Rumor: Microsoft is working on Chromium based replacement for Edge

The blog Windows Central reports that sources have told them Microsoft is working on a Chromium based replacement for Microsoft's Edge web browser, with the codename "Anaheim", and has already been seen committing code to the Chromium project to make it work on ARM devices.

These sources want to remain anonymous, so at this point this is just a rumor, but it would make sense. Nearly all of the major browsers are Chromium based at this point. Firefox still is it's own thing, but the former Mozilla CEO and co-creator of Firefox, Brendan Eich, left Mozilla and created the Brave Browser, which is of course Chromium based.

There are pros and cons here. For developers it means going forward if you develop a website for Google Chrome it will work in all browsers, which will save a lot of time and money to create websites. The upside for users is that websites will work the same no matter what browser you use. Especially here in Germany there are still a few major websites that only work in Microsoft's browsers. With this change, you'll finally be able to view all sites in Chrome or whatever browser you choose. The downside however is that the lack of competition might lead to a stagnation of innovation in the browser space. Sure, the companies can still compete by adding features on top of Chromium like Brave and Vivaldi are doing it already, but will that be enough?

And what will happen with Firefox? If everyone else is using Chromium and Firefox is the only (major) browser left doing their own thing, their market share might shrink more and more over time until that magic point where developers won't take the time anymore to keep their websites compatible with Firefox and at that point, Firefox either also switches to Chromium or dies.

What I haven't mentioned yet is Safari, that is still it's own thing right? Kind of, but not really. Chromium is based on Blink, which is a fork of WebKit, which is the rendering engine powering Safari. So they are extremely similar, over time they will become more and more different, but only if Apple doesn't give up and just use Chromium like everyone else.

All that being said, if you don't think about the larger consequences and just look at this decision on it's own, it might be a good thing. It took a long time to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the internet and people who experienced that generally do not want to go back to that time I think (although they probably also don't want that power to go to Google through Chromium). There is a joke going around that Microsoft's Edge is only ever used to download Google Chrome, so for Microsoft this step probably makes sense. If it's true that is, until Microsoft officially announces it this is all just rumor and speculation.

Discussion on Hacker News can be found here.