"There’s a lot of reasons for this change, and the move is a good one"
Nope. No one should cheerlead for less diversity in browser rendering. Google, in particular, should hardly be blithely given more influence over the web than it already has, as if that doesn't have negative consequences.
Chromium is open source, so neither Google or MS would be able to own it. This is good in the way that it will make web design easier, but might stagnate progress as if the community/gate keepers decline the update, it won't be pushed, while previously both MS and FF would be able to make independent decisions.
It's unfortunate because EdgeHTML is a thoroughly more modern rendering engine, consistently outperforming Chromium in speed and battery life, at the cost of a little accuracy that could be improved if people cared.
Obviously, people don't care. With Safari and Chrome the two most popular browsers (at least in the United States) and both being based on Chromium (Webkit is for all intents and purposes - Chromium) I guess the writing is on the wall.
The announcement for Windows 7 editions is somewhat exciting.
I can't wait to see the benchmarks showing a drop in performance after they switch. Personally I don't think the switch will help them gain much market share (at least on Win10). I mean look at Opera. It was once a perfectly viable alternative (especially for low-horsepower devices or older platforms). Now it's practically vanishware. I do agree that backporting Edge to Win7/8 and putting it on MacOS should help a little bit, but they could have done that with EdgeHTML/Chakra as well.
Anyway, I can't help but feel that every time a standards-based rendering engine dies off, it's a blow to web standards. Gives devs another excuse to only build for the stock browsers, standards compliance be damned. Webkit and Chromium will now cover not only the overwhelming majority of the market, but also all pre-installed browsers. On the plus side, this will mean more developers working on Chromium itself.
They don't have different themes? Not that I wouldn't recommend Opera, heck the less Google the better. If I get a new phone my goal would be to strip as much Google out of it as possible, or maybe even slap Lineage on it. Apple has gone off the deep end too now so they're a lot less appealing than they were. Sigh.
People are sheep. If people were to care about things being done correctly, they wouldn't allow corporations to give them software with incomprehensible names, like Chrome, in the first place.
A software program's name should indicate its function. Apple got that right in 1983 with the Lisa's document-centric design. Task-centric computing makes sense and application-centric does not. It is the height of application-centric stupidity to have programs given names like Chrome and Firefox.
As the article points out, most of the issues had to do with web devs not testing against it - or worse, not adhering to standards. I use FF as a backup and almost never have to fire it up instead of Edge. As far as functionality goes, I can't think of anything I miss / need that isn't available.
I think setting the default search to Google may have encouraged more users to switch. I know the functionality to change search engine is there but more general users will not do it and Bing sometimes do not give your good results.
The fact that Chrome does not need Administrative rights to install also help boost the marketshare in corporate environments.
Exactly right. There is nothing wrong with a screenshot that doesn't have ads on it. Although, I do generally think Anandtech's site is an atrocity without an ad blocker and NoScript running.
I hadn't realized that ad blockers weren't working while browsing as a guest on chrome until I came to anandtech. The situation is so bad that I refused to even attempt to read the site with ads. If the site really needs ads to live then they had better make them reasonable enough that the people running the site would choose to browse without ad blockers.
I think this is a big shame. Internet Explorer was terrible for many years lacking basic features like spell check and tabbed browsing but Edge was a decent browser. Having fewer choices is not a good thing. When one browser does not meet your needs it is nice to be able to use another. Chrome is typically my first choice with Firefox coming in quite handy under some circumstances. I admit to not using Edge very often but I like having 3x different browsers, just in case...
Webkit is based on the Chromium codebase, so I'd put Safari in the same boat. It's not just the default browser on MacOS but the browser on nearly 500 million active iOS devices worldwide.
Quite happy about this. Edge is modern compared to IE, but it still lags behind the competition when it comes to supporting new web standards (along with Safari). Hopefully this will improve the situation a bit and make development a little easier.
I agree with what you're saying, but it's also true that making Firefox multiprocess was very necessary, and I'm pretty sure that was the main reason why they changed the extension interface.
Although I am sad to see the distinct engine go. The things I most liked about it were the touch screen friendly interface and smooth scrolling. I hope these things are not going away.
