spokesperson declined to respond.

Microsoft has outlined its intended plan of action in a GitHub post. In the near term, the company said it intends to finish porting the Chromium codebase to support ARM-64, to improve accessibility in Chromium via Microsoft assistive technology, to add support for modern input mechanisms like touch controls, and to contribute to ongoing security hardening.

"This is a big step for Microsoft, for the Microsoft Edge team, and we recognize it will be a big step for the Chromium project as well," the company says. "We are enthusiastic about the benefit we believe this will bring to the larger web community."

Meanwhile... Firefox maker Mozilla isn't happy, blogging today that: "Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google."

The software foundation has a point. "Making Google more powerful is risky on many fronts," said Moz's Chris Beard.

"And a big part of the answer depends on what the web developers and businesses who create services and websites do. If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium."

®

[dayglored]

> I use w8.1 and I'd like to know what's so bad about it compared to other versions?

Win8 introduced a user interface style "Metro" which was very poorly accepted by Windows users. It was very different in ways that caused confusion, frustration, and massive amounts of lost productivity. Microsoft ballyhooed it as a great new thing but it was unwelcome and for the most part it only was bought on new machines where it was forced on the buyer. Very few XP or Win7 users upgraded voluntarily and stayed with it.

Win8.1 fixed a few of the most egregious errors, most Win8 machines could be upgraded to 8.1, and at this point the only people running plain Win8 are the ones whose machines failed to upgrade.

A lot of Win8.x users rolled back to Win7. The rest migrated forward to Win10 when it came out. Win10 stayed with much of the user interface, but Microsoft ate some crow and re-introduced some of the important, useful features it had removed in Win8.x

Now, all that said, was the underlying operating system itself bad? Not at all. The problems were all in the GUI, the user interface.

And of course, there are a number of folks who use and like Win8.1. More power to them -- ain't freedom of choice great? They have until 2023 to be getting security updates, before they have to migrate to Win10.

[dennisw]

great account that made me hearken back because I once lived in a place with cold winters that had an oil fired stove to warm it up.

More accurately this was a natural gas fired kitchen cook stove. You cooked meals w natural gas...... that ... HOLD ON...... In a separate burner built in compartment burned kerosene (aka fuel oil) sucked upward from a tank in the basement. What excellent design! And the kerosene burned very cleanly so I got no complaints.

The kerosene fueled kitchen heat heated the house. Not very well but it was there to gather around.

[dennisw]

I use Chrome and Firefox. Also Opera which has a great free VPN feature which is useful at times for getting past paywalls.

Firefox has much better bookmarking than chrome. While chrome renders graphics and videos more smoothly than Firefox and with less of a draw on memory and CPU...

You may have guessed... I go to task manager a lot to peer at mem and cpu usage.

[Joe Brower]

This transition has been ongoing for several months now, that I am aware of.

Microsoft's "Teams" office application, a group collaboration tool in the genre of Skype (which they also bought back in 2011), is actually a web-stack (JS/CSS/HTML) packaged using 'Electron'. Electron uses the Chromium engine.

Which goes to explain, at least somewhat, why it's so slow and twitchy. < G!>

[TomGuy]

I am at Firefox ESR 52.4. It still allows most of my add-ons to work and has the classic GUI.

I did run across a little program that enhances FF and the various renditions of it — FIREMIN. It seems to have taken control of the memory leaking Firefox has had since about version 0.7. I installed it a few weeks ago and occasionally check the FF usage through Task Manager. My FF memory usage dropped from 900meg to 15meg.

https://www.rizonesoft.com/downloads/firemin/

FYI

[Buckeye McFrog]

Too many websites that I have to use in my daily work tell me not to use Microsoft browsers. Too many bugs. Their developers can’t keep up with the too-cute tweaks that Microsoft is always making.

[zeugma]

This announcement could be both good and bad.

The good side is that with the chromium engine, we will see less website incompatibilities, because people won't have to be coding websites with a bunch of weird if..then..else sections specific to individual browsers. Microsoft did a really good job of screwing up the web with its incompatibilities in the past. Hopefully that will now get better

Down side is that having a single rendering engine across multiple platforms and browsers leads to a monoculture that may make malicious sites more effective, as they will only have to find one bug that they can exploit across a wide variety of browsers. Monocultures are dangerous, even though they do bring some benefits. (see: Irish and potatoes)

[redfog]

So, Microsoft Edge will still essentially look the same, and Microsoft Edge will still be the named-browser in Windows 10, but the “guts” or “engine” of Microsoft Edge will now be Chromium based - is that correct?

[olepap]

Was this 'Homage to Catalonia'? I can't find 'Letters from Catalonia'
Forgot to add this, if one wants to know the transformation of a communist to a libertarian read Orwell’s “Letters from Catalonia.” In reality this was actually an intellectual preface to his great novel 1984. Orwell gained much wisdom in Spain. In Spain he saw the belly of the beast. It changed him.

[Bob434]

[[ I’ll never understand why Microsoft still retains its old assumption that it can produce shite software and users will just lap it up.]]

Because by and large they do accept it- and get angry at those that don’t accept it- MS sees these internal wars, and thinks their change was great- I guess- Would like to see them admit they made a mistake phasing out windows 7, and bring support for it back (when they eventually drop it) or at the very least, revamp windows 10 to give back the control windows 7 gave users- and get rid of all the dang spyware crap-

[Bob434]

[[Brave is also built on Chromium]]

Really? Dang, was thinking about trying it- but now I’ll pass- don’t want anything google based on my computer if i can help it

[Bob434]

[[It has just gotten worse and worse. Hangs all the time. Especially seems to hold you for ransom until you submit to the update.]]

