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Microsoft gave up on maintaining their own browser engine (Trident) almost a decade ago, and therefore are now dependent on Chrome's engine (Blink). Since then
by achierius 2y ago
Microsoft gave up on maintaining their own browser engine (Trident) almost a decade ago, and therefore are now dependent on Chrome's engine (Blink). Since then there have only been three independent browser engines: WebKit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox), and Blink (Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Brave, Edge, ...). Maintaining a performant + featureful + safe browser engine is a massive task, requiring many expensive engineers -- and Blink/V8 in particular has a lot of complexity (sea-of-nodes repr, their weird DSL, ...) that other engines don't. So if Google dropped Chrome, Microsoft would have a hard time picking it up, but would need to if they wanted to keep providing Edge.
- shadowgovt 2y agoGood point. That suggests a significant nonzero possibility that unless MS decides it's strategically meaningful enough to them to maintain a foot in the door on the browser space (much like Google chose to do), they might abandon the project, which would severely crimp the money-faucet for maintenance of the core engine. This could, hypothetically, lead to a collapse of that ecosystem into an also-ran, in which case all Apple has to do is invest more in supporting their browser on OSs they don't own and we could end up with full browser hegemony... "If it doesn't work on Safari, it doesn't work on the Internet."