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Microsoft is Building a Chromium-powered Web Browser That Will Replace Edge on Windows 10: Report (windowscentral.com) 377

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and is building a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium, news blog Windows Central reported Monday. From the report: Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 back in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but launched with a plethora of issues which resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain any traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser. Codenamed Anaheim, this new web browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.

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Microsoft is Building a Chromium-powered Web Browser That Will Replace Edge on Windows 10: Report

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:07AM (#57745160)

    Oh no you DON'T just get to quietly admit defeat, there has to be public shaming! THEM'S THE RULES!

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:15AM (#57745198)

      It's probably more about someone finally realizing that, there's a high quality rendering engine available for free for them to use.

      Microsoft will still have their own branded browser... But nobody is making money off of the rendering engine, and it's the hardest part of the browser to build/optimize.

      Might as well leave the non-money making part to others while MS engineers focus on browser shell, money making services etc.

      • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @09:56AM (#57746700)

        Back in the late 1990's Microsoft won the browser war against Netscape. However they had failed to reach the objective of such war.
        Microsoft never really liked the World Wide Web. With Windows 95 it came with rather limited IE browser (in essence a tool to download Netscape) but at the time they really didn't care much, because they were pushing MSN service to compete against AOL. These services at the time were less an ISP but a large multi-node BBS with graphics. That was the direction they wanted to go. The internet and WWW was just for academic and those looser who had those Unix based servers.

        However the Web Grew in popularity, and Netscape was getting big, and showing a future of an OS independent system, where the browser was king. This future was a threat to Microsoft, however it seemed inevitable. So Microsoft started the browser war by beefing up IE to compete with Netscape (Which was a bold move at the time, as most applications that come with the OS were just small tools that just barely get the job done, eg. notepad, wordpad, calc, paint ). Now Microsoft is on its EEE strategy. Embrace the Web, Extend it with its own custom html commands and http protocol changes, then being able to kill it, because what everyone is using is so far from the normal web, there isn't any point to it anymore.

        With Windows 98 and the embedded full feature browser. It fully Embraced the web, and basically killed Netscape. Then they were in the process of Extending, with some ideas that are still common such as CSS, and others that are just a bad idea such as Active X, and Sliverlight. However Microsoft got stuck on IE 6 for way too long, and the Active X became a security nightmare. Microsoft extensions made people to not trust Microsoft, as their systems were getting hacked, often working around firewalls and all the other best practices at the time, because a trusted sight may had a less then trustful advertiser which would run applications on your PC.

        This security problem brought in a new lightweight browser called Firefox. Which supported the standards much better then IE, was faster and didn't use the stuff that allowed people to break into the computer. Then Firefox grew where it started to be too big, that is where Google Chrome came in (at around the same time Safari came in for Apple also based on WebKit)

        Now the growth of the WebKit based browsers, now meant for browsing the Web, it really doesn't matter if you are using Linux, Windows, MacOS or even some of the lesser known OS's such as the BSD's. And Netscapes vision of nearly all your applications being web based is nearly true today. Now Microsoft is having to fight to keep its market share, and having to deal with mobile devices with Apple and Google based OS's. Microsoft is still going strong, but they had to change their business model a lot.

        So they had won the browser war but failed the objective. Now with them trying to put effort into a rendering engine is just wasting resources. Going to a WebKit chromium browser will probably just let them focus more on what they really want to focus on and less on trying to get a better HTML5 support score.

        • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @10:37AM (#57746910)

          Back in the late 1990's Microsoft won the browser war against Netscape

          Microsoft didnt win. Netscape lost. It was a do-it-yourself mugging.

          Netscape committed suicide. [joelonsoftware.com]

          • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @11:28AM (#57747210)

            While it may have been ill-advised, realistically netscape was screwed by the gigantic disadvantage of having to be downloaded in a time when 57 kbit was the typical internet bandwidth.

            So they suffered from two things:
            -Microsoft bundling it into the OS meant that *everyone* had a serviceable browser
            -Netscape did not manage to overcome this through getting the OEMs to bundle their alternative (Hardware vendors wouldn't do this without getting paid to do so, and MS stood there with always deeper incentives for OEMs to *not* bundle Netscape).

            There's no amount of doing the technology part of the browser better that could have saved them.

