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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Latest comments (35)
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?
Every thoughts now are too early. Let's see the product first. anyway I belive in Microsoft this time.
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^
This definitely needs a read no matter how you feel about this move.
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 wonder how close we were to big corporations planning to get off IE and how many technology roadmaps have been ripped up and now we are back waiting for big firms again to get away from IE 10-11.
Another good Twitter thread about this announcement in regards to browser diversity. cc: @nektro
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.
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.
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".