

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.
