You can add other search engines if you want. But Google parted ways, creating a fork of WebKit called Blink that's the core part of Chromium.īy default, Chromium-based Edge sends search traffic to Microsoft's Bing search engine, not to Google's dominant search service. Chrome arrived a decade ago, built on the same WebKit core as Safari. Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated browsing for years, but Firefox dented that power 15 years ago and injected new life into the technology, even as Microsoft let it languish.

Chrome dominates the browser market.Īpple's Safari, a cousin to Chrome, and Mozilla's Firefox remain independent. However, it also means Google's already formidable power over the web - deciding in effect which technologies are supported and which aren't - is that much stronger. Using Google's software gives access to a mature and frequently updated software project while ensuring websites aren't likely to suffer from incompatibility problems. Other browsers that rely on Chromium include Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and Samsung Internet. The new version of Edge is based on Chromium, an open-source project run by Google. Different versions of Chromium-based Edge can be installed and run side by side. You can download the software for Windows 10 computers from Microsoft's Edge Insider site. But it never caught on widely, and in December, Microsoft announced a plan to rebuild Edge on Chromium, the open-source underpinnings of Chrome that's also used in several other browsers. 'You'll start to see differences from the current Microsoft Edge including subtle design finishes, support for a broader selection of extensions and the ability to manage your sign-in profile.'įor years, Microsoft had tried to reclaim some of its browser power by stripping away the legacy technology that hobbled Internet Explorer and by releasing the modernized Edge instead. 'In these first builds we are very much focused on the fundamentals and have not yet included a wide range of feature and language support that will come later,' said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows, in a blog post Monday.

Microsoft, having given up on its own core browser technology, has released test versions of its Edge browser built instead on the same foundations as Google's Chrome.

Google chrome vs microsoft edge 2019