Before Chrome came along, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari all had their own browser kernel (rendering engine and JavaScript engine). When Chrome came along, it initially used Webkit as the rendering engine. A new JavaScript engine, V8, was introduced. Chrome rewrote Webkit, renamed Blink, and made Blink and V8 open source through the Chromium project.


Chromium’s open source has really helped the whole Web ecosystem a lot. There are many browser manufacturers in China who develop directly based on Chromium.


The browser industry is becoming increasingly competitive, and in 2013 Opera announced a migration of its browser engine, using WebKit as a rendering engine and V8 as a JavaScript engine. Contribute code to both WebKit and Chromium projects.


That leaves only one browser vendor with a separate browser engine, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla.


Last year, when Microsoft released the browser on Android, I learned that they developed it based on Chromium. At that time, there were some comments that they wanted to develop the browser as fast as possible and try whether the market would approve it. Today, according to foreign media, Microsoft is doing something: They’re building a new browser based on Chromium to replace Edge on Windows 10 (see below).



Windows Central reports that Microsoft is building a browser based on Google’s Chromium engine to replace the existing EdgeHTML rendering engine. This will lead to more compatible web browsers and less maintenance. According to the source, the browser, codenamed Anaheim internally, will enter the Insider preview channel starting in early 2019 and will be completed for Windows 10 19H1, eventually replacing the Edge browser entirely.




News link: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-building-chromium-powered-web-browser-windows-10

If that were the case, there would only be Mozilla Firefox, with Google Chrome having a multi-platform browser engine, since Safari disowned Windows years ago and focused on Apple’s own operating system: MacOS, iOS, and now WatchOS.


This news triggered a lot of exchanges and discussions among companies at home and abroad. On Twitter, we saw an Apple Webkit engineer express his thoughts on this news:


Yet one less browser engine would be sad news for the Web :/

However, the loss of a browser engine is sad news for the Web :/




In addition to the comments of foreign engineers, in fact, domestic engineers also have the same concerns and feelings, the famous domestic front-end engineer Hax said as follows:



What do you think of it?



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