Source: Netmarketshare, January 2019 Building browsers is hard

Why are the world’s browsers shifting towards Chromium, and what does it mean for the future? Microsoft Edge has just announced that it will be making the switch, following lesser-known alternatives like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex, and more. We are in this web thing together, and this is about:// all of us! Whenever you see instructions that include the about:// scheme, your Chromium browser of choice will do the right thing.There’s a lot going on under the hood of your average browser, which is one reason why an increasing number of newer browsers are deciding to use Chromium components.

In Chrome, about:// URLs get rewritten to chrome://, in Edge to edge://, and so on for all vendors. Luckily there is a hidden champion scheme that fits all our needs: about://. At the same time, listing all possible vendor schemes like edge://, chrome://, brave://, etc. We strive for making our documentation inclusive of different browsers, so, for example, telling a Brave user to navigate to chrome://flags to toggle a given flag-while it works thanks to the rewrite mechanism-may not be the most welcoming experience. All vendors have created this rewrite mechanism, which makes sense, as Edge is not Chrome, although it is based on Chromium. For example, if you enter chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features into Microsoft Edge, you will notice that it gets rewritten as edge://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features. Something interesting happens, though, if you enter a chrome:// URL into a browser that is not Chrome. Not all features that are available behind a flag are ripe for production-sometimes quite the opposite. Only features deemed safe for testing with real users are available for origin trials.īrowser flags are set by you and opt in your local browser to a given feature. Origin trials are set by website owners and opt a user's browser into supporting a given feature. Browser flags are distinct from origin trials.

All chromium based browsers