#news

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and is thinking about a new web browser for Windows 10, this time based on Chromium.

The Microsoft Edge web browser has had little success since its debut on Windows 10 in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, light and secure, but was launched with a plethora of issues that led users to reject it early. Since then Edge has struggled to gain traction, thanks to its constant instability and lack of mental sharing, from web users and developers.

For this reason, Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new Chromium-based web browser, which uses a similar rendering engine popularized by Google's Chrome browser known as Blink. Codename"Anaheim", this new browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform. It is currently not known whether Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand or whether the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is certain, however: EdgeHTML in the default browser of Windows 10 is dead.

EdgeHTML is dead - long life to Blink

Many will be happy to know that Microsoft is finally adopting a different rendering engine for the default web browser on Windows 10. The use of Chromium means that websites should behave exactly as they did on Google Chrome in Microsoft's new Anaheim browser, which means that users should not suffer the same instability and performance issues as they found Edge today. This is the first step to revitalizing the built-in Windows 10 web browser for users on PCs and phones. Edge on iOS and Android already uses native rendering engines for those platforms, so it won't change much on that front.

In addition, Microsoft engineers were recently spotted in code in the Chromium project to make Google Chrome work on ARM. Maybe part of that work will translate to Anaheim even on Windows 10 on ARM.

Most likely we will see Microsoft introduce Anaheim during the 19H1 development cycle, which Insiders is currently testing in the Fast ring. Microsoft's web browser should finally be able to compete with Chrome, Opera and Firefox and those who are all-in with the Microsoft ecosystem will finally have a Microsoft browser that works well when browsing the web.

There are still many things we don't know about Anaheim and we're sure we'll hear more officially from Microsoft in the coming weeks.

  • By Pangoly,