Regarding the topic of browser mono-cultures, I was web developer in the post browser war era in the early 2000s where we had a dominant IE6 and a stagnant browser landscape.
It was bad.
Real bad.
But I'm actually fairly positive about MS getting into the chromium landscape and back into the game. Let's face it MS had lost all of its influence in the browser world before dropping IE and making this move. It is a Google/Chrome dominated world at the moment. But by adopting Chromium, MS can "catch up" on a technical level and also wield significant power inside the Chromium project itself. They have money and they have an experienced browser engine engineering team. They will be able to provide some balance to Google in this ecosystem. If push came to shove, forking chromium wouldn't be an idle threat from MS. They will have some power.
On a technical level it looks like a move towards a mono-culture, but politically it looks like a chance at more balance and diversity to me.
I just wish they'd moved to Gecko instead of Chromium.
It's not like Gecko is an inherently inferior engine by any stretch, and it would significantly bolster their marketshare so that developers actually have to test against it.
One huge advantage the Chromium has over Gecko is Google's Security Team (ie Project Zero).
For most users, the web browser is one of the biggest attack surfaces and having arguably the best security team behind the browser engine is a good thing.
Google have certainly done a great job of maximizing the PR benefit from their security researchers. And it’s a great thing they’re doing. But regardless of how well individual companies market their respective security teams, Firefox has a comparable reputation for their browser engine.
Yes some of that might be thanks to PZ, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it?
Choosing Mozilla’s platform would have been better for code diversity, which has its own distinct security benefits.
I can understand value in multiple browsers for experimenting with new things (see Rust integration into Mozilla's engine), but what are the security benefits?
Like if you have 3 different crypto imlpementations, you have times more teams that have to get a thing right. It seems way easier to try and get it right just once.
Perhaps there's a holistic idea of "if one browser has an issue, at least it doesn't affect 100% of them" but given what CVEs look like in reality (often variations of the same attack across multiple programs) it seems like the cost/benefit would not be in our favor
Multiple implementations is a great way to highlight issues in the spec vs reality (assumptions, unspecified behavior, etc). If you only have one implementation, the implementation becomes the spec and you end up with people targeting compatibility for that rather than a specification.
This happened with Cisco routers back in the day, Juniper had to add a flag to make a routing protocol compatible with Cisco because Cisco implemented it wrong but had so much dominance that Juniper had no choice if they wanted to get in the game.
The biggest security benefit is that competition motivates everyone to work harder, to explore alternative solutions, to raise expectations. Competition means investing in ideas like Rust and Servo.
Without serious competition you eventually get IE6.
This is flatly not true. Just dig through the CVEs and you'll see while they have a similar number of bugs Chrome's are mostly in the harmless category (browser got DOSed) where as Firefox's has had like 10x the bad category (code got executed outside the sandbox).
It's not actually clear that they prioritize their own products all that much. Certainly in regards to Project Zero, it seems the point is that they are detached from the rest of the product teams. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
Outside of the security teams, I think it's actually that Chromium is much better fuzzed and scrutinized. They just have so many more resources, including those for security.
>It's not actually clear that they prioritize their own products all that much. Certainly in regards to Project Zero, it seems the point is that they are detached from the rest of the product teams. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
Most of what I've read relates to Microsoft products - and I'm not saying that Microsoft is better/worse than the rest when it comes to security.
So you’d rather live in a world where all the web apps you use every day need to be installed and run with full user permissions?
The web is the safest, most battle-tested sandbox environment to run apps in. It’s so safe that you click random links all day long, running 1000s of apps and never have to worry.
I’ll take web apps over native apps from a security perspective, thank you.
I don't really think this is a problem anymore. It's more that no desktop OS provides secure native execution facilities a la iOS. The web browser was the best solution for sandboxing web applications in 1995-200x, but now CPUs have multiple cores, virtualization extensions, systems with multiple gigabytes of ram, etc.
There are better ways to sandbox applications in 2020.
As an interesting counterpoint, since iOS sideloading became semi-possible around 2014, there have been many more app-based Jailbreaks than Safari-based Jailbreaks.
