If you're the kind of person who isn't sure what a browser is, and have always just thought of that E icon on your desktop as the icon for the Internet, you probably don't care about this news. However, if you've ever had a preference between any of the browser giants, you might be surprised to hear that Microsoft has decided to swap out their browser engine for Google's. (If you're a bit behind, you may not yet know that Internet Explorer is no longer a thing, but has been replaced by Edge. And now Edge is going to use Google's open source Chromium platform, at least starting at some point in 2019.)
Granted, people who spend time coding websites will find this much more interesting news than the average Internet consumer, but it's a fairly significant change. Since the times when modems still went bleep bring badoooong, there's typically been a couple of competitors in the browser space, developing code in competition with each other. This has led to new technology (and also many headaches for programmers.) But at the moment, we are now looking at primarily a single platform driving website display, and it's difficult to predict exactly how this will affect website functionality.
If you'd like to read more, here are a few articles:
December 13, 2018 in Articles, Browsers and tagged Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Google, Microsoft. Bookmark the permalink.