Microsoft flirts with Chromium as a replacement for Edge

Chromium Engine currently serves as the basis for, among other things, Google Chrome. Microsoft also seems to be interested in replacing Microsoft Edge and EdgeHTML, according to sources from WindowsCentral.

There is a wide misunderstanding about Chrome browser. It’s engine, Webkit, is not written by Google. It is free for all and open source. It serves as a foundation for Chrome, Chromium, Opera and many others. Chromium is also open source, others are not. Chrome browser is only Google’s wrap around the WebKit.

With the arrival of Windows 10, Microsoft, for the first time in the history of the operating system, renounced Internet Explorer. The browser had caught quite a few hits over the years, the browser was seen as lethargic and unsafe. With the arrival of new browsers such as Google Chrome, the share of Microsoft therefore dropped enormously fast – Edge, the browser that comes with Windows 10, should have solved this. Nevertheless, the new setup has not been such a success, at the time of writing, Microsoft Edge, the browser based on EdgeHTML, has a market share of only five percent.

This is a considerable disappointment for Microsoft, who had just hoped to make browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox “inferior” on its platform. These disappointing results do not come out of the blue, and certainly have a number of reasons: the browser missed, especially in the early days, a lot of functions such as extensions. The company may want to re-search for a new strategy to meet the needs of customers – WindowsCentral says it has indications for the development of a Windows browser based on Chromium. With that, the company would say goodbye to EdgeHTML, and this only slightly more than three years after the unveiling of Microsoft Edge.

It would not come as a complete surprise that Microsoft is working on a Chromium browser for Windows 10 – it is not the first time that it is experimenting with the open-source project, Chromium has already been used as the basis for the Edge browser for Android. . It would therefore be a logical step to provide the desktop browser with the same basis, especially if you would like to share functions between the two browsers more easily. In addition, Microsoft has already made a number of contributions to Chromium in recent weeks that indicate a possible arrival of Chromium to a Microsoft browser for Windows 10. The new project, which goes through life as Project Anaheim, still sounds completely unknown our ears. Possibly this will soon change, what the name of the browser is going to be if it actually comes to Windows is not known.