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Edge Switching To Chromium Is Not Bad, It Is Actually Good

Dec 07, 2018 by Kolappan N

Microsoft recently announced that they are going to replace their browser’s rendering engine with Open Source Chromium engine. This news has received some mixed reaction. But there is a lot of good news and here are some of it.

Better built-in browser

One thing we all can agree is that Chromium is a well tested code and it renders websites better than Edge. Replacing EdgeHTML with Chromium backend will improve the overall quality and stability of the built-in browsers. And If Chromium replaces EdgeHTML to power web views in UWP apps, it is good for Windows OS too.

Improvements to Chromium

Microsoft has been one of the biggest contributors to the Open Source in recent years. With their Edge browser switching to Chromium, Microsoft will be contributing to Chromium.

"We will contribute web platform enhancements to make Chromium-based browsers better on Windows devices"

They are already working on bringing ARM64 support. MS also confirmed that they will be working on Web accessibility, touch support, etc…

Chromium powers many browsers including Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, etc… among others. It is also used in Electron framework which powers a large number of desktop apps. Any improvement to chromium is an improvement to all these apps.

More Addons for Edge

One of the most common criticized thing about Edge is it’s lack of addons. As is switches to Chromium, Edge will be getting support for Chrome based addons which will be great.

Edge goes cross platform

Edge is already available in Android and iOS. Now it has been confirmed that Edge will be coming to Mac OS thanks to the new chromium backend. There are also speculations that Edge might come to Linux eventually.

Not only that, there are reports that Edge might be coming to Windows 7 and Windows 8. It will e a great improvement over the Internet Explorer present in those operating systems.

Better PWA support in Windows

While the importance of Progressive Web Apps is constantly growing, most of them are developed for Chrome / Android. Having a chromium based browser will help Microsoft to push PWA adaption in Windows.

Less worry for web developers

This move according to Microsoft “reduces browser fragmentation”. It definitely makes work easier for web developers as they will have one less browser to check for compatibility. It also makes it easier for developers who use Linux / Mac as they don’t have to boot into a Windows machine for compatibility testing.