The new Edge browser will be released for “all supported versions of Windows”, i.e. Windows 7, 8.1, 10.
“We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS.”
Edge on Ubuntu? 8)
Five years ago, Opera switched from its own rendering engine Presto to Blink and Chromium, now Microsoft does the same. Blink and WebKit, from which (WebCore, to be precise) Blink is derived, will be even more dominating. Soon Mozilla’s Gecko will be the only rendering engine that is not Blink/WebKit.
It is not Chromium being more compatible but website developers are lazy to only develop for Chromium. It seems like history is repeating its self now but now it is not Internet Explorer dominating but Chromium.
Not that many web developers bothered to see if their creations look decent in Edge, since Edge – three years efter its initial release – in November was used by four percent on the desktop (and the desktop is a smaller web browsing platform than mobile phones).
It will be interesting to see if and how Chromium will change, now that Microsoft has joined.
But up until now, Google has had free reign to contribute code and proposals to Chromium without Microsoft. That is now shifting, and Microsoft will actively work on the Chromium Project, which means the future of the web – including what Google Chrome adopts – will be influenced by Microsoft. That's an interesting change in strategy versus a competing browser and browser engine.
Windows Central seems to be lazily legitimizing the dominance of one rather than promoting diversity as Mozilla does :
For web developers, it means less work, as there is no more of specific targeting EdgeHTML code for website compatibility. While the browser will be better in many ways, the overall look and feel should be similar, meaning many people won’t notice the shift, at least visually.
According to Wikipedia the HTML5 compatibility of Edge is on par with Firefox:
s of October 9, 2018, Edge 17 scored 492/555 on HTML5test, comparable to Firefox 59 which scored 491/555, but lagging behind Chrome 66 which scored 528/555
Edge has also gone from supporting only the same proprietary audio and video formats supported by IE. Now Edge has full support for WebM and Ogg, ranging from the obsolete video compression format Theora to the brand new AV1 (for the latter, an optional install (beta) is currently required).
But as I am sure you have seen as a long time user of Presto, support does not guarantee compatibility. A browser may do everything right, but some pages still don’t render rightly.
Being limited to Windows 10 makes it hard for any web developer not using that system to see the page in Edge. Since Chromium is a multi-platform browser, so can Edge be, beginning with other versions of Windows (7, 8.1), and then Mac OS, and possibly others (Linux-based).
Opera was known to be very precise about following the back then HTML 4 standard. Things were much wilder in those days Things were also hampered by Microsoft introducing their own HTML code. Website would often be written for IE only providing ‘alternative browsers’ like Opera and Mozilla/Firefox with code giving a limited experience. Getting around browser sniffing could get solve that Browser sniffing was often loosely implemented preventing ‘alternative browsers’ from showing their potential. Only when IE only code was used they would fail but that wasn’t as often the case as the superfluous use of browser sniffing suggested.
These days there is a much bigger adherence to HTML standards by all players. HTML 5 is said to be defined much more precisely even when it comes to handling errors in code. So I would expect compatibility to be noticeably less of an issue. Which leads me to believe that incompatibility becomes very much driven by wanting to immediately implement the latest available HTML 5 features. Which in turn drives the web in the arms of Chromium again.
