How Microsoft is making Chrome a better browser

By Sean Endicott
published

Microsoft's efforts to improve Chromium-based browsers help more than just Edge.

Google Chrome Canary
Google Chrome Canary (Image credit: Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Microsoft has committed several changes to improve Chromium browsers on Windows 10.
  • The changes help Microsoft Edge, but also help other browsers such as Google Chrome.
  • Microsoft recently fixed a notification issue that affected Chromium browsers.

Microsoft made it clear when it moved Microsoft Edge to Chromium that its move would also benefit other Chromium browsers. When Microsoft embraced the Chromium project it started down a path of improving the codebase that powers Google Chrome and several other popular browsers. While some of Microsoft's improvements only benefit Microsoft Edge, several of the changes improve Google Chrome.

TechRadar believes "Microsoft is the best thing to happen to Chrome," and outlines several of the improvements from Microsoft that improve Google's browser. For example, Microsoft recently fixed an issue that caused Chrome notifications to appear twice on Windows 10. That issue also didn't open the website that sent the notification from Chrome.

Microsoft also committed code that made Chrome use less RAM. Improvements like this from Microsoft improve the Microsoft Edge experience, but also benefit Google Chrome and other browsers such as Vivaldi. Google Chrome is still very popular among Windows 10 users, so it's in Microsoft's best interest for it to provide a good experience. Because Chrome and Edge share a Chromium codebase, Microsoft can improve its own browser and get the added benefit of improving other popular browsers on Windows 10.

Sean Endicott
Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

7 Comments
  • Yes, and I believe this was always the goal. Leaving aside the juvenile "browser wars", this adoption and improvement of Chromium reaps big dividends for Windows overall. There are many examples of this. Just consider that Visual Studio Code recently released its first native ARM version. This could not have happened without the work Microsoft has done to port Chromium (and hence Electron) to ARM. It's no exaggeration to say that Google would simply never have done any of this work.
  • I have been using the Microsoft Chrome Edge browser for about a month now. I honestly feel that it is the best overall browser ever and a huge improvement over anything else I have used. Just as their Internet Explorer greatly improved web access back in the day, so does this new, improved version of Chrome.
  • I've also switched to Microsoft Edge and man, it has the performance of Chrome but without the memory hogging, and it is also easier on the battery.
  • Totally agree with you on the juvenile browser wars; its just silly that people get into fights over a browser. Use what works for you folks; that's all. I didn't realize VSCode had an ARM version now which is really good because now I can us VSCode on my old Chromebook (which runs the OP1 processor). I had been using a custom baked version which worked fine but having an official one is great news. You are 100% right on your last sentence; Google would NEVER have done any of that work. I honestly wish Microsoft would just buy Android and take it over. They would do a much better job. I know some people would say "well look at Windows phone; they trashed that" but Windows phone had more issues than most folks realize (namely; the competition). I think Microsoft would make Android better too.
  • Microsoft improve android and ios. What's new. Without Microsoft android would've have died a slow death.
  • But the android version of edge is bad.
    The tab list order is reversed which makes it unusable for heavy users who open many tabs.
    It can be fixed easily using custom flag but Microsoft doesn't give access to chromium flags in android version.
  • Trying out the new Edge myself after realizing how much RAM that Chrome was sucking up. I manually installed the Chromium version a while back just hadn't given it a real test yet. The other day I opened the same 4 tabs in both and left them for about 2 hours. When I came back, Chrome was using well over 700MB+ and Edge was only using about 360MB. Both browsers were also running the same extensions (uBlock Origin, UBlock Origin Extra, and the binary Lastpass extension). Really liking that the new Edge keeps a lot of the look and feel in many ways that Chrome has (guess that's due to the Chromium base code), but it still feels fresh at the same time. I actually liked the original edge as well, but not enough to DD it.