Inside Microsoft’s surprise decision to work with Google on its Edge browser

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was frustrated .
Microsoft ’ s Edge web browser, released in 2015, hadn ’ thymine made much progress by the summer of 2017. “ Satya came to us and said, ‘ Hey, I ’ d like to see us make more progress on the browser, ’ ” says Microsoft ’ s Joe Belfiore, in an single interview with The Verge. Nadella pointed out where the web was heading, and he wanted more from Microsoft ’ s Edge browser .
“ Google is doing well with web-based collaborative experiences, the Office team is investing more to improve ours, we want the world wide web browser to be better, ” says Belfiore, reciting Nadella ’ sulfur comments. “ Edge had a reasonably desegregate reputation, ” he admits, but Microsoft had been spending a lot of its time trying to improve its browser compatibility, all while Google was marching ahead with Chrome, which was solidifying its side as the de facto default web browser on the background .
Something had to give. Microsoft had to change its Edge browser in a boastful way. That meeting with Nadella ultimately led to Microsoft ’ s huge decision to jettison the browser it built in house and start from rub using Chromium as a new foundation. The stakes for success couldn ’ thymine be much higher : the future of Windows and the web itself could hinge on this project.

This is the story of how Microsoft made that monumental decision and what could happen following .



curtly after that meeting with Nadella, Microsoft ’ second browser team started to analyze everything that was wrong with Edge. It was a way to spark a discussion internally about the changes needed .
“ We wrote a paper. We wrote the newspaper for the aim of having a discussion at an offsite that Terry Myerson [ early Windows foreman ] had in October of 2017, ” says Belfiore .
This paper included a bunch of the benefits and drawbacks of Edge. Microsoft picked a different term for the drawbacks, though. It called them “ headwinds. ” It was a bespeak that, in 2017, the problems with Edge weren ’ thymine barely technical, nor were they necessarily insurmountable. They were merely — theoretically — the things that were slowing down its adoption .
One of the strongest headwinds might surprise you : distribution. Despite Windows 10 ’ s growing install root, there weren ’ triiodothyronine enough people using Edge. People were calm picking Chrome and other rivals. “ Our volume practice is abject, partially because we ’ re lone on Windows 10, ” admits Belfiore. “ In the global populace of all the devices, although it ’ s huge, [ Windows 10 ] is a minority. ”
only being on Windows 10 mean that businesses hush running Windows 7 couldn ’ metric ton get Edge for those machines. tied if a caller had switched to Windows 10, that didn ’ t mean they would be will to adopt newfangled versions of the OS right away. That meant their edge browsers would only get updated if they took the very latest sport updates to Windows 10, which are released roughly every six months. Given how enterprises like to hold back and test Windows versions, this was a recipe for Edge getting badly behind the times .
Microsoft made a list of problems with Edge
That adoption headwind was about indistinguishable from the second big gust : compatibility. Because Edge used a different rendering engine than Chrome or Safari, it meant that it would sometimes have problems on websites. Testing a web site against multiple browsers has always been difficult, and because Edge had so little uptake, it meant optimizing for it much fell off the precedence number for web developers .
edge is besides built on Microsoft ’ s Universal Windows Platform ( UWP ), the company ’ s former big energy in Windows 8 and Windows 10 to get single universal joint apps that run across desktops, tablets, phones, Xbox consoles, and devices like the HoloLens. “ Our third base headwind was UWP. And it ’ s not that UWP is bad, but UWP is not a 35-year-old senesce platform that a laughably huge sum of apps have been written to, ” explains Belfiore. That meant things like multiple monitor support weren ’ t always solid for UWP, and the Edge team would have to wait for general UWP improvements. Microsoft had to get Edge back to a actual desktop app, available across Windows 7, Mac, and Windows 10 .
Microsoft considered a total of different ways to deal with all of those headwinds. It looked at apparently bare solutions, like getting Edge into the Windows Store so it was updated more frequently than the core OS. It besides looked at trying to make Edge available on Windows 7. Considering moving to Chromium was on the list of ways to fix these problems, besides .
“ We had this confluence and conversation, and we didn ’ thymine decide at that point to move to the Chromium engine. We considered it, we said, ‘ No, we think we can get there with compatibility, ’ ” says Belfiore .
then Microsoft threw more engineers at trying to fix its Edge compatibility issues, but it was a whack-a-mole border on : Microsoft would fix one issue in Edge, and another 10 would pop up. The vane has been moving at a far more rapid pace in recent years, with Google pushing a lot of new standards and travel rapidly with Chrome, and Microsoft didn ’ thyroxine have the structure to keep up .
One of the other big issues for Microsoft ’ s web ambitions was the manner it used to be organized as a company. When Edge began, world wide web platform work for Windows ( EdgeHTML ) was handled by a separate team than the one build up and maintaining the Edge browser itself. Microsoft reorganized its Windows clientele in a boastfully way last year, with former Windows headman Terry Myerson departing the caller, and Microsoft ’ s network platform and Edge teams converging under Joe Belfiore for better accountability and ultimately a better browser for Windows .
This reorg put an even bigger foreground on Edge ’ randomness problems, particularly immediately that the world wide web teams were aligned to improve the ship’s company ’ s browser efforts. Microsoft started building modern browser prototypes on different implementations of open-source engineering to see what was potential. One, codenamed “ Blade, ” tried to take the existing Edge application and add the Blink rendition engine behind the scenes. Another prototype, codenamed “ Septagon, ” actually fully enforce Chromium. The Septagon browser prototype was the obvious choice. But that interchange was such a big decision that it would have to be made at the top .