            • by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @03:39PM (#57748936)

              You missed a third thing:

              Netscape sucked. A lot. Everybody talks about 'standards' but Netscape was as guilty of being non-standards based as IE at the time. In fact a lot of the DHTML stuff that IE pioneered ended up forming the basis of quite a few technologies.

              Also I'm just going to point out that CSS Box mode from IE is making a large resurgence because it was always arguably the more sane model.

              IE vs Firefox or Opera was a completely different landscape than IE vs Netscape. IE vs Netscape was two incredibly proprietary non-standard browsers competing in the wild west. I switched to IE not because it was bundled but because I was so fed up with Netscape's poor technology.

              Once it died and was resurrected as firefox while Microsoft abandoned IE development, Firefox started offering compelling technological advantages to switch but at the time Netscape was bad. That's what I think most people forget. They remember the Firefox vs IE days and just back project their memories of Firefox onto Netscape when that was far from the case.

            • At the time, the PC wasn't dominant except in homes. The corporate world was still using a lot of workstations, especially in technical areas which was where the web was more popular originally. When workstations started being replaced by lower powered PCs a lot of technical users still stuck to Netscape (and it's honory child, Mozilla). Many corporations had policies against using Internet Explorer, but other corporations had IT support groups that just did whatever Micrososft asked and they'd go and cr

        • Microsoft wanted to Win the Internet so they could change the standards to their liking
        • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @11:13AM (#57747092)

          Then Firefox grew where it started to be too big, that is where Google Chrome came in (at around the same time Safari came in for Apple also based on WebKit)

          I don't know which parallel Universe you come from, but Safari pre-dates Chrome by more than five years. Also, Google used WebKit, Apple's fork of KHTML, until Chrome version 27. Starting with Chrome 28, it used Blink as its rendering engine which is Google's fork of WebKit.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
          January 7, 2003, at Macworld San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had developed its own web browser, called Safari. It was based on Apple's internal fork of the KHTML rendering engine, called WebKit.[9] The company released the first beta version, available only for Mac OS X, later

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
          The browser was first publicly released on September 2, 2008 for Windows XP and later, with 43 supported languages, officially a beta version,[33] and as a stable public release on December 11, 2008.

        • This was the thing I never understood about Firefox. I have been using SeaMonkey for a very long time now. When Firefox came out they removed a whole bunch of stuff, but from day 1 it was a larger download, took more RAM and started slower.
          Now it still is larger, takes up more RAM, starts slower, has more bloat and is removing old standards.
        • by Pfhorrest ( 545131 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @01:14PM (#57747994) Homepage Journal

          This security problem brought in a new lightweight browser called Firefox. Which supported the standards much better then IE, was faster and didn't use the stuff that allowed people to break into the computer. Then Firefox grew where it started to be too big, that is where Google Chrome came in (at around the same time Safari came in for Apple also based on WebKit)

          A couple important missing bits to note in your history here:

          - Firefox is powered by Mozilla which was also the core of Netscape Navigator, so Firefox was basically the revenge of Netscape.

          - WebKit was created by Apple (as a fork of the KHTML renderer from KDE) specifically to power Safari (all of the OSX/OpenStep/NeXTSTEP libraries are named something-Kit), and then Google adopted that for Chrome, so Safari isn't really just a side note, Safari is essentially the ancestor of Chrome.

          • by Rob Riggs ( 6418 )
            iOS was the death knell for a lot of proprietary IE crap pervading the web and in the enterprise. As soon as CEOs started showing up with their shiny new toys to find the corporate web site and intranet looked like crap or would not render, heads rolled and a whole new set of web developers were hired on to replace the IE6 mess they had been maintaining for a decade.
        • Now Microsoft is on its EEE strategy. Embrace the Web, Extend it with its own custom html commands and http protocol changes, then being able to kill it, because what everyone is using is so far from the normal web, there isn't any point to it anymore.

          Note this is what Google is doing now, too. While they don't seem to be actively malicious about it, it would be nice to have some browser diversity to prevent them from making poor design decisions.

        • by fwarren ( 579763 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @03:49PM (#57748994) Homepage

          The big problem with Active X security is if you ever downloaded a control and checked off "Trust Microsoft".

          At that point any website could force a different version of an Microsoft signed active-x control to download.