Overall though, the move is genius by Microsoft. They see control of the web slipping away from them in favor of Google. Google gets to dictate how the direction of certain web standards because of their market Share. Now, in almost a gorilla fashion Microsoft will regain control of the mass market web by contributing to the largest open source project. I don’t think Mricrosoft cares as much about browser market share as much as they just want to have a big seat at the table of web.
Letting one company have all the power in web standards is how you get the guy who developed QUIC at Google also being the chair of the HTTP standards board, and pushing HTTP/3 to be UDP only, and not being backwards compatible.
Also think of other benefits Microsoft has with this move
1. They don't have to worry about actually coding the rendering engine, than can make suggestion to community
2. But the biggest benefit is in area of security. Most of the virus and malware come from the internet scripting and such. With a major part of browser being open source, than virus that target Microsoft Internet browser for example go away - any web related security issue effects all of browsers and such. In a way it win-win situation for Microsoft - when people complain about virus on internet with Microsoft - the primary cause is not up Chromium open source group
I also am curious off how far this is going to be - will Edge become shell wrapper around browser environment and just be in charge of actually physically showing content via output from Chromium Engine - in that case I would think touch support and smooth scrolling will be there.
Where they went wrong was by creating a closed source browser to compete with Chrome. They should have made an open source browser engine to compete with Chromium. That way it would have gotten ported to other platforms and more people would use it.
I'd bet that even now after choosing to end EdgeHTML development, if they were to open source it then other developers would pick it up and it would continue on as the third serious browser engine.
It would be better for web if they fork blink or webkit instead going hand to hand with google. Though there would be 3 different browser engines with similar roots, at least they can head to different directions without giving absolute monopoly to any one
It would be better to have only one, as long as it is open sourced and free to fork (which still allows integration of changes from the parent branch). The best standard is de facto standard. Web development will be cheaper and produce higher quality results by concentrating all efforts on just one thing.
As Mozilla financing dries up they will have to switch to Blink/V8 themselves to keep up.
I'm still not sure why Chrome gained popularity at such a rapid pace. At the time it was released it was much inferior to both Opera and Firefox. And yet, it's market share just kept climbing, while Firefox steadily declined and Opera remained fairly obscure. I still think Opera 12 (the last one based on Presto) was the best browser I've ever used, but unfortunately more and more websites started rendering poorly due to being optimized for Blink only, and after some times it was basically necessary to switch :(
I'm not so sure. Firefox was a dumpster fire when chrome was becoming popular. Firefox was the de facto choice through mid 2000s but it fell into a bad state and google capitalized. Opera always seemed nice but didn't have mass appeal. Mass appeal is what draws in extension creators, which is what made chrome popular.
--[I'm still not sure why Chrome gained popularity at such a rapid pace.]--
All the software whose installers came with a "Install Google Chrome!" option already checked by default. I bet they were getting kickbacks from Google for that.
"I'm still not sure why Chrome gained popularity at such a rapid pace."
Because every time you go to google.com in any other browser, it advertizes Chrome. And google.com is a monopoly in search and uses this monopoly power without shame.
Plus a few innovative feature for its time, like multi-process rendering, and starting up from very mature and standards-compliant codebase of WebKit (unlike, say, Edge, which was released half-baked, and did not - and does not - support majority of even Windows installations and just had bad reputation afterwards).
One thing I am curious - how much change will the user actually see in this change. Only thing I can actual smaller renders of web pages on top of screen that is not in Chrome.
Of course any thing that use latest updates for HTML that Chromium uses.
Google posted on the user's surfing activities. I don't think Microsoft would want to partner with Alphabet in supplying them with harvested web browsing data, but I presume Microsoft will build in their own collection components and still leave us with limited choices for a non-creeper web browser.
Hate to be Captain Obvious here, but Edge is automatically selected as the default browser on every Windows 10 installation. Therefore hundreds of millions of people have chosen to trash Edge for some other browser solution. Based on the epic statistics alone, Edge is one of the worst products ever created by mankind. Personally, I would vote for the automatic paper towel dispenser as the worst ever, but the world has spoken.
