Microsoft is continuing its march toward a more open future. The company said today it will open source a core piece of its Edge web browser, the successor to Internet Explorer.
Microsoft will publish the source code for Chakra, the part of Edge responsible for running JavaScript code, next month on the code sharing and collaboration site GitHub, the company said in a blog post. What's more, the company will accept code contributions from developers outside of Microsoft—a point driven home by the fact that it made the announcement not at a company event but at the JSConf US Last Call developers conference in Florida.
This move isn't the same thing as open sourcing the entire browser. You won't be able to actually browse web pages using ChakraCore. But Microsoft thinks its JavaScript engine will find use in a wide range of applications, such as games, cloud services and Internet of Things devices.
That may seem counterintuitive, given that JavaScript was originally created as a programming language for web browsers. But in recent years the language has found a home in other applications, thanks to Node.js, a platform for running JavaScript on servers or other computers. (Node.js depends on Google's V8, the JavaScript engine that powers Chrome.)
Why, then, would developers want to use Chakra instead of V8? Microsoft claims that Chakra has better support for the latest version of JavaScript. Chakra is already used by Microsoft outside of Edge to render JavaScript on the Xbox and Windows Phone, and on the server side for technologies from Cortana the Outlook.com.
Node.js can already run on Chakra instead of V8, but only on Windows systems. But Microsoft will work to make Chakra available on other platforms, according to the company. Making the software open source will open up Microsoft's options for having it bundled with Linux distributions, as well make it possible for independent developers to port ChakraCore to other platforms.
And by sharing the code for Chakra, browser developers at Apple, Google and Mozilla can learn from Microsoft's approach and potentially improve their own JavaScript rendering engines.
