14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Edge is a mature browser already, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the Redmond-based software giant is planning to give up on ways to improve it.
And in addition to new features, Microsoft is also working on some pretty big changes under the hood as well, and one such improvement concerns the code base currently used in the browser.
As you probably know already, Microsoft Edge is now a cross platform browser, so in addition to Windows 10, it’s also available on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
So in theory, when Microsoft is developing a new feature, the company has to optimize it three times for different platforms, on Windows, Linux, and Mac for the desktop, and then for Android and iOS.
So the software giant is now planning a different approach: move Microsoft Edge to one common codebase that would allow for feature parity much easier.
Microsoft explained at Ignite earlier this month that such an update would allow for an improved engineering process, sharing features with desktop, and would make it “free to innovate.”
The mobile Edge push
While Microsoft is evolving quite fast on the desktop, not the same thing can be said about mobile, where the company is still working on several big features. Needless to say, it’s still forced to use the WebKit-based rendering engine on iOS, just like everyone else offering a browser to iPhone users, but the company wants the same codebase to be shared with Android.
And this is quite big news, as the mobile version of Edge would thus be able to sync with the desktop sibling much more efficiently, making the transition from the PC to a mobile device as seamless as possible.
Without a doubt, this can’t happen overnight, but in the long term, it’s something that would certainly make Microsoft a leader in the browser world.