Last week Microsoft surprised the web development world with the announcement that Edge will be based in Chrome’s rendering engine and that EdgeHTML will no longer be developed.
The community’s reaction has been mostly negative. And it’s a solid argument: Having another major browser move to Chromium (as Opera did a few years ago) is a great loss of diversity, it promotes the “made for Chrome” badge, is a threat to web standards that have been long fought for by the whole community, it cripples diversity, competition and might create a dystopia where Google rules what can be made on the web and what not. Just like the horrible days of Internet Explorer 6.
But I think this might actually be a good idea.
Truth be told, Microsoft has been out of the web rendering engine game for years. IE never caught up with the development of web standards, never provided good support and had to carry with a lot of proprietary weight behind it.
Edge was supposed to change that. But the truth is that it never did. Supporting Edge or IE it’s still a pain for most web developers and having to test 3 or 4 different rendering engines it’s costly, painful and annoying for most web development teams. Besides the introduction of the Grid layout system (which is AMAZING!) Edge has been more of a pain than an advantage.
Microsoft is moving from a closed-source rendering engine that has lost a lot of market to an open-source rendering engine that is well-maintained and supported by a large community.
Having most major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge) share a solid codebase will save a lot of time and money for developers and companies that no longer need to test a closed-source engine that it’s only used in major corporations.
Chromium’s development will surely benefit from having Microsoft team within their community and in the end we all can count with an open-source rendering engine backed by 3 of the largest tech companies.
It’s obvious that Chromium’s master is Google and they rule the project, but Microsoft can always for Chromium the way Google forked WebKit. Either way, the shared codebase is there for all.
The best move was that Microsoft would have moved to Gecko. It would have been so much better.
It would have created 2 major rendering engines competing with each other and getting better all the time. And Mozilla’s team could use a well-positioned collaborator in the development and growth of Gecko.
But although Chromium is not as good of a choice as Gecko for the web overall (it’s better for Microsoft’s interests for sure), eliminating a rendering engine that is proprietary and has been lagging behind for years in order to replace it the most popular one (and open-source) can only mean good things for the future of the web.
The Next Web made a great point on the fact that this means more frequent releases.
Nobody knows for real how this will actually affect the web development industry, but I sure hope it ends up being a positive move overall.
