Microsoft Edge Browser to be Powered By Google’s Chromium
Microsoft has officially announced that it will use Chromium to power its newest web browser, Microsoft Edge.Chromium is Google’s open-source software that powers its Chrome web browser. It also powers other great apps that were built using Atom Electron, such as Discord, Slack, and Visual Studio Code.
Microsoft is excited to make the switch, as they have announced their thirst for contributing to open-source projects. One of their big announcements about open-sourcing projects was Xamarin, a tool developers can use to create an app once and publish it across all major devices.
Microsoft also plans to contribute to Chromium to make it better for the future. This is some good news I wanted to hear, since Microsoft does well with developer tools and programming. They even invented my favorite programming language, TypeScript. Though Microsoft is an annoying brand, I’ve found they’ve excelled in at least 2 areas: Xbox and developer tools.
While Microsoft and Google are rival companies, when it comes to search engines and web browsers, seeing them work together is nothing new. It was a shock when Google said they would use TypeScript as their language for Angular 2 a couple years ago. Typescript is a language developed by Microsoft and Angular is a library developed by Google that is available in TypeScript at least a year ago. Google used Microsoft to power their tool, now it’s the other way around.
As a web developer with years of experience, I can say this news is actually awesome. One difficulty web developers face is browser-compatibility issues, meaning once they have their website working in Chrome, they have to then adjust it to work for Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc. With Microsoft using Chromium to power their browser, this is one less browser to test.
This is not the first time Microsoft has given up their own product to support the equivalent Google product. Microsoft has discontinued their Windows Phones to focus on improving Android support on their Windows operating system. It seems like Microsoft has two options when it comes to rivals: Buy them or support them. Or as the saying goes: If you can’t beat them, join them!
Source:
