Edge is dead. Yes, its shell will continue, but its rendering engine is dead, which throws Edge into the also-ran pile of WebKit/Blink wrappers. And no, I’m not thrilled. Ignoring anything else, I think EdgeHTML was a solid rendering engine, and I wish it had survived because I do believe diversity is good for the web. But I’m not nearly as upset as lots of other pundits I’m seeing, and I was trying to figure out why.

I think it’s because the other pundits are lamenting the death of some sort of utopia that never existed, whereas I’m looking at the diversity that actually exists in practice.

The people upset about Edge’s death, in general, are upset because they have this idea that the web is (at least in theory) a utopia, where anyone could write a web browser that conformed to the specs and (again, theoretically) dethrone the dominant engine. They know this hasn’t existed de facto for at least some time–the specs that now exist for the web are so complicated that only Mozilla, with literally hundreds of millions of dollars of donations, can meaningfully compete with Google–but it’s at least theoretically possible. The death of Edge means one less browser engine to push back against Chrome, and one more nail in the coffin of that not-ever-quite-here utopia.

Thing is, that’s the wrong dynamic.

The dynamic isn’t Gecko v. EdgeHTML v. Blink v. WebKit. It’s any engine v. native. That’s it. The rendering engine wars are largely over: while I hope that Gecko survives, and I do use Firefox as my daily driver, that’s largely irrelevant; Gecko has lost by at least as much as Mac OS Classic ever lost. What does matter is that most people access the web via mobile apps now. It’s not about whether you like that, or whether I like that, or whether it’s the ideal situation; that’s irrelevant. The simple fact is, most people use the web through apps, period. In that world, Gecko v. Blink v. WebKit is an implementation detail; what matters is the quality of mobile app you ship.

And in that world, the battle’s not over. Google agrees. You know how I know? Because they’re throwing a tremendous amount of effort at Flutter, which is basically a proprietary version of Electron that doesn’t even do desktop apps.[1] That only makes sense if you’re looking past the rendering engine wars–and if already you control effectively all rendering engines, then that fight only matters if you think the rendering engine wars are already passé.

So EdgeHTML’s death is sad, but the counterbalance isn’t Gecko; it’s Cocoa Touch. And on that front, there’s still plenty of diversity. Here’s to the fight.

  1. Yeah, I know there’s an effort to make Flutter work on desktops. I also know that effort isn’t driven by Google, though. ↩︎