After watching its Edge browser bleed users, Microsoft this week gave up the ghost and said it will replace the browsers home-grown rendering engine with Blink, the engine that powers Google Chrome.
After a years-long pummeling, Microsoft this week surrendered in the browser war, saying that it will junk Edge’s home-grown rendering engine and replace it with Blink, the engine that powers Google’s Chrome.
With Edge pulling code from the Chromium project, the browser will also be able to run on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as well as macOS.
«We intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers,» wrote Joe Belfiore, a corporate vice president in the Windows group, in a post to a company blog .
Belfiore’s announcement was a stunning humiliation for Microsoft, which in the early years of this century ruled the browser world after Internet Explorer (IE) had obliterated Netscape Navigator and achieved market share in excess of 90%.
Although Edge will survive, it will no longer be a Microsoft-made browser: It will exist as a UI (user interface) wrapper around core technologies developed almost entirely by Google engineers, in the same way Opera has existed since 2013, when it ditched its own internal engine for Chromium’s Blink .
Microsoft cast the decision as affection for, and adoption of, open-source software that would, said Belfiore, lead to an application compatible «with other Chromium-based browsers.» That would «make the web experience better» for users, web developers and corporate IT, he argued.
Not surprisingly, Belfiore declined to mention the poor showing of Edge and the years of user share declines that bled IE white. But taking up Chrome’s rendering engine — dubbed «Blink» when it forked from WebKit in 2013 — was an admission of defeat and a move of desperation.
Microsoft’s troubles were largely of its own making.
In 2014, a year before the debut of Windows 10 and its default browser Edge, Microsoft announced that it would require all Windows users to run the most-recent version of IE, and when that requirement took effect, dropped support of the others. That, combined with the glacial development pace of IE, opened the door for rivals. Millions of Windows users, when faced with a change of browsers, decided to change from IE to Chrome rather than go from one version of IE to another.
