I read today that Microsoft is reportedly throwing in the towel with their EdgeHTML browser engine and starting work on a new browser based on the Chromium engine.

My immediate thought was down-heartened. Another Google-backed browser to reinforce the popularity of Google’s own Chrome browser, but the problem may actually be worse than that (depending on your point of view of course).

Andre Alves Garzia explains more in his post:

We already lost the mobile world for a duopoly of Apple and Google, now we’re losing the desktop most used application, the Web Browser, to a monopoly from Google again, how much control do you want that company to have over the future of the Web? All this not counting the many Electron based apps we use in our daily lives such as VS Code, Atom, Slack, etc, which are all Chrome engine again.

— While we Blink, we lose the Web by Andre Alves Garzia

Even though I’m against any one company having too much control over any part of the technology stack, I’m supporting the use of Google, by using some tools that include the Chrome engine. I use VS Code daily as a web developer and of course the company I work for uses Slack as a communication tool between teams. Is there any getting away from the Chrome engine? Perhaps not at work, but I can make a concise decision to use other applications when I’m not at work.

I’ve been using Firefox and Safari as my preferred browsers for the last few years. In fact, I haven’t looked at Chrome since I decided to go Google-free a few years ago. As for the Chrome-based tools, I don’t use Slack outside of work, but I do use VS Code as my preferred text editor.

Perhaps it’s time to look at Vim again?