Goodbye Microsoft Edge, welcome Microsoft (Chromium) Edge

Enlarge / It still takes a connoisseur to spot the differences between Chromium-based Edge and Google Chrome at a glance. (credit: Jim Salter)

As of Wednesday, January 15, Microsoft will begin pushing its new, Chromium-based version of the Edge browser to Windows 10 Home and Pro users. We covered the beta version of Chromium-based Edge in November. The beta was still pretty raw then-but "raw" is a relative term. The new Edge project began with a complete and fully functional Web browser-Chromium-so it worked fine for browsing the Web. There were just a few rough edges as far as installing extensions, logging into them, and the like.

We've seen one take waxing nostalgic for the old, purely Microsoft developed version of Edge, but we don't think many people will miss it much. It's not so much that Edge was a bad browser, per se-it just didn't serve much of a purpose. Edge didn't have the breadth of extensions or the user-base enthusiasm of Chrome or Firefox-and it was no better than they are at running crusty old "Internet Explorer Only" websites and Web apps.

While there is some validity to worrying about one company "controlling the Web" and one of Google's biggest competitors now becoming a Google downstream, we don't think those concerns add up to much. We don't want to see the full-on Google Chrome become any more indispensable than it already is-but we don't think Microsoft trading in its own fully proprietary, closed-source HTML-rendering engine for one of the two biggest open source rendering engines is a bad thing.

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