Over a week ago, Microsoft announced that its Edge Browser will migrate from EdgeHTML to open source Chromium. Corporate Vice President for their rendering engine. Windows Joe Belfiore, writes:

Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge… As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project

I usually don’t write about news and especially not days after the fact, but I find this announcement particularly unsettling. That may be a surprising sentiment coming from an old Apple enthusiest who remembers the bad old times when Mac users literally couldn’t use banking websites that required Internet Explorer, but here’s the thing – sure Internet Explorer being non-standard was awful, but the whole reason it could be non-standard (and awful) was through dominance. Many web designers didn’t bother developing or testing other browsers, not because they were opposed to them or W3C standards, but because IE made up almost 95% of their overall traffic. The significant effort to support that last piddling 5% was simply hard to justify on principles alone. The problem wasn’t Internet Explorer, but rather the lack of diversity. Once Firefox and then later Chrome started netting significant browser share, Internet Explorer couldn’t and didn’t survive.

Thus we got Edge.

Now I am not going to say Edge is a good browser. As a Mac user, I can’t really speak to it from a user perspective, but I do have one good thing to say about it as a web developer. Edge has been a great standards based web browser. Just look at its score on HTML5test where it literally outperforms every browser other than Google Chrome. Now this sort of test never tells the whole story, but the results do align with my own experience with Edge as a developer in that my code worked in Edge about as much as did any other standards based browser. The pain only really happened on the rare occasion there was an Edge specific issue and I had to use its truly godawful Developer Tools. Edge seemed to me like a good browser engine wrapped in a lackluster (lowercase) chrome with even worse tooling, and delivered confusingly side-by-side with Internet Explorer (which is still needed for compatibility with other/legacy Microsoft solutions.) ¹ I really don’t think EdgeHTML is the problem², and while moving to Chromium should address at least the tooling issues (its Developer Tools are top notch), it doesn’t necessarily mean better(again lowercase) chrome, and it does nothing to help with the confusion with Internet Explorer.

Switching to Chromium in particular contributes to the problem that gave us awfulness of Internet Explorer – lack of diversity. Chrome controls somewhere between 60 and 70% of browser share, and while that’s no where near Internet Explorer’s former dominance, there have already been a handful sites that are Chrome-only/Chrome-first. Even more worrisome is the number of other Web Developers that disdainfully treat non-Chrome browsers as aberrations³.

Edge used to be an independent voice in the web standards community. Now that voice will be lost in such a way that empowers the most powerful.

That’s unsettling.