This is true despite the fact that on iOS, sideloading custom apps without a developer account is extraordinarily inconvenient.
I'm so sorry to respond so late; I would just like to point out "the cloud," and the fact that there have been very few hypervisor escapes. Just because there are more app-based Jailbreaks on iOS has little to do with what is technically possible given the hardware (recent Intel missteps notwithstanding).
Personally, I'd rather live in a world where you could tell a web app from a document before you opened it. No need for apps to be native, but on a different protocol.
I think the biggest reason they went with Chromium/Blink is simply because of market share... most users at this point are using Chrome for better or worse, and MS is going with the safest bet in terms of user compatibility for today's web.
I believe the reason was NodeJS and Electron, wasn’t it? Basically, MS expects NodeJS and especially Electron to become fairly important going forward (MS’s 2 newest and highly successful apps are both Electron based...VS Code and Teams). There is no indication that either of those are moving away from Chromium anytime soon.
The sad thing is that those apps' HTML and JS probably are standards-compliant, so supporting Slack, Teams, VSCode, (Electron) Skype, etc in a Firefox-based version of Electron should be possible and very straightforward - yet it probably won't happen.
What's sad is that Windows 98 fully supported desktop-based HTML+JS apps ("HTA Applications"), with access to native resources (using COM via `new ActiveXObject`) and it works with IE11 still - Microsoft just never pitched it as a serious development platform for some reason. Just imagine what today's world would be like if Microsoft did pitch HTA as a successor to VB6 (instead of the quickly-abandoned WinForms platform, now barely on life-support) (I'm mostly thinking we wouldn't be stuck with excessive memory consumption in Slack, and these apps would be able to use things like native context-menus and accessibility features)
Electron is pretty much the same nightmare anyway. Just because it runs in chromium doesn't mean it preserves the sandbox. All electron apps have full access to your filesystem and os, even from their chromium window context.
WinForms did not receive any significant updates after .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 - integration with the new User32 controls added in Windows 7 was only through downloaded optional redistributable DLLs. Ever since the .NET Framework 3.0 (and until UWP) Microsoft was selling WPF as the way to build Windows desktop applications without C/C++.
It's a big reason, for sure. To be able to instantly sync everything over, will mean there will be many, many people switching. It's tied to Edge is built in to Windows. Having Chrome installed will be redundant.
Responding to a reply that was deleted while I was in the process of writing my response:
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> I don't see why it's Microsofts responsibility to do whats worse for their products, users and business just to bring some sort of benefit to Mozilla which has awfully mismanaged over the past 10 years or so.
The browser monoculture didn't happen over night it happened thanks to years of neglect from the other browser engines.
I don't like this situation and don't even use Chrome myself but this is the reality of the web today.
I would wholeheartedly agree with you if Firefox Quantum wasn't so damn good.
I didn't use Firefox for years except for occasionally testing sites. Quantum blew me away in terms of rendering speed; it reminded me of Chrome in the very early days. I know that benchmarks say Chrome is still ever-so-slightly faster, and I can't explain that, but Quantum legitimately feels quicker when I use it. At worst, it's certainly not a downgrade from Chrome.
I do wish Firefox's interface was cleaner—the pocket integration and similar stuff just feels like icky clutter to me—but I've been able to mostly clean it up via about:config tweaks, and none of that's relevant to the rendering engine.
That Firefox managed to do all of this with much more limited resources than Chrome, and despite how many sites nowadays are built to target Chrome specifically... it's seriously impressive. I'd love to see what the engine could do with Microsoft's additional resources behind it.
I think Quantum is smarter about what it prioritizes rendering. Time to complete page load may be slower in Quantum, but Quantum makes sure to display key parts of the page so that it appears to load faster.
We started with Gecko in 2015, but it lost on many dimensions in a head to head comparison enumerating gaps vs. Chrome. DRM is just one example. We don't like DRM, but users want Netflix to work, and Google makes WideVine free-as-in-beer; whereas at the time, Mozilla had an Adobe deal that did not extend to non-Firefox Gecko embeddings.
So we switched to chromium/Blink in late 2015. Much later, when I visited Apple in early 2017, a devrel friend asked why we couldn't use WebKit. A WebKit founder in the meeting agreed with me that there was no way for Brave to do so on Windows w/o running out of capital. DRM again was an issue too, without WideVine. Don’t blame startup for not carrying a full engine — that needs deep pockets. While MS does have deep enough pockets, it is starting by using chromium/Blink and slow-forking.
Hey, thanks for everything you've done for open source and open platforms.
The reason you gave here for Brave not choosing Gecko (or WebKit) is interesting – but given Microsoft's deep pockets and tech know-how those reasons don't apply to them.
I think this is a strategic blunder on Microsoft's part and I say this as a Linux user. :)
Microsoft has now warmly embraced Linux – and I think they could have chosen this time to warmly embrace Mozilla. Oh well.
Microsoft was slowly losing browser share with their own engine, felt they needed more web compatibility (including de facto via the WebKit lineage) and extensions sooner. They were not going to play a long game, even if they could afford it. Mozilla may have looked wobbly to them, too.
I hear what you're saying – but! – a tech giant has to play the long game. The Web is an open (for now) platform and Microsoft, like Apple, like Google, need to have their own web client/server implementation. Makes no sense to be beholden to Google imho.
I'm stunned at how little desktop browser share Edge has (4.6%): https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... – however, changing browser engine is not going to change that, is it? I suppose, if Google and Microsoft end up equally and democratically sharing Chromium development then all's well.
Given the recent layoffs at Mozilla it's a pity (in hindsight – for the benefit of the open web) Microsoft didn't back them :(
Surely Microsoft has done their homework: researched everything and weigh the pros & cons. This is a big thing and the next step in their browser strategy. We can only guess their reasons, but clearly in their eyes, Chromium codebase is the better choice.
KHTML was always designed and positioned as an embeddable browser engine. Mozilla deprecated the embedding of Gecko, so you have to fork and change the whole browser instead of just lifting the engine...
Moving for any modern language you know well to any other modern language will feel like that. You need to spend time learning. It has nothing to do with the what the language is capable of.
"I can code in X so I should be able to jump in to any other language and get to speed instantly." is obviously wrong.
Serialization for one thing. You can work with JSON extremely freely without creating weird serializable classes for every combination of data you might need to work with - eg, no class named "DoodadList" for when you want to de-serialize a JSON list (maybe that's a Unity3D thing?).
You can nest functions nicely and work with closures when it makes sense, if you like that sort of thing.
The async programming model is also really nice to work with.
You also don't need to create classes for every noun, verb, and adjective in your system either - when all you need is a function, you just write a function, not some weird object to hold it.
You also don't have to write a f after all of your decimal values to tell the silly compiler that you mean for 0.25 to be a float. (this one truly does not matter, but there are a lot of little things like this that add up)
I know you can do a lot of that in C#, but its just so effortless in javascript. You just need to be more disciplined about how you code it
You are right about having to create a class to hold a function, that is annoying. But C# do support nested functions and closures. I don't really understand your other points. A literal 0.25 in C# will be parsed as a double precision. If you want it to be a float (less precision) you use the F postfix. But JavaScript doesn't even have the float/double distinction.
Expressions and functions for example. Assembler is really low level, it doesn't even have control structures. But C# seem to have everything JavaScript has and much more, so I just wondered why the parent post found JavaScript more expressive.
I joined Netscape on April 3, 1995 but in the server team, due to a temporary requisition shortage. I worked on what would eventually become HTTP 1.1, which we wanted to be more like SPDY or HTTP 2. Therefore I had only spare time to think about what became JS, and I used it to study HyperTalk, Logo, and other languages, not just Scheme or Self.
I finally got transferred to the client team one whole month later, in early May. Then I had ten days to demo-day.
Why do you feel compelled to make up a story? Because it sounds nicer to you to denigrate my work, it seems.
Not that you need it or anything, but I'd like to thank you for your work on Javascript - without it I might never have gotten started with programming.
So, thank you very much for laying down the foundation for a whole generation of new programmers!
