Still no word from the horse’s mouth about the reported EdgeHTML demise, but I hear that’s coming later today. The blog posts are starting to roll in about the possible impact of this though.

Andre Garzia: While we Blink, we loose the Web:

Even though Opera, Beaker and Brave are all doing very good work, it is still Chrome engine behind them and that limits the amount of stuff they can build and innovate. It is like as if they were building cars, there is a lot they can do without actually changing the engine itself, and thats what the Web Browsers are becoming, everyone is working on parts of the car but all the engines are now Chrome and believe me, you don’t want all the engines to be the same, not even if they are all Gecko or if somehow we resurrect Presto, we want diversity of engines and not monoculture.

Tim Kadlec, Risking a Homogeneous Web:

I can understand the logic. Microsoft can’t put as many folks on Edge (including EdgeHTML for rendering and Chakra for JavaScript) as Google has done with Chromium (using Blink for rendering and V8 for JavaScript), so keeping up was always going to be a challenge. Now they can contribute to the same codebase and try to focus on the user-focused features. Whether this gets people to pay more attention to their next browser or not remains to be seen, but I get the thinking behind the move.

The big concern here is we’ve lost another voice from an engine perspective.

Ferdy Christant, The State of Web Browsers:

Edge is doomed. It was doomed and its next version will be equally doomed from the start. For the simple reason that Microsoft has close to no say in how browsers get installed: on mobile as a default app, and on desktop via web services under the control of Google. Switching to Chromium makes no difference in market share, as the only way to compete now is through the browser’s UI, not via the engine. Which isn’t a competition at all, since browser UI is a commodity.

I’ll link up the official statements as they come out.

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