I think this is for upcoming Qualcomm SoC for laptops. They probably want the least friction with users as the browser is the most important app in a laptop
So, I'm a bit confused. Isn't Chromium the open-source browser (before Google branding turns it into Chrome) using the Blink engine? Is Edge moving to the Blink engine, or is it fundamentally a Chromium reskin? I use a high-contrast theme to get dark-mode web pages, and so far it seems Edge and Firefox are the only ones to honour those settings. I hope Edge still continues with that.
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Chaitanya - Thursday, December 6, 2018 - link
Shame Edge had to go, it was much better than Chrome and its peers.Desierz - Thursday, December 6, 2018 - link
The market has spoken.nevcairiel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Edge, the browser, will remain. It'll just use a different rendering engine behind the scenes.Oxford Guy - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
"There’s a lot of reasons for this change, and the move is a good one"Nope. No one should cheerlead for less diversity in browser rendering. Google, in particular, should hardly be blithely given more influence over the web than it already has, as if that doesn't have negative consequences.
RSAUser - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
Chromium is open source, so neither Google or MS would be able to own it. This is good in the way that it will make web design easier, but might stagnate progress as if the community/gate keepers decline the update, it won't be pushed, while previously both MS and FF would be able to make independent decisions.Samus - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
It's unfortunate because EdgeHTML is a thoroughly more modern rendering engine, consistently outperforming Chromium in speed and battery life, at the cost of a little accuracy that could be improved if people cared.Obviously, people don't care. With Safari and Chrome the two most popular browsers (at least in the United States) and both being based on Chromium (Webkit is for all intents and purposes - Chromium) I guess the writing is on the wall.
The announcement for Windows 7 editions is somewhat exciting.
Alexvrb - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
I can't wait to see the benchmarks showing a drop in performance after they switch. Personally I don't think the switch will help them gain much market share (at least on Win10). I mean look at Opera. It was once a perfectly viable alternative (especially for low-horsepower devices or older platforms). Now it's practically vanishware. I do agree that backporting Edge to Win7/8 and putting it on MacOS should help a little bit, but they could have done that with EdgeHTML/Chakra as well.Anyway, I can't help but feel that every time a standards-based rendering engine dies off, it's a blow to web standards. Gives devs another excuse to only build for the stock browsers, standards compliance be damned. Webkit and Chromium will now cover not only the overwhelming majority of the market, but also all pre-installed browsers. On the plus side, this will mean more developers working on Chromium itself.
marees - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
Ironically, I have switched to Opera on Android, after the white-on-white update by Chromebefore that I used to think, who the hell would need Opera, since it is using the same webkit engine as Chrome?
Alexvrb - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
They don't have different themes? Not that I wouldn't recommend Opera, heck the less Google the better. If I get a new phone my goal would be to strip as much Google out of it as possible, or maybe even slap Lineage on it. Apple has gone off the deep end too now so they're a lot less appealing than they were. Sigh.Oxford Guy - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
"Obviously, people don't care."People are sheep. If people were to care about things being done correctly, they wouldn't allow corporations to give them software with incomprehensible names, like Chrome, in the first place.
A software program's name should indicate its function. Apple got that right in 1983 with the Lisa's document-centric design. Task-centric computing makes sense and application-centric does not. It is the height of application-centric stupidity to have programs given names like Chrome and Firefox.
peevee - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link
"(Webkit is for all intents and purposes - Chromium)"Your view might be just a bit outdated. 5+ years... blink-blink.
Murloc - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
IME it has bugs and lack of basic functionalities that made me want to switch every time I was on a computer without chrome installed.Alexvrb - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
As the article points out, most of the issues had to do with web devs not testing against it - or worse, not adhering to standards. I use FF as a backup and almost never have to fire it up instead of Edge. As far as functionality goes, I can't think of anything I miss / need that isn't available.Kaggy - Thursday, December 6, 2018 - link
I think setting the default search to Google may have encouraged more users to switch.I know the functionality to change search engine is there but more general users will not do it and Bing sometimes do not give your good results.
