Microsoft Edge Chromium and the Full Circle
Your web browser’s family tree
In the fall of 1996 the earliest form of the web browser you’re probably reading this article on was created by Torben Weis and Martin Jones. That year marked the peak market share of Netscape Navigator, the commercial ancestor of Firefox, fueled by a booming early Internet. Microsoft dealt a devastating blow in the browser wars in August when it bundled Internet Explorer version 3 free with every copy of Windows. This move led to a landmark 1998 AntiTrust case against Microsoft culminating in Netscape’s sale in 1998 to AOL and its ultimate collapse in the early 2000’s.
23 years later, after Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge browser launched in January of 2020, almost all modern web browsers now trace back to the khtmlw (KDE HTML Widget) library Weis and Jones created between October and December of 1996. While modern browsers didn’t all begin there, all but Firefox ended up moving to and sharing this common technological ancestor.
Origins
Torben Weis from Germany and Martin Jones from Australia, were drawn to contribute to a brand new open source graphical user interface for Linux called KDE (October, 1996):
Weis thought it:
“might be a good idea to render the KDE file manager (KFM) in HTML, allowing for customized views. It turned out that this feature was rarely used and eventually disappeared, but the web browser code lived on and eventually became KHTML and then WebKit.”
Jones recalls that:
“I wrote a man page / info page viewer in motif, which was awful. That led me to Qt and the viewer got a rewrite. I happened to see Matthias Ettrich’s KDE proposal at about the same time and contributed the viewer to KDE. From there I contributed to various parts of KDE. I suspect my interest in khtmlw originated in its use for documentation.”
Timeline
1998–1999: Konqueror powered by KHTML
Konqueror, a file manager/web browser for KDE, used KHTML based on the khtmlw library. Waldo Bastian and later Lars Knoll (in the video at the top of the article) were key contributors advancing that effort into a usable web browser.
2001–2003: Apple bases WebKit on KHTML to power Safari
The WebKit project was “forked” by Apple from the KHTML rendering engine in 2001. Forking, analogous to taking a fork in the roadmap of an open source software project, is when the current code for one project becomes the foundation for a new project that goes in a different direction. Apple developed WebKit into the basis for the Safari web browser released in 2003.
2008: Google launches Chrome/Chromium powered by WebKit
Google launched its own web browser in 2008 using WebKit as its technological foundation. Current Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai oversaw the launch during his time as VP of products. Simultaneously, The Chromium open source project was created with the essentials of Google Chrome, excluding proprietary Google services and licenses for video decoders.
2011: WebKit powers UC Browser
UCWeb, owned by the Alibaba Group, created a popular web browser in China called UC Browser. In 2011 the browser’s underlying technologies moved to WebKit.
2013: Google bases Blink on WebKit to power Chrome
Google announced it was forking the Blink rendering engine from WebKit for Chrome/Chromium to “introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and (it) might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular has become a WebKit monoculture”.
2013: Chromium powers Opera
Around the same time Chromium was moving to Blink, Opera announced its move away from its own web technologies to powering their web browser with Chromium/Blink instead.
2015: WebKit powers Firefox (on iOS only)
In the fall of 2015, Firefox for iOS launched globally using the underlying iOS WebKit technologies as the iOS app store rules forbid alternatives.
Non-Safari Browsers powered by WebKit only on iOS:
Google’s Chrome on iOS, released in 2012, was also restricted to using WebKit while Chrome moved to Blink on all other platforms. This restriction by Apple is not without controversy as, until recently, the performance of non-Safari browsers on iOS was lesser than Safari on the same devices.
2020: Chromium powers Microsoft Edge
Microsoft announced in late 2018 that the Edge browser would switch from their own technology (EdgeHTML) to using the open source Chromium as the foundation on Windows as well as on Mac OS and mobile. The rebuilt Edge browser launched in January of 2020 as the heir to Internet Explorer 11.
2020 and beyond
The consolidation of web technologies and concentration of power this creates for the companies steering them, Apple and Google, is something to watch as the next decade plays out. Mozilla CEO Chris Beard cautions:
“If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium. That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again.”
Indeed, these days Weis:
“[uses] Firefox most of the time. One reason is that I am worried that we might end up with only a single modern browser implementation. The web should be an open standard.”
Weis concedes that new entrants will have an impossible climb to be able to compete as even Microsoft is throwing in the towel:
“Today, launching a new web browser from scratch would be impossible. Back at my KDE time, it was a tough thing to do, but not an impossible thing to do.”
Will web browser innovation stall again as it did when Internet Explorer dominated the market? It only seems certain that a first(?) full circle in the history of the web is now complete.
Thank you to professor Torben Weis and Martin Jones for providing their perspectives for this article!
Torben Weis, Dr.-Ing is currently a professor holding a doctorate in engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany whose research is centered around distributed systems.
Martin Jones is currently a senior software engineer and co-founder of Qinetic Pty Ltd, a consulting company based in Australia working on Qt-based projects. Qt is an open source toolkit that KDE and other software is based on.
Further reading
- Find out how you get to a real customer problem by finding The “project cartoon” root cause
- If you’re working on new products check out how to Prioritize a backlog like an entrepreneur
- Want to keep the conversation going? Reach out on LinkedIn
