Author: gkdoig

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Microsoft has declared plans to use Chromium open source technologies in its Edge browser.

Kyle Pflug, a senior program manager on the Microsoft Edge team indicated in the threads of a Reddit post that Microsoft will have “a new rendering engine” in Edge, which he didn’t name. The new rendering engine will be able to use WebView, a Google Android technology for porting Web site content into applications.

While some may applaud this change, not everyone does. Chris Beard, CEO of the Mozilla Corp. overseeing the Firefox browser, said the following

“Microsoft’s decision gives Google more ability to single-handedly decide what possibilities are available to each one of us,” Beard wrote in Mozilla Blog post titled, “Goodbye, EdgeHTML.” While he understood the business reasons for the switch, Beard said that “Google’s dominance across search, advertising, smartphones, and data capture creates a vastly tilted playing field that works against the rest of us.”

Microsoft’s move could make things harder for Firefox, which now stands alone among browsers in using the Gecko rendering engine, rather than Blink.

“If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium,” Beard wrote. “That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again.”

Opera Software stated recently that Microsoft’s switch to Chromium was a positive move for the Web. It was also what Opera Software had done back in 2012 for its own Opera browser. Google reported last week that it will be welcoming Microsoft’s future contributions to the Chromium project.