Microsoft is building its own Chrome browser to replace Edge

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Kara Dunlap in Microsoft Windows

Microsoft is building its own Chromium browser to replace the default on Windows 10. Microsoft is finally giving up and moving its default Windows 10 browser to Chromium.

The Verge understands Microsoft will announce its plans for a Chromium browser as soon as this week, in an effort to improve web compatibility for Windows. Windows Central first reported on these plans, which are code-named Anaheim internally. We understand there has been a growing frustration inside Microsoft at Edge’s web compatibility issues, and consumers and businesses have been pushing the company to improve things.

Microsoft has only managed to go so far with Edge-HTML, though. Chrome is now the most popular browser across all devices, thanks to Android’s popularity and the rise of Chrome on Macs and PCs. Chrome has turned into the new IE6, and web developers have been favoring its rendering engine to optimize their sites. Google has also been creating Chrome-only web services, simply because its often the first to adopt emerging web technologies as its engineers contribute to many web standards.

Microsoft’s rendering engine has fallen behind as a result, and the company is finally ready to admit this. There were signs Microsoft was about to adopt Chromium onto Windows, as the company’s engineers have been working with Google to support a version of Chrome on an ARM-powered Windows operating system.