The rumors<\/a> were true: Microsoft Edge<\/a> is moving to the open-source Chromium platform, the same platform that powers Google\u2019s Chrome browser. And once that is done, Microsoft <\/a> is bringing Edge to macOS, too. In addition, Microsoft is decoupling Edge from the Windows update process to offer a faster update cadence \u2014 and with that, it\u2019ll bring the new Edge to Windows 7 and 8 users, too.<\/p>\n It\u2019ll be a while before any of this happens, though. There\u2019s no code to test today and the first previews are still months away. But at some point in 2019, Microsoft\u2019s EdgeHTML and Chakra will go away and Blink<\/a> and V8 will take its place. The company expects to release a first developer preview early next year.<\/p>\n Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here. What\u2019s clear, though, is that Microsoft is acknowledging that Chrome and Chromium are the de facto standard today, both for users and for developers.<\/p>\n Over the years, especially after Microsoft left the Internet Explorer brand<\/a> behind, Edge had, for the most part, become a perfectly usable browser, but Microsoft acknowledges that there were always compatibility issues. While it was investing heavily in fixing those, what we\u2019re hearing from Microsoft is a very pragmatic message: it simply wasn\u2019t worth the investment in engineering resources anymore. What Microsoft had to do, after all, was reverse engineer its way around problems on certain sites.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In part, that\u2019s because Edge never quite gained the market share<\/a> where developers cared enough to test their code on the platform. And with the web as big as it is, the long tail of incompatible sites remains massive.<\/p>\n Because many web developers work on Macs, where they don\u2019t have access to Edge, testing for it became even more of an afterthought. Hence Microsoft\u2019s efforts to bring Edge to the Mac, 15 years after it abandoned Internet Explorer for Mac<\/a>. The company doesn\u2019t expect that Edge on Mac will gain any significant market share, but it believes that having it available on every platform will mean that more developers will test their web apps with Edge, too.<\/p>\n Microsoft also admits that it didn\u2019t help that Edge only worked on Windows 10 \u2014 and that Edge updates were bound to Windows updates. I was never quite sure why that was the case, but as Microsoft will now happily acknowledge, that meant that millions of users on older Windows versions were left behind, and even those on Windows 10 often didn\u2019t get the latest, most compatible version of Edge because their companies remained a few updates behind.<\/p>\n For better or worse, Chrome has become the default and Microsoft is going with the flow. The company could have opted to open source EdgeHTML and all of its JavaScript engine (some parts already are open source). That option was on the table, but in the end, it opted not to. The company says that\u2019s due to the fact that the current version of Edge has so many hooks into Windows 10 that it simply wouldn\u2019t make much sense to do this if Microsoft wants to take the new Edge to Windows 7 and the Mac. To be fair, this probably would\u2019ve been a fool\u2019s <\/span>errand anyway, since it\u2019s hard to <\/span>imagine that an open-source community around Edge would\u2019ve made much of a difference in solving the practical problems anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n