          So if there was a serious exploit was found in version 1.2 of a control, does not matter it is 5 years later and the user has version 1.8. When they visit your site you can force the download of version 1.2 and then execute your exploit.

          There was just no way round this. If you had to do business with a trusted site that had active-x controls, if they ever got hacked AND you had ever clicked "Trust Microsoft" there was no way to defend against that.

  • by Tyger-ZA ( 1886544 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:09AM (#57745166)
    Now if Windows can be turned into an MS branded *nix distro things would be even better
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:14AM (#57745190)

    Spoiler: The rendering engine is not the reason I don't trust your web browser, nor will switching to Chromium get me to actually use it.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @03:06AM (#57745668)

      I guess we still haven't forgiven or forgotten IE6. Any MS web browser should be treated with extreme suspicion.

    • by jma05 ( 897351 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @06:11AM (#57746098)

      They are probably not doing this to gain your trust.

      It is probably either or both of
      1. Rendering engine is not the differentiating feature of browsers anymore (for me it is, plugin ecosystem, security and privacy choices in design).
      2. They understand that they cannot win the browser wars and chose not to spend any further money on the most expensive part of browser development.

      They did this before. Microsoft only invested money in the browser when they intended to win the browser wars, and they did with IE. After that, they downsized their dev team. The web stagnated for years until Firefox emerged.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:35AM (#57746362) Homepage Journal

      Which browser does AC trust?

      Firefox - slyly installs binary plugins without consent, keeps adding new bullshit like Pocket

      Chrome - allegedly spies on you

      Vivaldi - has the same telemetry as Chrome (unique ID, IP address, some system info), malware protection

      Opera - Chinese owned, same spying as Chrome

      Safari - bundles more Apple crapware, UI is janky on Windows, Apple spies on you the same as Google does

      Edge - Microsoft spyware

      Maybe IE6 wasn't so bad...

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        It's Palemoon for me!
        • Safari - bundles more Apple crapware, UI is janky on Windows, Apple spies on you the same as Google does

          Safari for Windows hasn't been available since 2012... just sayin'.

          And I think Apple's spy model is a little different than Google's.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I used to like Pale Moon but it has severe performance issues, and one of the updates deleted a lot of user data. I don't have confidence in the developers or that performance will ever get competitive. While it doesn't seem to have spying built in, the fact that it's using an old version of the Firefox codebase with known vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild means you will probably be p0wned by someone far worse than Google anyway.

          My post above was really just mocking the Slashdot posters who always

      • I'm on FF, with uMatrix blocking all non-1st-party cookies'n'scripts, and non-whitelisted cookies deleting.

        Similar on mobile. My mileage is billboard-free.
  • by louzer ( 1006689 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:14AM (#57745192)
    I guess now banks and B2B companies will now feel comfortable to use Edge now that Microsoft has stopped supporting it.
  • by jessepdx ( 1207628 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:14AM (#57745194)

    Edge downloads Chrome faster than any other browser

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:40AM (#57746388) Homepage Journal

      PROTIP: Use a package manager like Chocolatey to avoid needing to open Edge at all! Install it from a flash drive and then easily install/update all the software you need without visiting a dozen websites.

      Scoop (https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop) is pretty good too. Fewer packages but you can install it directly from PowerShell without even a flash drive or browser.

  • by Eravnrekaree ( 467752 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:16AM (#57745206)

    Next thing they will be replacing the Windows kernel with the Linux kernel with a Win32 compatibility layer for running Windows apps on Linux, and a driver compatibility layer for existing Windows drivers. I'm not kidding. Mark my words. It will happen. Will also include even moving the Windows GUI over to Microsoft's own Wayland server. The UI look and feel will be maintaining but the underlying architecture replaced with wayland with a compatability layer for Win32 apps.

    Microsoft is a cloud company, the Windows kernel really is just an added expense that it wants to shed so will move Windows over to a Linux kernel, seamlessly, due to the compatibility layer, windows apps and drivers will run fine. They can thus share development costs with other users of Linux.

    This is exactly whats happening with Edge as well. Overall, its a pretty good thing, actually.

    • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:27AM (#57745242)

      It seemed like they have wanted to get rid of the kernel since at least the days they were sued from inter-coding IE and windows. Will be interesting to see the timeline.

