Microsoft Edge Browser Running Officially on Chromium since January 15th 2020

This news may have slipped some of you by - as in fact it did me until I was doing some referencing recently for a client issue. I always thought Edge was a natural continuation of Internet Explorer - just more aligned to the then brand new Windows 10 application platform.

Long gone are the heady days when IE was the number one browser - in fact the Edge successor has been languishing in 3rd place - behind Chrome and Firefox- for quite some time now.

I guess Microsoft decided that Google’s Chromium architecture was somewhat superior to their own - and in 2019 they initiated project Anaheim to rebuild their Edge browser - using a combination of the Blink and V8 engines, but seemingly building on Chromium now - which means no further support for Active X and BHO technologies.

I’m not sure what the overall intentions or gains from this move are (besides overheads?) - but from a marketing standpoint Microsoft surely looses out on proper differentiation here. Google can say that their browser is pure-play Chrome - while calling out Edge as a somehow lesser and watered-down derivative of their proprietary - yet also open-source Chromium platform.

I assume that Edge will still be naturally aligned with the Bing search engine - while I am barely aware of that search engine’s existence nowadays. 99% of my searches are in Google, and I occasionally double-check in DuckDuckGo - although that seems to happen fairly rarely.

I would love to know more about the operational reasons as to why Microsoft in effect ditched its own proprietary engine for Chromium. I think it likely just a cost saving - while Microsoft has of course been investigating and putting resources into the Chromium project itself for a number of years.

I personally run on Mac and my browser of choice is Safari - mostly because it memorises all my logins across devices - from MaxBook Pro to iPhone phone and Apple TV - but also because Apple at least for now seems to care the most about its customers privacy and security. I’m not sure I fully trust anyone of these companies - but in the areas mentioned I trust Apple a lot more than Google and Microsoft.

Before I switched fully to Mac OS, I was windows based and ran mainly with Chrome. In the early days Chrome was a mean lean beast of a browser - super fast and reliable. While more recent versions in fact like Gmail - have become bloated and more laggardly as they’ve onboard more and more Chrome OS elements.

The vast majority of my colleagues tend to favour Firefox on Windows and Safari on Mac - I’m not really sure where Microsoft’s browser fits in any more. They seem to be slightly losing their edge to me - what do you think?