Windows Central reports that Microsoft is planning to replace its Edge browser, which uses Microsoft’s own EdgeHTML rendering engine and Chakra JavaScript engine, with a new browser built on Chromium, the open source counterpart to Google’s Chrome. The new browser has the codename Anaheim.
The report is short on details. The easiest thing for Microsoft to do would be to use Chromium’s code wholesale—the Blink rendering engine, the V8 JavaScript engine, and the Chrome user interface with the Google Account parts omitted—to produce something that looks, works, and feels almost identical to Chrome. Alternatively, Redmond could use Blink and V8 but wrap them in Edge’s user interface (or some derivative thereof), to retain its own appearance. It might even be possible to do something weird, such as use Blink with the Chakra JavaScript engine. We’ll have to wait and see.
Since its launch with Windows 10, Edge has failed to gain much market share. The first iterations of Edge were extremely barebones, offering little more than a basic tabbed browser—no extensions, little control over behavior. Early releases of Edge were also not as stable as one might have liked, making the browser hard to recommend. Three years later on and Edge is greatly—but unevenly—improved. The browser engine’s stability seems to be much better than it was, and performance and compatibility remain solid (though with the exception of a few corner cases, these were never a real concern).
What has consistently let Edge down is the stuff around the engine. Tab handling remains rudimentary, for example; it’s still all too easy to make Edge lose my meticulously pinned, organized tabs, presenting me with an empty browser window. Cross-device syncing falls short of that provided by Chrome. Chrome’s integrated password manager is vastly superior to Edge’s. The number of extensions available is limited (though this is a little double-edged; Microsoft’s carefully vetted set of extensions sidesteps the significant issues that Google has had with malicious Chrome extensions).