In part, that’s because Edge never quite gained the market share where developers cared enough to test their code on the platform. What Microsoft had to do, after all, was reverse engineer its way around problems on certain sites.

While it was investing heavily in fixing those, what we’re hearing from Microsoft is a very pragmatic message: it simply wasn’t worth the investment in engineering resources anymore.

Over the years, especially after Microsoft left the Internet Explorer brand behind, Edge had, for the most part, become a perfectly usable browser, but Microsoft acknowledges that there were always compatibility issues.

What’s clear, though, is that Microsoft is acknowledging that Chrome and Chromium are the de facto standard today, both for users and for developers. Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here. The company expects to release a first developer preview early next year. But at some point in 2019, Microsoft’s EdgeHTML and Chakra will go away and Blink and V8 will take its place. There’s no code to test today and the first previews are still months away. It’ll be a while before any of this happens, though. In addition, Microsoft is decoupling Edge from the Windows update process to offer a faster update cadence - and with that, it’ll bring the new Edge to Windows 7 and 8 users, too. And once that is done, Microsoft is bringing Edge to macOS, too. The rumors were true: Microsoft Edge is moving to the open-source Chromium platform, the same platform that powers Google’s Chrome browser.

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