[Aside] Edge switching to Chromium rendering engine

I don’t have any bias or special feeling towards Edge’s rendering engine, but I do like the idea of multiple rendering engines. The web is suppose to be a standard, and having multiple engines ensure that the standard is adhered to. The less competition there is, the more likelihood of the dominant rendering engine tweaking the standard to their way thus making it difficult for other rendering engines to operate or ever gain a market foothold. (I am reminded of Internet Explorer and how once upon a time most websites were written to be displayed well in Internet Explorer, ignoring the web standards, and how upstart browsers like Firefox (then known as Phoenix!) had difficulty gaining a foothold because most websites looked like $hit on Firefox. We don’t want that again). 

With that in mind it is sad to know that Microsoft is switching to the Chromium rendering engine. So this leaves three major rendering engines now – WebKit (used by Safari), Gecko (used by Firefox), and Blink/ Chromium (used by Chrome, Vivaldi, Brave, Edge, and many others). 

Anyways, this is old news but I was reminded of it via this excellent blog post by John Gruber on macOS native apps. It’s less about Chromium or Edge and ore about macOS apps and how things are slowly getting worse there. I didn’t know of this history, being new to the Mac, so I found it a good read.