After a few days of rumors, Microsoft announced today that it"s going to be using Chromium in its browser moving forward and that the new Edge will be coming to Windows 7, 8.1, and macOS. Now, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has posted a response to the news, saying that it"s bad for the internet.
Mozilla says that Microsoft"s decision to use Chromium and the Blink rendering engine basically gives Google a monopoly on what we see on the internet. Remember, Chromium is the open-source browser that Google Chrome is based on, and other third-party browsers use it too, like Opera, Vivaldi, and more.
With Microsoft moving away from EdgeHTML, that"s one less competitor in the browser space, growing Chromium"s market share. Mozilla worries that when Chromium"s usage share gets large enough, web developers won"t test their apps against anything else, going so far as to compare this to when Microsoft had a monopoly in browsers in the early 2000s.
Mozilla also said that this is why it exists. "We compete with Google not because it’s a good business opportunity," Beard said. "We compete with Google because the health of the internet and online life depend on competition and choice."