In brief: Microsoft joined team recently Chromium when it re-launched its not-so-popular Edge browser under the open-source project’s umbrella. However, Microsoft is doing more than just taking advantage of Chromium’s existing functionality — it’s contributing to the project with a few ideas of its own.
Microsoft and Chromium programmers have recently collaborated to bring Edge’s unique multi-tab management feature to the open-source project. This feature, for the unaware, lets users grab multiple tabs and send them to a new window all at once, instead of having to drag them one-by-one.
The first hint of this collaboration popped up earlier this month, when Chromium contributor and Google engineer Leonard Grey asked Microsoft’s Justin Gallagher to “upstream” the feature from Edge to Chromium. Gallagher was quick to agree and take ownership of the issue.
This information may surprise some. While Chromium is hardly the same thing as Chrome, one could easily make the argument that by adding a useful feature to the former, Microsoft indirectly contributed to the success of one of its chief competitors.
Regardless, it seems the company, or at least Mr. Gallagher, decided to push petty corporate politics and rivalries to the side and work toward the betterment of the Chromium project as a whole.
With that said, features that do get added to the project won’t necessarily make their way to all Chromium-based browsers (Chrome included). It’s up to each individual browser developer to decide how their software will function, so Google may simply ignore this functionality (which has already been committed to Chromium).
However, that seems unlikely. Better tab management functionality is always in high-demand for multi-tasking use cases, and it would be foolish for Google to look a gift horse in the mouth here. If Google does take advantage of it, we should expect to see the feature hit Chrome’s beta builds in the near future.