He was... kind of. My understanding is Eich had been thinking for a while about the idea of bringing a version of Scheme into the browser. He was lured to work for Netscape by the promise that yes, he could do this. Unfortunately the business decision came down that the language's syntax had to approximate Java. So the semantics of the language had probably been settled in his mind for quite some time, but the syntax change still makes the 10 days an impressive feat. (And also explains a lot of the weirdness in JavaScript -- you're writing code and expecting it to behave like a C-like, but you're actually kind of writing quasi-Scheme and you don't know it.)
Friends from SGI recruited me (second attempt) in March 1995, I joined in early April but in the server group. I thought a lot -- but worked too little due to server commitments -- during the month of April, about "the scripting language" which was suggested to be Scheme when I was being recruited, but which by the time I joined could not be Scheme, due to the impending Java deal between Netscape and Sun.
Java meant either no scripting language, or a kid-brother language, which meant C-like syntax, primitive vs. object types as in Java, and other unfortunate consequences.
When I transferred to the client group in early May, I had to produce a demo very quickly. I chose first class functions and (barefly there at first) prototypes as the building blocks. The rest is history.
That's what I wrote, yeah. With constraints going from "Come do Scheme!" to "make it look like Java" and even "feel like Java" because interop, via what we hoped would come, and did in Netscape 3, as a JS/Java bridge called LiveConnect.
The Belgium Post built a whole web app+service architecture on LiveConnect.
Think of LiveConnect as "Active Scripting" on MS's platform, which enabled Java components to be developed and glued together by JS.
Edge still has (had?) so many rendering issues on sites we make. One thing I find really impressive about Firefox, despite the completely different engine I _very_ rarely find FF-specific bugs.
(Perhaps I should have specified "Quantum" rather than "Gecko"? I meant the engine that new Firefox uses, I thought it was still called Gecko but sounds like I might be wrong?)
Many (all?) Oslo postcodes start with 0, and their site truncates the 0 when you try to enter your postcode. Their stated solution was to use Chrome, so they don't get any of my business.
From your description, it sounds like they decided to use a "number" typed field for the post codes. This is of course incorrect, post codes are really just strings. While the bug manifests itself on firefox, it is hard to blame it for implementing the field according to spec [1]. Chrome decided to ignore the spec and leave the field more free-form, which in turn enables developers to use it incorrectly without detecting the compatibility bug.
> User agents must not allow the user to set the value to a non-empty string that is not a valid floating-point number. If the user agent provides a user interface for selecting a number, then the value must be set to the best representation of the number representing the user’s selection as a floating-point number.
Open-source IE would be even more interesting to see, mostly because the early versions ran well even on systems with two orders of magnitude less RAM and CPU power than ones today; especially when displaying static pages and not JS-heavy apps. I remember the Firefox of the time was noticeably more sluggish than IE6 and used more RAM, and know quite a few people who tried FF and went back to IE for that reason.
> I just wish they'd moved to Gecko instead of Chromium.
The usual answer to that complaint is that Gecko is harder to embed. MDN pages on the subject even mention it’s deprecated and that the documentation is obsolete.
If Microsoft had also gone with Gecko? Yeah, I'm quite confident Gecko would still be around (and maintained by many people other than Microsoft) in a decade.
I think it will be around anyway btw, although I'm perhaps less sure.
I'm a noob web dev working in a small shop that sells a niche SaaS product.
We had a customer push us to support Edge.
The dev team (3 dudes) just looked at eachother and laid down the "No, Firefox or Chrome...".
It's just so much pressure to dance around the "this one does this, that one doesn't" and generally we rarely run into any Firefox and Chrome issues. Edge, just not worth it for a small team.
I'm glad we probabbly can direct them to the new Edge now (after some testing).
We treat Chrome/Safari/Edge/FF all as 1st class browsers and haven't had many problems (aside from Safari lacking U2F and exotic CSS props like motion-path).
