In late 2018, Microsoft announced it would be giving up on EdgeHTML rendering engine for Windows 10’s default browser Edge to use Chromium’s solutions. Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge browser is supposed to come out later this year on Windows 10, 7 and even macOS.
Microsoft is technically building its own browser for Windows using Chromium codes and Blink rendering engine but the interface of new Edge won’t look like Chrome.
Microsoft still has plans to release Chromium-based Edge browser preview builds in early 2019 and it looks the company is now actively contributing to Chromium community. Microsoft Edge’s engineer on Twitter confirmed that the company is actively contributing to the Chromium community.
Of course. We are actively contributing to chromium.
— Marion Daly (@marionpdaly) February 7, 2019
We did a quick search on Chromium Gerrit and discovered that Microsoft engineer has made commits for Chromium. For instance, a commit on Chromium Gerrit by Microsoft’s engineer aims to address a bug where array initialized with the same name of previously declared variable fails on DirectX. This was posted a few days back.
Another commit by Microsoft’s engineer has something to do with upstream local-time related web tests to WPT. Microsoft is also helping the community to support Chromium for Windows 10 on ARM.
On the Google products forum, there is a thread by Microsoft that aims to improve the accessibility features of Chromium.
While Microsoft is contributing to Chromium, the company hasn’t shared an ETA regarding a possible release of the final Chromium-based Edge. The preview builds are expected to come out in early 2019 and release of the final version could happen by end of this year when the fall update for Windows 10 would be finalized.