      --
      The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow -- Bill Gates

    • they will be replacing the Windows kernel with the Linux kernel with a Win32 compatibility layer for running Windows apps on Linux

      If they can get DirectX working the Linux kernel with a minimal performance penalty then I say HELL YES!!!!

      • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:52AM (#57745316)

        Fuck that. DirectX should just die. If you want to play "older" DX based games then there is always WINE and the Vulkan implementation of D3D11/D3D10. [github.com]

        • I would love nothing more than to see DirectX DIAF but the truth is no developer is going to rewrite their existing code because there is no $$$ in it. Therefore, if I can get all my Steam games to work on a Linux kernel via a Microsoft derived Linux kernel/DirectX implementation I'm all for it.
          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Tyger-ZA ( 1886544 )

            I would love nothing more than to see DirectX DIAF but the truth is no developer is going to rewrite their existing code because there is no $$$ in it. Therefore, if I can get all my Steam games to work on a Linux kernel via a Microsoft derived Linux kernel/DirectX implementation I'm all for it.

            Nobody implied developers should go rewrite their shit to remove DirectX

            You could use the Linux version of Steam with Proton [steamcommunity.com] to make the Windows games from your Steam account work on Linux

            And I just played the Windows version of Starcraft 2 on Linux using Lutris [lutris.net] to configure the correct Wine version etc.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Indeed. DirectX was a bad idea right from the start, fueled by a lot of money and not a lot of understanding.

    • by rwbaskette ( 9363 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:52AM (#57745320)

      The groundwork for doing this is already there.

      SQL Server 2017 for Linux required the creation of a PAL (platform abstraction layer) that allows essential kernel function for SQL Server to run.

      It's really interesting stuff.

      Add a dash of gdi borrowed from wine and you might have something.

      "SQL Server on Linux: How? Introduction":
      https://cloudblogs.microsoft.c... [microsoft.com]

    • Windows subsystem for Linux is the thin edge of the wedge... gradually build more stuff to run on WSL, and then a few years from now, everything flips, and instead of running linux apps in a windows host, the base os will be linux, and the windows apps will be running in wine... and it will still cost >100$ to buy the *license* bute they can fire almost all their OS folks, and their cost will be nil. If they play their cards right, just us nerds will notice.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, the may decide on an xBSD kernel instead, due to the licencing. And they may make the GUI simply a window-manager on top of X.org. But essentially, you are right. They spend an extreme amount of money to maintain their island of incompatibility and all the reasons for doing that are vanishing. I also agree that it is a good thing.

      You know, that would be the last step for the UNIX kernel API to take over the world.

    • Unlikely. NT kernel works differently, it has many low level features that are missing or work differently in Linux kernel. For example its FS permission system is more complex than *nix "user, other, group". The kernel architecture affects many low level user mode exposed things such as address space layout, system call ABI, Audio/Video subsystem, process/thread stuff, etc. It's impossible to migrate to Linux and preserve 100% binary compatibility. Also what's wrong with NT kernel? As if Linux kernel is fr [kernel.org]
    • MS will soon port Wine to Windows in 2020

    • by Rufty ( 37223 )

      The Windows kernel is quite well engineered. The VMS team did a good job there. It is just the mind-boggling quantities of Win32API+MFC+.NET+VB6+... heaped on top that stink up the system.

    • Next thing they will be replacing the Windows kernel with the Linux kernel with a Win32 compatibility layer for running Windows apps on Linux

      Too much trouble.
    • "Microsoft is a cloud company, ..."

      Cloudy thinking?

      Microsoft seems to me to be extremely badly managed. Some of the many, many stories:

      Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. [networkworld.com] "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (Aug. 4, 2015)

      Microsoft's Intolerable Windows 10 Aggression [ecommercetimes.com] (May 27, 2016)

      Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads [theverge.com] (March 17, 2017)

      Microsoft, stop sabotaging Windows 10. [infoworld.com] (March 21, 2017)

      There is no wa
  • Hope can be bitter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ancientt ( 569920 ) <ancientt@yahoo.com> on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:34AM (#57745260) Homepage Journal

    Microsoft could really change some minds and win some hearts. They've done a lot of good things, and Satya Nadella has done a lot to win me over. I wanted to love Edge, and I've tried over and over, but never succeeded. If Microsoft is really willing to change their course, this could be a huge step in winning me, and people like me back.

