Daily Archives: December 6, 2018

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and developing a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium.

Due to the lack of success of the Edge, since its release in 2015, Microsoft are building a new web browser to replace Edge on Windows 10. Edge uses a rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, which was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure. But when launched it came with an array of issues that resulted in early users rejecting it. As such, Edge struggled to gain popularity – the decline in usage of Edge (and IE) compared to the rise of Chrome is significant – see W3’s trend graph here.

The new browser, codenamed “Anaheim”, uses Blink – a similar rendering engine to the Google’s Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser. In fact, the Edge app for iOS and Android already uses a rendering engines native to Chromium platforms, so this is a change for the desktop platform only.
It has been announced that Anahein will replace Edge on Windows 10, but it is currently unknown if Anaheim will retain the Edge brand or forge a new identity.

Some users will be pleased to hear that Edge will be replaced. Having a Microsoft browser based on Chromium should mean that websites behave similar to how they would on Google Chrome. This is also good news for developers and companies, who need to maintain compatibility across different systems and browsers.

This is another step towards revitalising Windows’ reliability and usability, and represents a significant step for Microsoft, as they have maintained their own web browser and rendering engine since Internet Explorer was first released back in 1995.

There is more to know about Anaheim but the initial announcements seem interesting.

The UK government has pledged £78m of funding to the start-up Raspberry Pi, which sells the most popular British computer in the world. The project will train 40,000 teachers across the UK in computing education – who will then in turn go on to teach computer science to children in every school in England.

Over the next four years, the Raspberry Pi team along with its partners, STEM Learning and the British Computer Society, will deliver a programme for primary and secondary school teachers. They will provide 40 schools with face-to-face workshops and after deliver training to neighbouring schools. This will include free educational resources, nationwide training, and certification.

In other countries, teacher training in computer science tends to be bundled with other science subjects or funded through philanthropy. In the US, Code.org, a non-profit organisation, says 900,000 teachers use its resources, but only just over a third of high schools teach computer science. Code.org is funded through a combination of corporate donations and state or federal money. The UK funding is part of a £100m tranche of money announced by the chancellor in the last Budget, a per capita investment by government that is unprecedented.

Raspberry Pi is a non-profit company founded in 2008 by Eben Upton, with the aim to get young people interested in technology. They designed a $5 credit-card-sized computer that could be programmed by anyone from a laboratory engineer to a child, these are used with partners included Google, ARM and Cisco and have since sold 23m units.

Children will now have the opportunity to work on projects including Google Home voice systems, space experiments and chatbots. Technology is becoming integral to our society, and so the importance of teaching computer science is has become an increased necessity. “We have not seen anything of this scale and comprehensiveness in the world from a government, which is really exciting,” said Philip Colligan, chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.