Microsoft announced today at Pubcon that Bing is adopting Microsoft Edge to run JavaScript and render webpages with Bingbot.
In addition, Bingbot will be continually updated to the latest version of Microsoft Edge going forward, making it evergreen like Googlebot.
Microsoft says making these changes will create less fragmentation of the web and make lives easier for SEOs. Bingbot rendering web pages using Microsoft Edge on Chromium creates compatibility across web crawlers, ensuring all JavaScript frameworks can be supported.
Fabrice Canel, Principal Program Manager of Microsoft-Bing, states:
“By adopting Microsoft Edge, Bingbot will now render all web pages using the same underlying web platform technology already used today by Googlebot, Google Chrome, and other Chromium-based browsers. This will make it easy for developers to ensure their web sites and their Content Management System work across all these solutions without having to spend time investigating each solution in depth.
By disclosing our new Bingbot Web Pages rendering technology, we are ensuring fewer SEO compatibility problems moving forward and increase satisfaction in the SEO community.”
This is actually the first time Microsoft has ever disclosed this much information about Bing’s web crawling engine.
This change will occur over the next few months as Bingbot gradually switches to Microsoft Edge. As a result, the bingbot crawler user-agent may change as appropriate to allow rendering on certain sites.
For the most part, site owners have nothing to worry about. Careful testing will take place to ensure that sites can dynamically render fine before switching over to Microsoft Edge.
In order to be sure if there are any issues detected with your site as this change occurs, make sure your site is registered with Bing Webmaser Tools.