Nadella ’ mho leadership team meets every Friday, and they have a process dubbed “ Researcher of the amazing. ” It ’ s designed so each merchandise team can put forth people who are trying interesting things. coincidentally, at the target the Windows team was prototyping new versions of Edge, it was their turning to present their own “ research worker of the amazing. ” The Septagon prototype made it to the senior leadership meet, and the feedback was beneficial .
Microsoft then spent months doing a serious review of what it would take to even consider moving Edge to Chromium, as it was a big shift in the manner the company typically does things. “ We did a short sting of a roadshow, ” explains Belfiore. “ We went and met with Bill Gates, we went and met with Kevin Scott, our CTO who came from LinkedIn, and Reid Hoffman who was on our board. ” The team besides met with Nat Friedman, who is nowadays the company ’ second GitHub CEO .
Microsoft spoke to Bill Gates about the switch
The draw a bead on in all of these meetings was to get some outside perspective on switching to Chromium and the challenges involved and what screen of relationship could the company expect with Google. Switching to Chromium, after all, is a big stake for Microsoft and an even bigger borrowing of open-source code .
Some of those challenges involved how to have a effective kinship with the open-source community, but others were fundamental changes to the way Microsoft ’ south Windows mastermind teams operate. Edge shipped to the public every six months, but the Chromium Canary developer builds ship every unmarried day. chromium is besides a unlike codebase that Microsoft ’ s engineers would have to understand and contribute to.

Microsoft spent a crowd of time analyzing that before deciding in September 2018 that it was going to adopt Chromium. Nadella and his leadership team signed off on the change, and Microsoft then spent some time getting quick to announce it publicly in December. It was a big here and now .
“ We were a bit anxious, ” admits Jatinder Mann, a Microsoft Edge broadcast director. “ The fortunate thing is, american samoa soon as we made the announcement, we got a lot of positive responses from Chromium engineers, from other Chromium browser vendors that were pretty excited to see us join this community. ” The reaction was largely convinced, and other browser engineers saw this as a room to get more help to improve the network .
Mozilla, the ship’s company behind Firefox, didn ’ t welcome Microsoft ’ mho move. It could mean that web developers will be less likely to code to web standards that would with any browser and more likely to just code for Chromium and Safari. It ’ s a real hazard, and so Mozilla says it will continue to “ crusade for a sincerely open web. ”



once the decision had been made and then made public, the real work of switching Edge to a Chromium base began. Google and Microsoft engineers had been used to working in concert to help design network standards before, but this would be very different. Microsoft ’ mho borrowing of Chromium has meant that those relationships have grown even closer over the past six months .
There have even been some moments of having to decide between communicating with Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams or using Word or Google Docs, but Microsoft engineers are will to use whatever works well for Chromium contributors. “ We recognize that we ’ ra join this community, so we wanted to collaborate in whatever they were using already, ” explains Mann. “ We use Google Hangouts when we ’ re talking to Chromium engineers, equitable to make it easier for us to collaborate. ”
Google ’ s engineers talked to Microsoft about how conducive to the Chromium open-source community normally works, and Microsoft ’ mho engineers have adopted these processes. “ A distribute of our principles aligned well with these best practices, ” says Mann. Those practices include being function of the Chromium project for the long ladder, maintaining any contributions Microsoft makes, respecting architectural blueprint, and cross-platform and cross-device needs .
“ even when we talked to Chromium engineers about best practices, they were pretty helpful, ” says Mann. Google has evening suggested good bugs for Microsoft engineers to go fixate to learn the code infrastructure. It ’ s a learn work for both companies, but the engineers involved ultimately lack to work together to improve both Edge and Chrome on Windows. For Microsoft, it benefits all Windows users if both browsers work well .
Microsoft and Chromium engineers are now working together to address things like approachability features, scrolling, and touch controls. touch has been a adult partially of Edge, and Microsoft is now contributing changes to Chromium that will make picking a date or prison term in a network form far more touch-friendly. Microsoft is besides working on better support for the Windows touch keyboard in Chromium, including swiping on the keyboard to write .









