We call them “Chromium-based browsers”-Chromium is Google’s open source project from which Chrome and its engine emerged.īut what’s inside a browser engine? MOAR ENGINES! Every browser engine is comprised of several other engines: Oculus Browser, Brave, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet, Amazon’s Silk, and Opera all run on Blink. Good job, Edge.)Įxcept for Edge, all of these engines are open source, meaning anybody could grab one, wrap it in a new interface, and boom, release their own browser-maybe with a different (perhaps better) user experience-and that’s just what some browsers are! Apple only allows webKit-based browsers in its iOS app store, so the Chrome, Firefox, and even Edge browsers on iPads and iPhones work more like Safari than their desktop counterparts. Often the people who build the browser’s engine never even touch the interface!īrowser engines are the things that actually read all the HTML and CSS and JavaScript that come down across the Internet, interpret them, and display a pretty picture of a web page for you. All your bookmarks, the forward and backward arrows, that URL bar thingy-those aren’t the browser.

Whichever browser you use daily (I use Firefox, thanks for asking) is only an interface layer wrapped around a browser engine. Popular browsers you know today include Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, but in the past we’ve also had such greats as NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator. Let me be clear: an Internet that runs only on Chrome’s engine, Blink, and its offspring, is not the paradise we like to imagine it to be.Īs a Google Developer Expert who has worked on Microsoft Edge, with Firefox, and with the W3C as an Invited Expert, I have some opinions (and a number of facts) to drop on this topic.

Early in my career when I worked at agencies and later at Microsoft on Edge, I heard the same lament over and over: “Argh, why doesn’t Edge just run on Blink? Then I would have access to ALL THE APIs I want to use and would only have to test in one browser!”

Which browsers use chromium