Microsoft Is Building a Chromium-Powered Web Browser That Will Replace Edge on Windows 10

Zac Bowden:

Microsoft’s Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 back in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but launched with a plethora of issues which resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain any traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I’m told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine first popularized by Google’s Chrome browser. Codenamed Anaheim, this new web browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform. It’s unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10’s default browser is dead.

Having used many different browsers over the years, Safari has always appealed to me most for a number of different reasons. Since it was discontinued on Windows a few years ago, I have defaulted to Firefox on my only PC (I still naturally use Safari on my Mac), especially since Mozilla appears to be pushing privacy hard, but I really wish Safari was still around. I tried and tested Edge a few times, but it never appealed to me much. Chromium would be my second choice and I’m curious what Microsoft will do with it.