Report: Microsoft is scrapping Edge, switching to just another Chrome clone
'Windows Central reports that Microsoft is planning to replace its Edge browser, which uses Microsoft's own EdgeHTML rendering engine and Chakra JavaScript engine, with a new browser built on Chromium, the open source counterpart to Google's Chrome. The new browser has the codename Anaheim. The report is short on details. The easiest thing for Microsoft to do would be to use Chromium's code wholesale—the Blink rendering engine, the V8 JavaScript engine, and the Chrome user interface with the Google Account parts omitted—to produce something that looks, works, and feels almost identical to Chrome. Alternatively, Redmond could use Blink and V8 but wrap them in Edge's user interface (or some derivative thereof), to retain its own appearance. It might even be possible to do something weird, such as use Blink with the Chakra JavaScript engine. We'll have to wait and see.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/report-microsoft-is-scrapping-edge-s... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 12:25:13 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/report-microsoft-is-scrapping-edge-s...
As that article makes clear, the main problems with Edge are in areas other than the HTML rendering. So getting rid of its HTML-rendering engine and substituting another one isn’t likely to help. What it will do is reduce the biodiversity among the beating HTML hearts of the common web browsers. Such biodiversity is a rather important part of ensuring that open standards (like HTML and CSS) remain open. Such a step by Microsoft will only further entrench the dominance of the WebKit-derived HTML renderers.
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.
On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 12:25:13 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'... Microsoft is planning to replace its Edge browser, which uses Microsoft's own EdgeHTML rendering engine and Chakra JavaScript engine, with a new browser built on Chromium...'
From <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/06/microsoft_edge_chromium/>: 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 buil[t] 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. That “Universal Windows Platform” gets less attractive by the day ...
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Peter Reutemann