The fact that Chrome does not need Administrative rights to install also help boost the marketshare in corporate environments.
mryamaguchi - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
That screenshot of Anandtech on Edge........... Where's the ludicrous amount of ad's? Edge blocks scripts on Anandtech website?Pooya - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Anandtech team is using an ad blocker to view their own website.Sailor23M - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
LMAO....FunBunny2 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
if it's a nice round one, I'll keep it as it rolls by. :)Umer - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Screenshot indicates that OP was logged into his AT account, seeing how he's staff, it's possible the ads are disabled for them on backend.... still lol, though.
PeachNCream - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
It'd be disgraceful to put up a screenshot of the site without an ad blocker turned on.Samus - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
It's also be unprofessional to put a photo with ads in an article. So proper editing at its finest right there.PeachNCream - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
Exactly right. There is nothing wrong with a screenshot that doesn't have ads on it. Although, I do generally think Anandtech's site is an atrocity without an ad blocker and NoScript running.willis936 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I hadn't realized that ad blockers weren't working while browsing as a guest on chrome until I came to anandtech. The situation is so bad that I refused to even attempt to read the site with ads. If the site really needs ads to live then they had better make them reasonable enough that the people running the site would choose to browse without ad blockers.lakedude - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I think this is a big shame. Internet Explorer was terrible for many years lacking basic features like spell check and tabbed browsing but Edge was a decent browser. Having fewer choices is not a good thing. When one browser does not meet your needs it is nice to be able to use another. Chrome is typically my first choice with Firefox coming in quite handy under some circumstances. I admit to not using Edge very often but I like having 3x different browsers, just in case...tuxRoller - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I'm not sure what platform you're on but webkit browsers are still a thing (and not just on Mac!).piroroadkill - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Isn't Blink really just Webkit?nevcairiel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
It started out being WebKit, but how long does it take to be considered truely its own thing?jordanclock - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Isn't Firefox really just Netscape?Samus - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Webkit is based on the Chromium codebase, so I'd put Safari in the same boat. It's not just the default browser on MacOS but the browser on nearly 500 million active iOS devices worldwide.mkozakewich - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
You've got it reversed. Google split Blink out of Webkit.peevee - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link
And long time ago.Chaser - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Well if you feel that way there is Opera, Vivaldi, Maxthon, and more.stephenbrooks - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Unfortunately Opera not an alternative as it also uses the Chromium rendering engine.emilemil1 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Quite happy about this. Edge is modern compared to IE, but it still lags behind the competition when it comes to supporting new web standards (along with Safari). Hopefully this will improve the situation a bit and make development a little easier.NesteaZen - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Firefox got so much better since it went down the webextensions road. NOTDolda2000 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I agree with what you're saying, but it's also true that making Firefox multiprocess was very necessary, and I'm pretty sure that was the main reason why they changed the extension interface.Zeratul56 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Although I am sad to see the distinct engine go. The things I most liked about it were the touch screen friendly interface and smooth scrolling. I hope these things are not going away.Overall though, the move is genius by Microsoft. They see control of the web slipping away from them in favor of Google. Google gets to dictate how the direction of certain web standards because of their market Share. Now, in almost a gorilla fashion Microsoft will regain control of the mass market web by contributing to the largest open source project. I don’t think Mricrosoft cares as much about browser market share as much as they just want to have a big seat at the table of web.
James5mith - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Letting one company have all the power in web standards is how you get the guy who developed QUIC at Google also being the chair of the HTTP standards board, and pushing HTTP/3 to be UDP only, and not being backwards compatible.That's a terrible idea, but nobody can stop him.
HStewart - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Also think of other benefits Microsoft has with this move1. They don't have to worry about actually coding the rendering engine, than can make suggestion to community
2. But the biggest benefit is in area of security. Most of the virus and malware come from the internet scripting and such. With a major part of browser being open source, than virus that target Microsoft Internet browser for example go away - any web related security issue effects all of browsers and such. In a way it win-win situation for Microsoft - when people complain about virus on internet with Microsoft - the primary cause is not up Chromium open source group
I also am curious off how far this is going to be - will Edge become shell wrapper around browser environment and just be in charge of actually physically showing content via output from Chromium Engine - in that case I would think touch support and smooth scrolling will be there.
