On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 12:25:13 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/report-microsoft-is-scrapping-edge-s...
Followup article <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/post-mortem-tying-edge-to-windows-10-was-a-fatal-error/> explains what the problem was: Microsoft tied Edge updates to Windows 10 updates. As a result, people staying on older versions of Windows 10 never got Edge updates, whereas they would still get the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox. This made the website compatibility problem even worse than it might have been: Microsoft did consider decoupling the browser from Windows 10 so that it could be updated on its own cadence and so that it could be ported to Windows 7 (if not macOS), but for reasons that are unclear, it decided that the work to do this would be too substantial. Switching to Blink is seen as the easier way to break the Windows 10 dependence, and so not only will Edge's release cycle be decoupled from Windows 10's, Microsoft will also make the new Edge available on Windows 7 and macOS.