It's official.
Microsoft is killing Edge and rebuilding it using Google's Chromium project.
This has huge implications for the web, the open source community, the Microsoft Store,
the Universal Windows Platform, Chrome, ChromeOS, basically everything, so in the 41st episode
of the Story Behind series, let me walk through all of these implications one by one.
Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video.
The first 500 students to use the link in the description below
will 2 months of premium access for free.
Currently, the three big platforms, so Windows, Android and iOS all come with their own browsers
that are built mostly in-house, meaning that the platform maker control both their user
interface and how these browsers actually render webpages, which is controlled by something
called a rendering engine.
And that's what Microsoft's announcement will change.
Because the first thing Microsoft has announced is that it is going to slowly phase out its
own rendering engines, specifically EdgeHTML and Chakra, and replace it with tech from
Google's Chromium project, such as the Blink rendering engine and the V8 JavaScript Engine.
Microsoft will keep control over the user interface, and extra features like
Windows Hello login and so on, but this new version of Edge will even support Chrome extensions
apparently.
Chromium of course powers Google Chrome, but since it is open source, it's also adopted
by many other products like Opera, Vivaldi, Brave and even app platforms like Electron,
which is what a lot of new desktop apps like Spotify, the newer versions of Skype
or Visual Studio Code are built on.
Chromium is everywhere, and it's not news that one browser adopts another browser's engine.
For example, Microsoft Edge on Android already uses Chromium stuff and all browsers on iOS
are forced to use the Apple tech from Safari, but this is the first time in a while where we
we see a major commercially developed OS with a default browser that will not rely on its
own in-house engine.
And there is a lot more, but this by itself already has 2 huge implications.
Edge itself will likely become a better browser for most people because Chromium has
slightly superior compatibility with web standards, and because developers used to
not really optimize their sites for the old Edge with its tiny market share, but it also means that
browsers that do not use the Chromium engine will have an even harder time going forward.
The two big competitors are currently Firefox, which is my browser of choice, which uses
its own, also open source engine called Gecko, and Apple's Safari, which uses WebKit.
These two are now part of an even smaller minority that fewer and fewer developers will test for.
OK, part 2 of the announcement is that Microsoft will start supporting and contributing to
the Chromium open source project, so they are rumored to port over some of the better
parts of Edge to Chromium like smoother scrolling, pinch to zoom or reduced power consumption
for example.
So that should overall lead to a better experience on all Chromium based browsers, which is great,
but I just can't help but wonder how exactly this collaboration will work on the long run.
Like, clearly Google's and Microsoft's objectives aren't exactly perfectly aligned, so there are bound
to be fundamental disagreements between the two.
Sure, Microsoft could always just decide to fork Chromium and make its own engine out of it if the
disagreements are too big, after all, Chromium is just a fork of Apple's WebKit, so that would kind of make
things go full circle, but, uhh, I don't imagine this being as smooth a process as Microsoft
says it will be.
OK, part 3 is that is that this new browser will be de-coupled from Windows 10.
So the current Edge is a part of Windows 10, meaning that it can't be downloaded and installed,
it can't be uninstalled, it only gets updated when Windows gets updated, which is twice
a year, and it's currently not available on older Windows versions.
And this is changing.
Just like Chrome, the new Edge will be downloadable to multiple platforms, including Window 7
and 8.1 and even MacOS and will receive more frequent updates.
Now, I doubt that most MacOS users, or people who couldn't bother to Upgrade to Windows 10
love Microsoft so much they can't wait to download a new browser from them, but there
are 2 distinct groups of people that this announcement might be interesting for.
Web Developers, who often use Mac will now be able to test their web apps natively on Mac
using Edge, and enterprise customers, many of which are stuck on Windows 7 or 8.1
who are not allowed to download just a random browser from the internet,
will finally get something newer than the ancient Internet Explorer.
So overall, this is a net positive, I guess.
Part 4 is that this new Edge is not a UWP or Universal Windows Platform app and there
are very strong rumors that it will not be distributed through the Store.
UWP, if you didn't know is Microsoft's native app platform for Windows 10 that was supposed
to be this huge thing that worked on Windows Phone and Xbox and Hololens and what not,
and while the old Edge was built on top of it, the new one will be built on top of the
older Win32 platform.
Kind of understandable, since that's just what Chromium uses and because older Windows
platforms only support Win32, but yeah, it's not a good look.
Together with multiple new key apps from Microsoft like Teams, Visual Studio Code and the new
Skype that didn't go the UWP / Microsoft Store route, this definitely shows that Microsoft
has either significantly de-prioritized or delayed its efforts to build a proper new app platform.
And that's a good place to end the announcements and start exploring why Microsoft made this switch.
The announcement post they wrote on GitHub would like you to believe that they switched
because their love for the open source community was too strong and they just couldn't contain
it anymore, but of course that's more of a PR story than anything.
Don't get me wrong, the new Microsoft does seem to love Open Source quite a bit, but
they could have just open sourced Edge, or decided to adopt Firefox's Gecko engine,
which is truly open source and would have given Google Chrome some proper competition.
Open source was a factor for sure, but not the main factor in my opinion.
In fact, this was, more than anything, just a simple admission of defeat.
Microsoft tried really hard to make Edge work, they poured resources into it, made it actually
a pretty decent browser aaand it never really took off.
So instead of continuing to build their own thing and burning money, I think they will
try to start influencing Chromium instead.
Hear me out.
Historically, Google has been notoriously unwilling to support most Microsoft Initiatives
like Windows Phone, like the UWP platform, like the Microsoft Store, like, you know, making
their websites work well in Edge, or more recently Windows 10 on ARM.
But now Microsoft can just, uh, gently nudge them into the right direction by contributing
the right code to Chromium.
Starting with ARM, it seems like Snapdragon processors are finally going to become viable
for Windows 10 this year with the recently announced 8cx.
Until now, one of the main things holding the platform back was that Chromium apps weren't
native and had terrible performance on it.
But now with Microsoft's contributions, that will change.
The new Edge, Chrome, Electron apps, they will all be running natively on ARM.
Given that in a few years from now I expect a big chunk of Windows devices to run ARM
chips, I think this is hugely important for Windows.
Similarly, I also wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft slowly tried to introduce UWP support
to Chromium.
In fact, some open source Google projects like WebRTC for example have been introduced
to UWP and I think there is more to come.
Like, ever heard of Windows 10 Lite?
It is the current code name of Microsoft's long-standing dream of building a version
of Windows that doesn't have all the nasty legacy stuff Windows has been carrying around
with it for decades.
It would make things lighter, faster, more secure by only running UWP apps an web apps.
Kind of Like Microsoft's take on a Chromebook.
Problem is, the new Edge, which I suppose will be a huge part of this new OS is neither of those things,
it's a Win32 app.
So it couldn't actually run on this new platform... Unless, until then, Microsoft finds a way
to turn it into a UWP app.
And that would mean that in the future, conveniently, Chromium browsers and all the Electron apps
could also easily become native UWP apps if they wanted to.
Look, I bet that Microsoft would have preferred to have its own successful UWP browser, that the masses
adopted and loved, but since that failed, the next logical business decision is to adopt this popular thing
that everyone uses, Chromium, and to slowly turn it into something that Microsoft can benefit from.
And we'll see how much Google will let them get away with.
If you are excited about the future of Edge, there is a link to joining the Edge insider program
in the description below, but if you are worried that Chromium is becoming a little too dominant,
or you just want to try something else, I actually recommend using Firefox.
It's become really good lately and it is not controlled by any huge corporation.
Now, I've been missing from YouTube for about 2 months for now, because ...
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