And once that is done, Microsoft is bringing Edge to macOS, too.

Micrsoft Edge Windows 7 And 8

In addition, Microsoft is decoupling Edge from the Windows update process to offer a faster update cadence and with that, itll bring the new Edge to Windows 7 and 8 users, too.

But at some point in 2019, Microsofts EdgeHTML and Chakra will go away and Blink and V8 will take its place.

The company expects to release a first developer preview early next year.

While it was investing heavily in fixing those, what were hearing from Microsoft is a very pragmatic message: it simply wasnt worth the investment in engineering resources anymore.

What Microsoft had to do, after all, was reverse engineer its way around problems on certain sites.

And with the web as big as it is, the long tail of incompatible sites remains massive.

Hence Microsofts efforts to bring Edge to the Mac, 15 years after it abandoned Internet Explorer for Mac.

The company doesnt expect that Edge on Mac will gain any significant market share, but it believes that having it available on every platform will mean that more developers will test their web apps with Edge, too.

Micrsoft Edge Windows 10 Often Didnt

I was never quite sure why that was the case, but as Microsoft will now happily acknowledge, that meant that millions of users on older Windows versions were left behind, and even those on Windows 10 often didnt get the latest, most compatible version of Edge because their companies remained a few updates behind.

The company could have opted to open source EdgeHTML and all of its JavaScript engine (some parts already are open source).

That option was on the table, but in the end, it opted not to.

The company says thats due to the fact that the current version of Edge has so many hooks into Windows 10 that it simply wouldnt make much sense to do this if Microsoft wants to take the new Edge to Windows 7 and the Mac.

To be fair, this probably wouldve been a fools errand anyway, since its hard to imagine that an open-source community around Edge wouldve made much of a difference in solving the practical problems anyway.

That means itll bring to Chromium some of the work it did to make Edge work really well with touchscreens, for example.

But also, as previously reported, the company now publicly notes that it is working with Google and Qualcomm to bring a native implementation of the Chrome browser to Windows 10 on ARM, making it snappier and more battery friendly than the current version that heavily relies on emulation.

Maybe thats its Cortana integration or new integrations with Windows and Office.

Or maybe those are new consumer services or, for the enterprise users, specific features that make the lives of IT managers a bit easier.

By becoming more active in the Chromium community, itll have more of a voice or so it hopes and be able to advocate for web standards and bring its own innovations to Chromium.

The company isnt detailing what its development process will look like and how itll go about this, but were being told that the company is looking at which parts of the Edge experience to keep and then will work with the Chromium community to bring those to the Chromium engine, too.

If youre a happy Edge user today, chances are this move will make you an even happier Edge user in the long run.

If you arent, Microsoft hopes youll give it a fresh look when the new Chromium-based version launches.

Its on Microsoft now to build a browser that is differentiated enough to get people to give it another shot.

Micrsoft Edge For Mac