• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 10, 2019

Bing will adopt the Chromium-based Edge browser to run JavaScript and render web pages. The move is not a surprising one, since Search Marketing Dailyreported that Microsoft would build its new browser on the Google Chromium open-source project.

This will result in fewer challenges and less fragmentation of the web -- especially for search engine optimization (SEO) professionals and web developers -- and fewer SEO compatibility problems, wrote Fabrice Canel, principal program manager at Microsoft Bing, in a blog post.

This update means that Microsoft’s web-crawling robot Bingbot, which collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Bing search engine, will become evergreen as the company commits to regular updates on the web page-rendering engine to the most recent, stable version of Microsoft Edge.

During the next few months, Microsoft will switch to Microsoft Edge. Most SEO professionals should know when it occurs, and it should become transparent to all.

Microsoft may choose to change its bingbot crawler user-agent as needed to allow rendering on some sites. 

For most web sites, there is nothing marketers really need to be concerned about, as the company will carefully test that they dynamically render properly before switching them to Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft has been working with Google to complete the open-source project.

For Edge, company developers believe the shift should decrease the number of vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s browser because of the maturity of Google’s browser tool, rather than writing one from the ground up. That’s according to Morey Haber, chief technology officer at BeyondTrust, a securities company, which had published a lengthy report on Microsoft’s vulnerabilities.

In fact 189 “critical” vulnerabilities reported in 2019, of which 81% would be mitigated across Microsoft’s portfolio of products such as Windows and Edge by removing local admin rights from users.

So not only should this change make it smoother for SEO professionals and web masters, but perhaps also reduce vulnerabilities in Bing’s search engine.

Can you just imagine Microsoft and Google developers working side by side?