Microsoft Edge Browser Replacement Could Run Google's Chromium Rendering Engine

There once was a time when the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser was the most popular browser in all the land, but that time has passed. People tend to rely on browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and others over Microsoft's offerings these days. In 2015 with the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft hoped to change that with Edge built using a new at the time rendering engine called EdgeHTML. The problem for Microsoft is that Edge launched festooned with issues that turned web surfers off to the browser early on and it never recovered.

A new rumor is going around claims that Microsoft is working on a replacement for the Edge browser and that it will ditch EdgeHTML and use the Chromium rendering engine that was popularized by the Google Chrome browser. Microsoft's new browser reportedly carries the codename Anaheim and is tipped to become the default browser in Windows 10. It's not clear if the new browser will be called Edge or if it will use a different moniker.

What is certain is that EdgeHTML is most likely dead. The move to Chromium means that websites you visit on the new browser will behave just as they would if you were running Chrome. With Chrome being the most popular browser on the planet, having websites display the same on Microsoft's Anaheim browser will make it more likely that Chrome fans will try the browser and possibly stay if Anaheim offers appealing features that Chrome lacks.

Expectations are that Anaheim will be rolled out through the development cycle in the first half of 2019. If we needed any more proof that Microsoft plans to leverage Chromium, engineers from the software giant have been spied committing code to the Chromium project that was specifically to get Chrome to run on ARM devices.