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A few years ago, practically no one would have imagined that Chromium, the engine on which the Google Chrome web browser is built, could unify, with a few exceptions, the rest of the browsers. Those of us living through the various eras of browser wars, which began in the last years of the last century with the competition between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, atWe are still a little surprised to see how hostilities have suddenly turned into a collaboration between (almost) everyone to create a unique engine. Sometimes I think of Chromium as an international collaborative project, a kind of United Nations of technology.
One of the latest big surprises was Microsoft’s announcement that it would stop using its own engine and instead, it would use Chromium in Microsoft Edge, something we’re finishing normalizing today, with Microsoft pushing users who are still on the older version to switch to Chromium-based one, and services like WhatsApp removing Edge Legacy support.
This huge change in the browser industry, once a battleground in which some bet on standards and others on proprietary technologies to improve the browsing experience (or so it was said) has given rise to the most egregious situations, and a perfect example of this is to discover that, today, Microsoft is a major contributor to the development and advancement of Chromium, something we can verify through este tweet by Eric Lawrence, part of the Microsoft Edge team, showing it to us the contributions of those from Redmond translate into 161 collaborations with 1,853 CL (change list).
In case you are not familiar with the terminology used by Google in its engineering teams, a CL or list of changes is a change that has been sent to the version control platform used in a development (in this case Chromium) .
Chromium: better together 💪 pic.twitter.com/uJVUIDm9q1
– Eric Lawrence 🎻 (@ericlaw) November 18, 2020
From these data it is concluded that Microsoft’s commitment to Chromium is more than evident. Redmond has put some of its engineers to work on advances in the browser engine used by most and therefore, and in a year since Microsoft joined Chromium, they are approaching 2,000 contributions, a milestone that, if they keep up, they could still reach before the end of 2020.
The most suspicious will think that, with this collaboration, what Microsoft intends is to “introduce” some of its proprietary technologies into Chromium. However, there is one point to keep in mind when thinking about this. And, unlike what happened when he worked on his own engine, in the development of Chromium there is always “light and stenographers”. It is open, it is public and any interference in this regard would be detected immediately and, of course, reported by the community, if not directly by the engineers of other companies that also participate in Chromium.
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