The move to Chromium is largely going to be something that's only under the hood. By switching Edge to Chromium, Microsoft can leverage some of that popularity and jump ahead of the queue instead of being in a constant battle with web developers and changing goalposts. Edge currently suffers from compatibility issues with some websites, many of which are now optimized to run properly on Chrome. The switch is largely to take advantage of this popularity.

This makes Chromium and its Blink engine the most popular on the web due to Chrome's inherent popularity and omnipresence. Chromium is an open source browser platform developed by Google and is the basis of Google's own Chrome as well as Opera. The new variant, codenamed Anaheim, will be rebuilt on the Chromium platform and use the Blink rendering engine and V8 JavaScript engine.

The Microsoft Edge browser currently runs on the EdgeHTML engine.

It will also be bringing the browsers to more platforms, including Windows 7, 8 and macOS.

Microsoft confirmed earlier rumors that it will be rebuilding Edge on the Chromium platform.

Microsoft edge vs chrome windows 8