A few things I’ve been using without EdgeHTML support: #rgba and #rrggbbaa in CSS, <details>, Custom Elements v1. On my personal website, I have deliberately chosen to no longer polyfill these or change my process to avoid #rgba in the final CSS, so various background colours are missing, the light/dark theme switcher doesn’t collapse (it should start collapsed), and a terminal recording will be missing in an upcoming blog post.
mix-blend-mode is another thing that EdgeHTML doesn’t support that I was using for a bit, but I stopped using it because I kept finding critical bugs with it in Chromium, most notably https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398 which was impossible to work around, simply stopping rendering the page after 8192px!
Been tacitly supporting Edge myself, but drew a hard line at IE (even 11) for current projects. Without async functions, promises etc, it's just too much extra boilerplate, a separate build setup and a huge payload just to support IE11, let alone older.
I'll be glad if/when Edge (blink) is deployed with a windows update.. the sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned.
> Been tacitly supporting Edge myself, but drew a hard line at IE (even 11) for current projects. Without async functions, promises etc, it's just too much extra boilerplate, a separate build setup and a huge payload just to support IE11, let alone older.
We've been using TypeScript for all scripts longer than ~20 lines for years - so we got async functions for free (it compiles async/await TypeScript functions to IE11-compatible ES5 just fine).
Agreed, but I'd just assume avoid dual builds and targets at this point... a project I'm working on started with IE11 support and dual build targets, but broke in IE11 about 3 weeks in, so changed the "legacy" build mode to a page noting the requirement for a modern and secure browser.
TypeScript does NOT shim async functions[1] for you, or give you fetch-api[2]? AFAIK, if you want that functionality, you still need babel and the fills/transforms to support async in browsers without it are freakishly huge payloads. That doesn't count dynamic imports and a number of other features that TypeScript doesn't support.
I'd rather not support a dead browser, that's been dead for years now, that has clear replacements and alternatives. Not to mention security concerns above and beyond development pain..
TypeScript does shim async functions, you just need to supply your own `Promise<T>` polyfill ( https://mariusschulz.com/blog/compiling-async-await-to-es3-e... ). `fetch` also works fine with a third-party polyfill. Combined, that's about 30KiB extra compared to pure ES6 (before GZip).
Thank you for pointing this out... I just know I've come across quite a few features of EScurrent/next that weren't supported in typescript and found the experience a bit irritating to do both babel and ts (and webpack).
Just out of curiosity, why not use a conditional polyfill using nomodule rather than outright breaking on something like IE11?
Because we use nomodule, the script tag will be ignored by modern browsers, while IE will fetch the polyfill. polyfill.io serves this request, and we have it include all the polyfills we require (for our use case, we just request the default plus es2015-16-17-18, plus fetch).
The beauty of the approach is that the big pollyfill payloads are only borne by the users who choose (or likely are forced by employers) to use those browser versions.
To be fair, Edge has a good feature support (check caniuse.com). It would be interesting to know what the exact issues your app has with the browser. Otherwise it sounds more like your devs like to use some vendor-specific hacks and blame Edge for it. I know there are some Flexbox things to consider, but nothing a small team can't handle.
I'd also be curious to know what features that Edge doesn't support. I know it doesn't do everything Chrome does, but I haven't run into any scenarios that Edge didn't support in a long time.
It's a pet peeve of mine that apps don't support Edge/Trident, Vivaldi, etc. It's easier to write cross-browser code than ever, but it seems like we're in the process of reverting back to the bad old days when IE6 was the only browser people supported, but it's Chrome now instead of IE.
IE6 was closed source and only ran on Windows... Chromium/Blink run cross platform, open source and already 2 forks in. There's some stark contrast, even if it's more of a mono-culture, it's nothing like the IE6 days, even if google does have more power/control than other stakeholders.
It really is getting bad. I use Opera as my 'daily driver' for work, and I get warnings on sites at least weekly where the site will either complain like I'm using some dangerous outdated software, or just plain refuse to work, nevermind the fact that Opera actually uses regular old Blink. Present-day Opera is just a minor reskin of Chromium - and I think Vivaldi is Blink too, right?
