The Redmond giant has made some big announcements to end this year. The good news is the company is doing whatever they think can enhance the overall experience of users with Microsoft products. We have earlier reported that Microsoft is planning to say goodbye to the rendering engine EdgeHTML that power Microsoft Edge in favor of Chromium.
The confirmation is now coming directly from the horse’s mouth. Microsoft confirmed that they are indeed adopting the Chromium replacing EdgeHTML. Like I mentioned in the earlier report, users do not have to worry about it as Microsoft Edge won’t be going anywhere except for the fact that it will now be powered by a Chromium and not EdgeHTML and that is pretty much all the changes that Microsoft has planned for Edge.
Even though it is not that hard to comprehend that EdgeHTML is not as par with that of open source Chromium, Microsoft cleverly admitted their defeat by saying “Our intent is to align the Microsoft Edge web platform simultaneously (a) with web standards and (b) with other Chromium-based browsers. This will deliver improved compatibility for everyone and create a simpler test-matrix for web developers.”
The company also made it clear that they want to move ahead with the browser and now since it’s all open source other operating systems to get Microsoft Edge as well. Microsoft specifically mentioned MacOS and other supported version of Windows which means Windows 7 is also there at least until 2020 as the year marks the end of support for the OS.
That said, Microsoft did not say anything about how the company’s adoption of Chromium affects the store policies. So, for the time being, EdgeHTML stays as the core component that will power UWP on the Microsoft Store. This also discourages the hope of a Google Chrome on Microsoft Store but now that Edge is adopting Chromium the performance is expected to a lot better and you might not need a Chrome in the first place.
However, things would not be all rosy. Adopting Edge, in turn, means that there will be a lot of power consumption and a downgrade in speed. It would be interesting to see how Microsoft promotes the Edge browser when it is all Chromium inside and we are looking forward to seeing if the company sticks to the leitmotif- Faster, Lighter, Safer.
A preview build with Chromium under the hood has been planned in early 2019. Microsoft encourages all the developer to sign-up here to become an Edge Insider.
