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The Microsoft Edge browser is adopting the Chromium engine for future releases, raising fears that Google will end up undermining it, as it has done with others in the past. As noted earlier in the year, until now, Google seems to be supportive of this change.
Last week, however, some beta testers found that Google's corporate email service, Hangouts Meet, was no longer running on Microsoft Edge and was asking users to download Chrome or Firefox. This has raised new concerns about the malfunction of Google services with Microsoft's new Edge browser. "The reality is different, though," reported The Verge.
Nothing sinister happens here, says Google
The reality is that Google Meet only works with browsers that have been "whitelisted", unlike the application that blocks browsers. As the new Edge version is in pre-release right now, it will be added to the whitelist as soon as it becomes available, Google confirmed. "The latest version of Edge from Microsoft was initially working before moving to a new user agent channel and Google Meet stopped working," said The Verge.
"We consider that the increasing adoption of Chromium and WebRTC is positive for the entire unified communications industry," said a Google spokesman in a statement.
With the recent release of Edge Developer Snapshots, we are excited to be able to offer a new Hangouts Meet preview experience, and we plan to officially support it as soon as it is available.
The transition from Microsoft to Chromium will be good news for Edge. However, activists and manufacturers of browsers like Mozilla are still not convinced. Although Google may be playing well with the new browser, it tends to "bother" other businesses. It is also important to follow Google's "implementation of the Web" as opposed to independent choices.
"By adopting Chromium, Microsoft is giving Google even more control over online life," Mozilla said last year when the Windows manufacturer announced plans to switch to the Chromium engine.
It may sound melodramatic, but it is not. The "navigation engines" – Google Chrome and Mozilla's Gecko Quantum – are "baseball" software that largely determines what each of us can do online.
Microsoft's decision gives Google more options to decide alone what opportunities are available to each of us.
Whatever the concerns, it will be interesting to see if Google "lets" another browser become as popular as Chrome or even exceed its share of use.
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