Microsoft is giving up and changing their Edge browser over to the Chromium base. This means that in the new year Edge will be completely redone based on the Chromium project, which many browsers are; most notably Google Chrome. There has always been a choice of Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and then Edge, Opera and a few others. Most of the others have already converted over to the Chromium project base, including Opera, so Microsoft is not alone in this move. Going forward it will have the same code base as Google Chrome and many others reducing the real number of options.
What does that mean?
Well, to the average person, probably not a lot, it in fact might be a good thing as you will be able to get many of the add-ons that work in Chrome on the Microsoft Edge browser and there will be many more possibilities for themes. To large corporate businesses it may be a pain as they have only just got many of the group policies for Edge that they have needed.
Internet Explorer was a fairly good and certainly well-established browser due to it being built-in to the operating system, which is why it is still there as it is part of Windows. It was made this way to avoid problems with competition laws. “Sorry your honour we can’t remove it because it is an integral piece of Windows” was their response to the European Court of Law in the early 2000s. That’s why we then had a pop up after installing Windows to show you that there were alternate browsers that could be downloaded.
The good thing about IE is that it could be configured to be secure, it was just a little, difficult for the average user but it could be done using group policy, keeping everyone in an organisation safe.
Edge, the replacement for Internet Explorer has never managed to gain the foothold that IE did. Google Chrome and Firefox are far bigger now. That is one reason why they are moving to the Chromium base for Edge. This move does have pros and cons. It means that it will have the sane code base as Google Chrome and so many of the features that are available in Chrome will be available in the new Edge (if they keep the name), that also means that Microsoft will have to start again with the Group Policies, needed for corporate administrators to be able to lock it down as they require.
If they do manage to claw back some of the market share then the other issues is that any bugs or exploits found in the code base will be present in Chrome and Edge, this gives a wider attack surface to exploit from a single flaw.
In any case time will tell and I personally am sure it will be an improvement over the current Edge browser
Keep Safe
CritchCorp Computers Ltd
