Here’s how Microsoft is helping to improve Google’s Chrome tab management

While you expect rivalry in big companies looking to find dominance in the market, it’s nice to also hear news about them working together to improve one another’s products as well rather than just trying to one-up each other all the time.

Thanks to Microsoft’s decision to move away from their own rendering engine with their Edge browser and adopt Google’s open-source Chromium instead, the two companies seem to have been collaborating closely to improve certain features of the native Chromium project. with Microsoft’s helping Google master some of the things that they have already figured out, as was recently showcased in a recent discussion between a Google and Microsoft engineer:

In the discussion, we see Google software engineer Leonard Grey post “If you’re still interested in upstreaming this from Edge, we’d be happy to take it,” with a Microsoft engineer Justin Gallagher responding “Sounds great! I’ll take ownership of this issue then,”.

The feature in discussion was the ability to move multiple tabs to a new window from the tab context menu, something which Edge offered, but Chrome didn’t. Two weeks after this chat though,  Microsoft committed code that enables this feature in Chromium, which Google can then use to build into their own Chrome browser.

It might appear like a small thing, but its collaboration like this that makes me still have some faith in our big tech companies who aren’t just out for all of our data ad money, but also have an interest in working together to make projects better. Now, if only Google can work on that memory management issue too and then we will really see some exciting browser battles in place.

Last Updated: January 28, 2020