Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward a Chrome-only Web
One of the greatest fears when Microsoft announced that it was ditching its EdgeHTML rendering engine and switching to Chromium-the open source engine that powers Google's Chrome, along with a range of others such as Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera-is that Web developers would increasingly take the easy way out and limit their support and testing to Chrome. That would leave Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and any other browsers, present or future, out of the fun.
This is, after all, substantially what we saw during Internet Explorer's heyday. Microsoft's browser grew to about 95 percent of the market, and wide swathes of the Web proudly announced that they were "best viewed in Internet Explorer," often to the point of not working at all in any other browser. IE's hegemony presented an enormous challenge for the upstart Firefox browser, which was built to support Web standards rather than Microsoft's particular spin on those standards. Though Internet Explorer was eventually displaced-by Chrome-this arguably would have gone much quicker if developers had been less fixated on Microsoft's browser.
Last week, Microsoft made a major update to the Web version of its Skype client, bringing HD video calling, call recording, and other features already found on the other clients.
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