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.