Headed towards the Open Edge
Headed towards the Open Edge
Recently Microsoft made a huge announcement regarding its built-in browser in Windows 10. No not Internet Explorer, the other, younger more attractive one: Edge. The browser we know as Edge is changing in a fairly significant way, especially under the hood. In a blog post on December 6thMicrosoft’s Joe Belfiore confirmed rumors that Edge is changing its code to use the Chromium rendering engine. Previously Edge was entirely built in-house using its own rendering engine, EdgeHTML which is itself a fork of the Trident rendering engine from Internet Explorer.
But what does this mean?
The rendering engine is an “under-the-hood” component of the browser.
With Edge using Chromium under-the-hood it allows one less engine that developers have to target. Chromium is open source (more on that in a minute) and is very much a standards-based browser. The add-on ecosystem is huge compared to that of the add-ons available for Edge. Users should be able to use any Chrome Extensions with Edge once this is fully live in 2019. Microsoft will also be contributing to the Chromium project in order to advance the platform and have some input into that process.
But isn’t Chromium just Google Chrome?
Yes and no. Chromium is the open source platform that Chrome is based on. Chromium was started by Google and is headed by Google developers but it is an open-source project and receives input from the community. Google adds its services and features on top of the Chromium browser which is designed as lightweight and minimalist. Many other browsers use Chromium under-the-hood including Brave (a new privacy-based browser I have been testing recently), Opera, Samsung Internet, and Vivaldi to name a few. You don’t have to use Google or like Google to use a Chromium-based browser.
It will be interesting to see the first beta of this when it rolls out in early 2019. Stay tuned.
I had no idea Chromium was underneath so many browsers! Nor have I heard of Brave. I wanted to check out Edge a while back, I’ll have take a test drive of a few of these in 2019 I’m thinking….