People are literally doing User Agent Sniffing again, and even though these browsers carefully craft their UA string to pass naive checks, the sniffers are hacking around that and urging me to "Download Chrome" to use a website.
Notable Offenders: Google Hangouts, and banks. Not impressed, Google.
Last time I was doing web dev (maybe 2 years ago), I worked primarily in Firefox and Safari. Chrome presented more issues for me than Edge ever did. I don't think I ever had anything work in Chrome, and fail in Edge.
I lived through the IE6 years, so I was never thrilled with any version of IE I had to support, but Edge was actually a good browser. Strange UI, solid engine.
...and that's one of the reasons everyone hates Edge. I'm a long-time IE user and that stupid dumbed-down UI is absolutely repulsive. If they'd just put the Chromium engine in the normal IE UI I bet they'd get far more users naturally using it.
I just can't get behind this lazy "small team" excuse; it's really unnecessary hubris.
I worked on a "small team" of 1 (just myself - I was the only dev) for several years on an enterprise webapp. The kind that does complicated stuff - not a simple CRUD app. [Sidenote: I would have killed for a team of three!!] Yet I supported Edge since the day it came out and never dropped support of IE. In fact, I even supported old versions of IE (7 and up) until the day Microsoft EOLed older version of IE (that was January 12th, 2016, FWIW). It honestly isn't very hard these days. Annoying sometimes, yes, but not difficult.
I don't want to get into technical details except to say some of what we support are/is some legacy stuff customer's use ... that we did not create. It's weird, and faced with the choice of fixing some old products with a lot of unknowns ... and moving customers to something more modern that is more compatible with Edge... we chose the latter.
I suspect the agility of any team is heavily influenced by not just numbers, but tech debt, and other choices.
All future work we do is compatible with Edge, it's not like NOTHING works with Edge, but to say "We support Edge"... customers expect that to mean everything.
Fortunately I don't think we'll have to have that conversation anymore.
Yeah, I worked around technical debt and legacy support too, it goes with the field.
Still not an excuse to alienate your customers who want to use a browser that comes with their OS. Enterprise customers never want to go through the hassle of installing external software company wide just to use your services.
This is a pretty niche area, "enterprise" would be generous to call these customers that even if it technically fits. It's a surprisingly small ask to have them install a browser.
Lots of customers still on Windows 7... that's bad, but we can't change that.
Many company's IT departments don't find it worth downloading, supporting, and updating external applications just to access the web when the OS provides that functionality out of the box. You could argue that's "wrong," but that doesn't change reality. I even had a government customer remove IE, clicking on the IE icon launched Edge.
I'm having to fix an issue where a user's workstation uses edge to print PDFs. It is bad at it, it swaps out embedded fonts (random ones) and changes some text. A known issue.
Chromium is open source, Microsoft has published most of their interesting work on Chromium itself. A monoculture is a big problem if the alternative is to write a new browser to compete, less so if you can just fork and have the same start line.
Well they could have picked up one of the other less-dominate browser engines. WebKit and Firefox are good starting points, and both could use the extra help maintaining their open-source core.
I get that they wanted to use the same browser as Electron, now that they own it...it just sucks.
The general quality of Firefox is worse, the tooling is more fiddly, some of it is written in languages which are not as familiar to Microsoft, it is considerably less straightforward to customize; and on top of this, performance is similar at best. Chromium has an architecture which lends itself to deep integration, and the default UI is much closer to Microsoft's own designs.
> WebKit and Firefox are good starting points, and both could use the extra help maintaining their open-source core.
If Firefox needs "help" from a big boy like Microsoft, it is probably the worse starting point. If WebKit is a good starting point, why is Blink worse? Chromium is more than Blink, and means that the moment Microsoft started with Chromium, they were already close to done. Whereas with WebKit, they would still have to build and test a shell.
> Is MS foolish enough to believe they can have influence on the evolution of the web through github.com/google/chromium pull requests?
I mean, "influencing the web" or otherwise, they accept heaps and heaps of patches that aren't about their core business. The Chromium project is really healthy.
> Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.
They can fork, but they probably won't need to. Even if they wanted to maintain an entirely separate shell, it is basically trivial to link such a thing in to Chromium.