“ The capture thing for that area was Chromium engineers had started that project at some point. I think they took a foramen or some other priorities took over, so we actually picked up the project they had started and finished it off, ” explains Mann. “ We had a meet with them where they ’ re talking about ‘ this is on our agenda for adjacent calendar month, following quarter ’ and we ’ re like, ‘ Oh, we ’ rhenium working on that right field now ’ and there were some enchant faces on the other slope. ”
It ’ mho distinctly early days for Microsoft ’ s Chromium adventures, and engineers from Microsoft and Google seem to be collaborating good toward similar goals. But Microsoft and Google are still boisterous competitors, and we ’ ve even to see how that will play out in the browser space. previously, we ’ ve seen Chrome-only sites from Google that seaport ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate worked well in Edge, and a former Mozilla administrator recently accused Google of sabotaging Firefox for years, despite having a close work relationship and a search cope to keep Google as default in Firefox .
“ Google Chrome ads started appearing following to Firefox research terms, ” explained Johnathan Nightingale on Twitter. “ Gmail and Google Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as incompatible. ” Nightingale says there were dozens, possibly even hundreds, of what he calls “ oops ” incidents where Google would respond to Mozilla and say the changes were accidental and would be fixed. “ I ’ megabyte all for ‘ don ’ t assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence ’ but I don ’ thymine believe Google is that incapable, ” Nightingale wrote .
Google and Microsoft have had some reasonably public spats over the years, which have resulted in ecosystem wars and affected customers of both companies. Windows Phone users were temporarily cut off from Google Maps, there was a bitterness battle over a Windows Phone YouTube app, and Google surprised Microsoft by cutting off Gmail ’ south Exchange ActiveSync support for Windows Phone. Combined with Google ’ s refusal to develop Windows apps, all of these incidents served to undermine Microsoft ’ s mobile efforts to compete with Android .
YouTube engineers even hatched a mysterious plot to kill off Internet Explorer 6 about 10 years ago, and, more recently, YouTube hasn ’ thyroxine worked well in non-Chrome browsers like Edge, Firefox, or Safari. Given this history, some fear that Google could use its many web properties and services to undermine Microsoft ’ s move to Chromium. It ’ s not an baseless fear, but it is an ironic one : Microsoft could end up being the victim of an “ Embrace, Extend, Extinguish ” strategy if this relationship goes sideway .
These fears, unfounded or not, became heightened recently when Google Meet abruptly stopped working in Microsoft ’ s newly Edge browser. Google besides recently added an “ unsupported browser ” warning to Google Docs when Edge Chromium users use the military service. Eric Lawrence, who worked on Internet Explorer before joining Google to work on Chrome and is now back at Microsoft, revealed on Twitter that Google ’ s holocene changes probably aren ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate malicious. Google international relations and security network ’ t trying to intentionally block Microsoft ’ s modern Edge browser .
“ I think our expectation is that Google is going to compete with us, ” says Belfiore. ” What we hope can happen is that we are engineering collaborators on web standards and a web implementation that works well on Windows devices. That seems possible, and that is in everyone ’ sulfur best interest. And there ’ s batch of room to compete in differentiation. ”
Google, unsurprisingly, has welcomed Microsoft ’ s contributions to Chromium. Google engineers invited Microsoft onstage at a holocene BlinkOn Chromium event, and Microsoft has contributed more than 400 merges to Chromium so far. “ Chrome has been a champion of the open web since origin and we have welcomed Microsoft to the community of Chromium contributors, ” says a Google spokesperson in a instruction to The Verge. “ We appreciate the work we ’ rhenium doing with Microsoft and the web standards community in advancing the open network, supporting user choice and delivering great browse experiences. ”
Microsoft is still figuring out how its Chromium push will go
Microsoft nowadays has a lot of work to do until this fresh adaptation of Edge is ready for all Windows users, and there are still a draw of unknowns. Microsoft besides runs the gamble of running into the most classic of Windows problems : backwards compatibility holding back future development. It ’ s likely that a future version of Windows 10 will have to support the existing Edge browser, Internet Explorer 11, and Edge Chromium all at once.

It ’ s not going to be an overnight substitution from old Edge to new Edge, and Microsoft is inactive figuring out how it ’ sulfur going to approach that. And don ’ metric ton forget that web rendering engineering international relations and security network ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate precisely a thing that happens inside a browser check, it happens in apps and all sorts of surprise places in an manoeuver system. How Microsoft will address those challenges remains to be seen .
The software elephantine is demonstrating some new features it ’ randomness planning for Edge Chromium today, and a Mac version should be coming identical soon. A new “ IE mode ” for Edge is coming, excessively, which might help some enterprise users who inactive rely on ancient inner sites designed for Internet Explorer to switch to something more modern. A new “ collections ” feature of speech for Edge is designed to improve the irritating know of collecting information and notes from the web. Microsoft is even adding in farinaceous trailing controls to stop ads from following you around the web. You can read more about these newly edge features here .
Beyond these features, Edge Chromium and Microsoft ’ s improved relationship with Google are placid identical much works in progress. It feels like Microsoft is hush working out the details on a visualize that ’ second very raw for the company. It might wholly be new, but the end result means if you ’ re using Windows then both Chrome and Edge are going to get a draw better in the approach months. Edge already feels equally full as Chrome, and it could well become the best default browser Windows has ever had. adenine good as Chrome might not be enough, though. It ’ randomness now up to Microsoft to convince everyone why it ’ randomness deserving ditching Chrome .

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