    Unfortunately I can't forget the past. Twenty years of pain and suffering from their decisions has made me reluctant to trust them. I can't help but remember all the things they've done to abuse their customers. I was a Linux at home guy for decades thanks to Microsoft failing to provide a system I could really make do what I wanted or needed. I've been on Windows 10 at home for nearly a year now and thanks to WSL and Chrome, I almost don't miss it. Give me bash and Chrome and they're getting close. An abused dog takes a long time to learn to trust. We've all been the abused dog by Microsoft, we want to love and hope, we want to believe. This time, we hope it will be different, but we don't trust easily.

  • That's just awful.

    Not quite as awful as IE or Edge.

    But still.

  • Did we just time warp to April 1st?

  • by aberglas ( 991072 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @01:29AM (#57745434)

    If there ends up being only one main source for all vendors then HTML will be defined by whatever the code does rather than by any standards process. And then it will be very difficult to move on if Chromium goes bad. Which means that there will be no incentive to make Chromium good.

    • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:45AM (#57746400)

      >"If there ends up being only one main source for all vendors then HTML will be defined by whatever the code does rather than by any standards process. And then it will be very difficult to move on if Chromium goes bad. Which means that there will be no incentive to make Chromium good."

      I agree. It is one of many reasons I use Firefox. And I suggest you do, too. And recommend it your friends and family.. It is a fine browser and deserves support. A mono culture (or near mono culture) in browsers is VERY VERY bad.... we lived through that nightmare once before.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    whether open source or not. It is going to be interesting to see how we address open source monopolies.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I'm not sure if Microsoft is preparing to do evil, or finally found the much sought after vaccination/cure...

      It's microsoft. Of COURSE they're going to do evil. The scorpion [wikipedia.org] is more likely to stop stinging.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @01:54AM (#57745514)

    Microsoft used to bridge between OS versions, e.g. IE6 and .NET were available for Win 9x, IE7 and IE8 were available for XP.
    No such work was to run Edge on previous versions, so a billion people were not able to run Edge and had to run other browsers for years. Millions people using Windows 10 for the first time in 2017, 2018 or 2019 thus have little reason to run Edge.

    I think this is a reason for Windows 8 (RT) store and apps failures as well, back then people may have had been curious about tablet-like ipad-like applications on their desktop (this was still relatively new in 2012, smartphones not universal yet, blackberry still around). They didn't backport it to Windows 7 so they left out hundreds millions users.

    I'm dumbfounded by this news still. A very bad news it means Google Chrome dictating the web. Does the oligarchy divide the cake (entire globalized world) between themselves? Microsoft keeps the desktop OS and legacy Office, Google gets the web, Amazon gets retail, Facebook is the ultimate real identity verifier and anonymity killer, Atlantic Council pilots the censorship, European Union writes the laws, Finance e.g. Goldman Sachs and central banks blackmail the governments.

  • It won't help much, there are many Chromium forks and none of them is mainstream.
  • It's faster, and it's not Google. It just needs a little bit of UX polish to really shine, including such bare necessities as global scale factor that Firefox flat out refuses to implement.

  • I have been thinking lately that IMHO Firefox would be an ideal candidate for a co-op with MS. They could do a little more good, regain some of that long lost karma, FF quantum would get the attention it deserves and MS would still be giving Google and Apple the finger. That works be a win win win Situation for both MS and Mozilla IMHO.

  • weird (Score:4, Informative)

    by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @06:58AM (#57746182) Homepage
    I've got more instabilities with Chrome than actually with Edge. Both have their plusses. Biggest problem with chrome was that it was doing exactly what people bitcht at with IE6, but a lot of webdevs didn't mind this time, as it was their prefered browser.. a lot of times they don't even check their sites with Edge, which is even more HTML5 compliant than Chrome.. Ahwel, I don't care (like a lot of people), as long as I can browse..
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @09:24AM (#57746560)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by kiehlster ( 844523 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @09:40AM (#57746622) Homepage
    because I'm tired of it eating up all my RAM. I'm pretty tired of these browsers forcing me to upgrade hardware to handle the performance and data footprint that they sell as "fast" and "feature rich". What is it worth if my perfectly stable old machine can't handle it?

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