Microsoft to Move to a Single Edge codebase
News of this change comes via Reddit, but I found out about this through Neowin.
In short, during the Microsoft Edge | Mobile Productivity in the Enterprise session at Ignite this week, Edge senior program manager Darryl Brown said that Microsoft was moving its browser to a common code base across desktop—Windows, Mac, and Linux—and mobile (Android and iOS). Of course, because of the limitations imposed by Apple, the iOS version of Edge will need to use Apple’s WebKit-based render. But otherwise, the codebases will be the same.
The reasons for this change are obvious enough, but the biggest is just related to efficiency. Today, Microsoft has to develop common new features across the browser three times—once for desktop, once for Android, and once for iOS—which makes it challenging to rollout those new features simultaneously.