For decades, Microsoft has been the company that has tried to crush the competition. Since Satya Nadella became the CEO, however, the company has adopted a new approach. Microsoft today is more open to partnerships and more open towards open-source software. The company’s decision to build an Edge browser based on the opensource Chromium is one example. Microsoft will now also be helping Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers get some Microsoft Edge features.
Microsoft will bring improved tab management to Chrome and other Chromium browsers
This news was brought to the limelight by a Redditor while going through the Chromium bug reports. The Redditor caught an exchange between a Microsoft developer and a Google developer. This was regarding a small change in the tab context menu. Currently, if you want to move an existing tab into a new window in Chrome, your only option is to drag it out.
On the new Microsoft Edge based on Chromium, you also get an option to do the same with a right-click on the tab. Last year, Microsoft and Google announced that they would be working together. This courteous exchange between two developers from the companies is an example of the kind of partnership we can probably expect.
Leonard Grey (Google):
If you’re still interested in upstreaming this from Edge, we’d be happy to take it 🙂
Justin Gallagher (Microsoft):
sounds great! I’ll take ownership of this issue then
While the aforementioned change might sound minor, more is yet to come. A larger, related tab management change to the Chromium code will allow Chrome users to move multiple tabs between different windows. As of right now, you’re limited to moving one tab at a time by dragging and dropping the tabs between the windows.
This is the first Microsoft Edge feature to be ported to Chrome
Two weeks since then, Microsoft has already submitted the code and Google has patched it upstream. That’s one way of saying that the feature has already been added to some build(s) of Chromium. We should see it reflected in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers in a few months, hopefully.
This is not the first time Microsoft has submitted code to Chromium. This is also not the first time Google has accepted and added it to Chromium. However, this is the first time Microsoft has submitted a major feature and not just a bugfix or workaround.
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