Microsoft Edge: What went wrong, what's next

 Microsoft's grand browser experiment flopped in the marketplace, so the company is turning to an unlikely successor: the open-source Chromium project. Can it succeed where EdgeHTML failed?

Microsoft today confirmed the rumors that have been swirling all week. As part of a sweeping change to one of the flagship components of Windows 10, it will rebuild its Microsoft Edge browser from the ground up, ripping out its proprietary EdgeHTML rendering engine and replacing it with the open-source Chromium code base.

Yes, that Chromium. The same one that's at the heart of archrival Google's Chrome browser.

Mary Jo Foley has the details here: "Microsoft's Edge to morph into a Chromium-based, cross-platform browser."

It's an extraordinary capitulation from Microsoft, which has spent nearly four years and a staggering amount of engineering effort on a quixotic campaign to convince Windows 10 users to ditch their current browser in favor of Microsoft Edge.

That effort was doomed to fail, because of a series of strategic mistakes. So what makes Microsoft think that they can convince the world that this all-new Edge is a worthy alternative to Chrome?

Let's start with what went wrong with EdgeHTML. In theory, the idea of building a standards-based rendering engine to compete with Chromium's Blink engine makes perfect sense. After all, who wants a monoculture?

But when that noble idea collided with the real world, guess what happened?

EDGE WAS BARELY ABLE TO COMPETE ON ITS NATIVE PLATFORM, WINDOWS 10.

One of the best sources for real-world data on browser usage is the U.S. Government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP). I've been tracking those numbers for several years, and six months ago, I noticed a startling fact: Microsoft Edge was falling behind Internet Explorer, the browser that Microsoft had officially stopped developing.

Even as the Windows 10 installed base continued to climb, traffic from Microsoft Edge dropped. Among Windows 10 users, the usage share for Microsoft Edge, as measured by DAP, has been steadily declining. Edge usage dropped from 20.3 percent in the second quarter of 2017 to 19.4 percent in the first three months of 2018.

For the three months ending November 30, 2018, that number plunged again, to 17.1 percent. Meanwhile, Google Chrome usage on Windows 10 increased to 58.3 percent.

Remember, Microsoft Edge is the default browser on Windows 10, which means that the first thing most people do with a new Windows 10 device is download Chrome and set it as their default browser.

Of course, Microsoft has been down that road before with its "Scroogled" campaign, and the results were, to put it charitably, disastrous. Five years later, with the miserable Mark Penn gone from the company and Satya Nadella in the CEO suite, it might work.

But even if the new Edge doesn't help Microsoft increase its browser share substantially, it's still good news for the web at large. Microsoft has already been making impressive contributions to the Chromium codebase, and whatever it does with the new Chromium-based Edge will go back to the community. If some of Edge's innovations make it into other browsers, even Google Chrome, then everyone wins.