Good News for Edge

Earlier this month Microsoft announced something that should make most web designers and developers extremely happy: they are doing away with the dying remnants of the Trident rendering engine and incorporating Chromium’s Blink! What does this mean for us? Simply put- more consistent experiences between browsers when structuring and styling.

Of course, this is the rendering engine and not the JavaScript engine. Edge still uses Chakra, compared to Chromium’s V8. But, one step at a time.

According to StatCounter Global Stats the browser disparity is nothing that it used to be. Chrome, largely due to mobile Android users I am sure, makes up nearly 62% of the web’s traffic. As a web developer, this is always in the back of my mind; the best use of my time subsequently is to write for Chrome first.

This change isn’t revolutionary, by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s a nice step towards a browser market that’s easier to develop for. By adopting Blink Microsoft is now pushing Edge towards Chrome-like compliance and feature implementation. But, it’s up to Edge to keep Blink up to date; and we’ll have to see how well they do that through their Edge updates.

So, what does this really mean for web designers and developers? Probably not a whole lot… right now. Edge makes up for just over 2% of web traffic, so the impact isn’t huge. But, Edge is being pushed out to Windows 7. As a significantly better browser than IE11, dependent upon how Microsoft does this roll out, we could see IE’s market share effectively drop off the map. If they push it out as an upgrade to IE, and not as a separate product, that is. Otherwise, I don’t know that we’ll see IE’s market share drop below what it is now any faster. After all, those on IE today are not exactly adopters of new technologies.