I think it will be bad for different reasons. Will Chrome not comply with the spec. Nope because the spec follows what the browsers actually do, and Chrome is the browsers.
Will it have bugs that make the web unusable? Probably not. What makes it bad? The world's biggest ad company is in charge of it, so privacy is at risk.
I am a web developer too, and for me, the biggest annoyance is feature inconsistency between browsers. Only yesterday, I was cursing under my breath, because webkit-based browsers allow scrollbar styling, but firefox doesn't. In our org, we have embraced CSS grid, but by doing so, made a conscious decision to finally ignore IE11 (rather than to use @supports and write fallback CSS for browsers that are left behind). Even considering the wildly improbable scenario that browser monopoly would lead to feature stagnation - at least you will have a single target with a known set of features to develop against. How can this be worse than what we have now?
In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured in the early 2000s while trying to develop apps for IE6.
Just focussing on the browser itself:
* Today's developers enjoy a large and rich platform of (relatively) bug free functionality and APIs on which to build. The hellscape had very limited APIs and were riddled with bugs. For a long time IE and the other browsers didn't even agree on how to compute the width/height of an element w.r.t. padding and borders. (CSS box-models did not match!). We spent a lot of time just working around bugs and keeping up to date on the latest work-arounds for all the problems.
* Today's browsers have high performance JS JITs with very few user visible bugs. The hellscape had slow buggy JS implementations. I remember having to unregister event handlers on page unload otherwise the browser would leak memory.
* Today's browsers have excellent debugging tools built in. In the hellscape, if you had a trailing comma in a JS list on IE, it would give an error message (pop up) with either no file and line number or a bogus one. Yes, that bad.
Even when supporting just one browser, development was often a miserable experience. MS had won the browser war and was trying to kill the idea of apps on the web by neglect. It wasn't until Firefox got going that things improved.
> In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured
I completely agree, but the points that you then make simply show how modern browsers are vastly better than the old ones. I love developing for a modern browser, such as Chrome. I just fail to see how the claim that having competing browser engines that do not have complete feature parity can be in any way considered desirable by web developers. I can understand this argument from end users' perspective (and even then not quite, because remember the days when sites would say that they were "best viewed in Netscape Navigator", or when you could watch Apple keynote presentation on Apple's site only in Safari?), but not from web developer's perspective. Wouldn't a single healthily evolving browser engine be better from web developer's point of view than multiple engines, each with its quirks?
Fair enough. I'll try to tie it back to the mono-culture question.
The primary reason why the hellscape was bad, and remained bad for so long, was because we had a single "winner" of the browser wars. Microsoft won and they immediately tried to strangle the web for years. There were no alternative browsers for a long time to provide some kind of competition which might improve the matter. Sure, we could just test on IE and only support IE, but it was still an awful browser and MS wanted it that way.
The point is that the bad "technical" level situation was sustained by the browser political mono-culture. I'm somewhat positive now about the current situation with MS getting more involved because it will add more diversity to our current political browser situation. This should translate into better results for everyone on all levels, technical, user, privacy (I hope), etc.
So maybe from a pure browser engine point of view there is the same or less diversity, but this situation is very different from the early 2000s one.
Stagnation was the biggest problem. Stagnation is not the problem with Chromium; in fact, it's the opposite, and that's really what's forced Microsoft's hand. They were simply wasting resources playing catch up to Chromium. Why bother?
Apparently it was not so bad that we needed a multitude of JS to JS compilation stages and instead could just, you know, execute the same JS in the browser that we actually wrote.
Also, MS invented DHTML and AJAX single handedly, against backlash from "pure" web developers.
Please don't argue with others about their experiences and feelings. I was there, and it was intensely bad. I think it's easy to forget how bad it was, even for those who went through it.
Starting mid-2006, I spent almost a year building a full-stack internal SPA for tracking manual and checklist testing at my company. I made the (then brave) decision to target Firefox instead of IE6, which everyone was using at the time - since FF was more standards-compliant.