Huh? I’ve had 57 for a long time now, and it doesn’t hold me hostage- the only thing i get is a bar at top every now and again about firefox being out of date- I just dismiss it-

[daniel1212]

Granted, this topic may be a little esoteric for some Windows 10 users. Most browser users are blissfully unaware of the engine that runs the browser.

And for those who care, and know and need the maximum amount of usability available browsers offer, then unless one is restricted to only using one browser (I use about 5, plus multiple Firefox profiles) and maximum security is determinitive of your choice, then only choice still is Firefox ESR , the extended release version. [url=http://www.basilisk-browser.org/download.shtml]Basilisk [/url], Waterfox , and Cyberfox are other options that most of the legacy FF extensions work on. Thank God for such helps! May they be used only for Him and for Good.

Some favs of mine in 2017 (you will likely have to hit the "all Version" if available to find one the works :

Tab Mix Plus 0.3.8.6 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus
Reduce tab width; Enable multiple tab rows; Change how active tab looks, etc.

Memory Restart https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-restart/ Shows how much ram FF is using, and enables easy restart to flush memory.

ColorfulTabs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/colorfultabs/?src=search/ Make tabs distinctive. Options to change color per site, etc.

FindBar Tweak https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/findbar-tweak/ Did was the above does but was not maintained.
Save search across pages. Keep search box open, etc.

Session Manager 0.7.5 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/ Saves sessions

Count word Toolhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/word-count-tool/?src=search/
Select text and see how many characters and words. Useful for forums with character limit.

Signature https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/signature/ insert custom text into posts and emails.

Menu Editor http://menueditor.mozdev.org/ Change items in menus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/checkcompatibility/ Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks (now needed for last 2 extns above)

Googlebarlite https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/latest/492/addon-492-latest.xpi?src=search More options and customizations than Google Toolbar

Send Tab URLs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/send-tab-urls/?src=ss Copy and send list of all open tabs URLs.

Copy as HTML Link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-as-html-link/?src=search R. click and Copy as HTML Link

Google/Yandex search link fix https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-link-fix/ The actual URL is copied.

BBCodeXtra https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bbcodextra/ An extension which adds to the context menu new commands to insert BBCode/Html/XHtml codes in an easy and fast way...
Very useful for FR.

Form History Control Form Recovery https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/form-history-control/?src=ss/ Saves text of some comboxes like FR, but not all. Has saved me loosing much typing after crashes.

Clippings https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clippings//
Saves text for pasting.

FlashGot https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashgot/?src=search

Google-translator-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/google-translator-for-firefox/

FT DeepDark https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ft-deepdark/ Best theme i found.

Noiascrollbars https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noiascrollbars A work of beauty and far better visibility,. .

Classic Theme Restorer https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/
stay-Open Menu https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stay-open-menu/ Opens Bookmarks in tabs without losing the menu.

[daniel1212]

Sound about right., The stats for our site from http://www.awstats.org show/

	Browsers	Grabber	Pages	Percent	Hits	Percent
	Firefox	No	4,952	27.2 %	5,096	26.6 %
	Google Chrome	No	4,235	23.3 %	4,630	24.1 %
	Safari	No	2,956	16.2 %	3,167	16.5 %
	Unknown	?	2,644	14.5 %	2,697	14 %
	MS Internet Explorer	No	1,702	9.3 %	1,740	9 %
	Opera	No	956	5.2 %	972	5 %
	Mozilla	No	413	2.2 %	428	2.2 %
	Edge	No	228	1.2 %	280	1.4 %
	Android browser (PDA/Phone browser)	No	32	0.1 %	34	0.1 %
	Netscape	No	31	0.1 %	34	0.1 %
	Others		17	0 %	78	0.4 %

[daniel1212]

If Chrome was not pushed so much by the Google Giant then its market share would be much lower. But i suppose most people just use a browser to open 2 or 3 pages.

[daniel1212]

https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.ph a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Dec 5, 2018

Top 10 Web Browsers
1	Chrome 70	38.30%
2	Safari 12	7.90%
3	Chrome 69	4.30%
4	Safari 11	3.97%
5	Firefox 63	3.79%
6	IE 11	3.43%
7	Chrome 59	2.38%
8	IE 17	1.86%
9	Chrome 68	1.73%
10	UC 12	1.71%

Top 10 Platforms
1	Windows 10	17.07%
2	Windows 7	14.45%
3	Android 8	11.72%
4	Android 7	10.75%
5	Android 6	8.48%
6	iOS 12	8.04%
7	Android 5	6.40%
8	Mac OS X	4.10%
9	iOS 11	3.88%
10	Android 4	2.99%

[SaveFerris]

Yes, Firefox leaks memory something terrible. I’m going to check out your link. Thanks.

[SaveFerris]

About the last 6 - 9 months, if you don’t update, it just hangs for excessively long periods of time. I finally give in each time and the hang goes away.

[SaveFerris]

I’m currently at:

63.0.3 (64-bit)

[SaveFerris]

That was to say if >>I<< don’t update. I may have bypassed 57 a long time when I just saw an update and let it roll. I was surprised to see I was on 63.0.3 (64-bit).