How Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With Web Components
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When Microsoft’s Edge browser team released WebUI 2.0 in May, a project that aimed to replace React components with native web components, its primary goal was to make Edge faster for end users. The core idea was that adopting a “markup-first architecture” would reduce JavaScript reliance on its product, which would mean less code to process on the client side — hence a better experience for the user.
To find out how the WebUI 2.0 project is going — including what inspired it and its ultimate goals — I spoke to Andrew Ritz, who leads the Edge Fundamentals team at Microsoft.
But first, let’s quickly clarify what web components are. The community site WebComponents.org describes them as “a set of web platform APIs that allow you to create new custom, reusable, encapsulated HTML tags to use in web pages and web apps.” Ritz puts it this way, when advising his own team how to approach this web development paradigm: “Anytime you want to do a new control [and] you find yourself writing any JavaScript, pause — stop — talk to a senior engineer and ask, how do you solve this with HTML and CSS?”