Chugworth - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Where they went wrong was by creating a closed source browser to compete with Chrome. They should have made an open source browser engine to compete with Chromium. That way it would have gotten ported to other platforms and more people would use it.I'd bet that even now after choosing to end EdgeHTML development, if they were to open source it then other developers would pick it up and it would continue on as the third serious browser engine.
leo_sk - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
It would be better for web if they fork blink or webkit instead going hand to hand with google. Though there would be 3 different browser engines with similar roots, at least they can head to different directions without giving absolute monopoly to any onepeevee - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link
It would be better to have only one, as long as it is open sourced and free to fork (which still allows integration of changes from the parent branch). The best standard is de facto standard. Web development will be cheaper and produce higher quality results by concentrating all efforts on just one thing.As Mozilla financing dries up they will have to switch to Blink/V8 themselves to keep up.
Barilla - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I'm still not sure why Chrome gained popularity at such a rapid pace. At the time it was released it was much inferior to both Opera and Firefox. And yet, it's market share just kept climbing, while Firefox steadily declined and Opera remained fairly obscure. I still think Opera 12 (the last one based on Presto) was the best browser I've ever used, but unfortunately more and more websites started rendering poorly due to being optimized for Blink only, and after some times it was basically necessary to switch :(Tams80 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Google's vast resources and their pushing of their services.Lazy web developers didn't help, and I doubt they will make use of their 'new-found time' due to not having to test with other rendering engines.
Opera 12 (Presto) was great. It's a real shame it's dead and that they didn't open source Presto when they decided to move to Blink.
willis936 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I'm not so sure. Firefox was a dumpster fire when chrome was becoming popular. Firefox was the de facto choice through mid 2000s but it fell into a bad state and google capitalized. Opera always seemed nice but didn't have mass appeal. Mass appeal is what draws in extension creators, which is what made chrome popular.stephenbrooks - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
--[I'm still not sure why Chrome gained popularity at such a rapid pace.]--All the software whose installers came with a "Install Google Chrome!" option already checked by default. I bet they were getting kickbacks from Google for that.
peevee - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link
"I'm still not sure why Chrome gained popularity at such a rapid pace."Because every time you go to google.com in any other browser, it advertizes Chrome. And google.com is a monopoly in search and uses this monopoly power without shame.
Plus a few innovative feature for its time, like multi-process rendering, and starting up from very mature and standards-compliant codebase of WebKit (unlike, say, Edge, which was released half-baked, and did not - and does not - support majority of even Windows installations and just had bad reputation afterwards).
HStewart - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
One thing I am curious - how much change will the user actually see in this change. Only thing I can actual smaller renders of web pages on top of screen that is not in Chrome.Of course any thing that use latest updates for HTML that Chromium uses.
PeachNCream - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
IIRC - Chromium core code doesn't contain the Chrome browser bits that keep Google posted onPeachNCream - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Geez, that's the second time in two days!Google posted on the user's surfing activities. I don't think Microsoft would want to partner with Alphabet in supplying them with harvested web browsing data, but I presume Microsoft will build in their own collection components and still leave us with limited choices for a non-creeper web browser.
smacfe - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
Hate to be Captain Obvious here, but Edge is automatically selected as the default browser on every Windows 10 installation. Therefore hundreds of millions of people have chosen to trash Edge for some other browser solution. Based on the epic statistics alone, Edge is one of the worst products ever created by mankind. Personally, I would vote for the automatic paper towel dispenser as the worst ever, but the world has spoken.zodiacfml - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
I think this is for upcoming Qualcomm SoC for laptops. They probably want the least friction with users as the browser is the most important app in a laptopmkozakewich - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
So, I'm a bit confused. Isn't Chromium the open-source browser (before Google branding turns it into Chrome) using the Blink engine? Is Edge moving to the Blink engine, or is it fundamentally a Chromium reskin?I use a high-contrast theme to get dark-mode web pages, and so far it seems Edge and Firefox are the only ones to honour those settings. I hope Edge still continues with that.
Brett Howse - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
It'll be using Blink and V8 replacing EdgeHTML and Chakra.rahvin - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
The title of this should be, Microsoft admits it can't create a reliable browser and surrenders to Google.damianrobertjones - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link
"I recall when Google Chrome was first" .... Pushed onto millions of computers via java and adobe updates. Without being asked.