I never thought I’d see Microsoft throw in the towel on their browser engine. Or that, by the time it happened, I’d see that as a bad thing.
But it’s true: like Opera did a few years ago, Microsoft is dropping not only the old Internet Explorer engine, but the newer Edge engine, and will be building Edge on Chromium going forward. That means Edge, Chrome, Opera and Safari are all built on the same codebase. (Chromium split from Apple’s WebKit a while back, but they still have a lot in common.)
Monoculture is still a problem, no matter who runs it. We’re already at the point where webdevs are treating Chrome like the defacto standard, the way they did IE6 back in the day.
Firefox is going to be even more important in the future, ensuring that the web continues to be built on interoperable standards instead of one stakeholder’s goals.
Mozilla is a non-profit organization, and like many, they’re running a year-end donation drive. Now is a good time to contribute to their mission to keep the internet and the web open. (I’ve already made my annual donation to them.)
I think I may want to finally shut down or retool that old Alternative Browser Alliance site I ran during the Second Browser War. The last time I made a significant update to it, Chrome was the new upstart.
@blog a multi-vendor open source monoculture beats a secret proprietary monoculture, but it’s still worrying. Also sad to see ChakraCore and EdgeHTML go away; the JS engine is already open source, though the render/DOM engine never was. I’m curious whether, like google did forking WebKit to blink, that they end up wanting their own codebase a few years down the line. 😉
@blog I saw this, but like you, I'm thinking, this can't be happening. I saw it in an article while collecting resources for my paper "The Windows Server Daily" over on paper.li. Came up during one of the sweeps for content. I was like what the heck?