Microsoft to Open Source A Key Piece of Its Web Browser

The company believes that its new browser is well-suited not just to PCs, but to emerging browsers inside the Internet of Things (IoTs) as well.

Beginning in January 2016 Microsoft will allow external developers to contribute to the project via pull requests on GitHub and more details on how to collaborate will be shared at that time.

Edge arrived as the Windows 10 default browser during the company's Build 2015 conference back in April. 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. First, it does not expose Chakra's private bindings to the browser or the Universal Windows Platform, both of which constrain it to a very specific use case.

Seth and Foresti write that the Chakra architecture's "multi-tiered pipeline that supports an interpreter, a multi-tiered background JIT compiler, and a traditional mark and sweep garbage collector that can do concurrent and partial collections" deliver performance and scalability from "cloud services to the Internet of Things".

That may seem counterintuitive, given that JavaScript was originally created as a programming language for web browsers. It is responsible for translating software code into interactions, animations, or operations performed inside each web page.

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. Microsoft is looking for contributors who will clone the repository, inspect the code and contribute new functionality for testing or fixing bugs. This means that the core components of the Chakra JavaScript engine used in Microsoft Edge – as well as Windows 10 – will be made available for developers to tinker with as they see fit. The company is continuing its march toward a more open future.

It's an interesting – and impressive move – for Microsoft, a company that has historically kept its code under wraps and rarely open sourced projects.

"It includes everything that is needed to parse, interpret, compile and execute JavaScript code without any dependencies on Microsoft Edge internals", the team also noted.

Source: Microsoft to Open Source A Key Piece of Its Web Browser