It was a very good decision in retrospect. But I had to spend 4-5 weeks just getting the front-end to work in IE6. So many HTML/CSS hacks, trying to wrangle the layout engine to do my bidding. Check out the Wikipedia article on the Acid2 test, and the image at the bottom of IE6's rendering, to get an idea how far IE6's layout was from standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2
I have published some of my extensions for the new Edge browser on their store [1], the submission experience was straightforward and pleasant, and the extensions were published in a couple of days after manual review. Updates were also reviewed and published in a timely manner.
More importantly, during extension submissions and reviews I did not feel abused as a developer, something which I cannot say about the Chrome Web Store [2][3].
So I am happy that Microsoft has not only renewed their effort in this space, but they're also offering a decent alternative for developers who would rather not deal with Google.
Phrasing it as a dichotomy like that is pretty dishonest, especially how Firefox is twice as popular than Edge [1] and is free open source software that doesn't spy on you.
I think the situation invites that specific comparison because the new Edge is based on Chromium. I didn't read it as leaving out Firefox for any other reason.
Microsoft is replicating the entire browser ecosystem, so developers and users who prefer Chromium are no longer bound to Google. Firefox is my browser of choice, and their reviewer team is wonderful, see my other [1] comment, though all of this is tangential to Firefox.
The dichotomy comes up because the new Edge supports Chrome extensions. So it's literally the same code being submitted to both stores, which makes it more of an apples-to-apples comparison.
Because they need developers more than developers need them. If they become as dominant as Apple and Google in their respective spaces, expect your experience to degrade.
One difference that stands out to me about Microsoft vs Google. Both are very heavy C++ shops. Both have invested in developing tools for enhancing developer productivity on their respective platforms (Windows and Linux). Yes, Linux is not a Google product (thank god) but it is what they build on.
Microsoft's C++ IDE and debugger are the gold standard for productivity and ease of use - everyone who writes native applications for Windows uses Visual Studio. You can try it out for free and the price per developer is very reasonable if you want to publish a paid product.
Google's C++ IDE and debugger are nonexistent. Whatever they've built is kept inside the Googleplex never to see the light of day. From time to time we see the occasional free software reimplementation of some facet of the beast (e.g. Kythe) but I haven't seen something catch on.
In fact, the biggest contributors to developer productivity on Linux have been Microsoft (with Visual Studio Code and the lsp protocol) and Apple (investing in clang led to the development of advanced C++ indexers which were impossible to write using gcc due to Stallman making a conscious decision to not allow it)
Of course there is a good reason for this - Microsoft and Apple make platforms. The easier they make software development, the more developers they get, which leads to more software being written, which leads to more users, which results in profit. Google on the other hand doesn't win by making development easy for others. They're themselves a third party and other developers are competition rather than partners. For Microsoft, the existence of developers outside the company using Microsoft's development tools to create software for Microsoft's platform is a win. For Google, the best case scenario is there being no developers outside Google.
Have you actually tried to use Visual Studio? It's an unusable piece of crap.
The navigation is nearly unusable. Don't focus the project navigation on a tree browser if you're not going to integrate it into the rest of the navigation workflow.
NuGet regularly fails silently to restore packages.
It uses a virtual filesystem that usually maps 1:1 to the actual project folder.. except files created outside of VS are completely invisible to it, unless manually added to the project.
The project/solution files are very verbose and aren't designed to be edited by humans.
The migration path from .NET Framework to .NET Core seems to be "create a new project, copy the files over manually, and copy over your old settings one by one".
Some of these have been fixed for new projects, but there is no option to migrate to the new structure. Except, again, starting over with a new one.
You are talking about the biggest architecture change of. Net in 30 years ( going cross platform) and they are still going to support VB 6, WPF,..
Visual studio is actually a very robust IDE. The issue you are mentioning is .net framework project files and if you copy files within or to Visual Studio it will be added. .net framework only wants to add files you want to deploy ( not perfect, but okay).
For migrating to. Net standard 2.0, remove assemblyinfo.cs and change the. Csproj file. You should manually add the Nugget packages again or change it to the new structure. The biggest issue is entity framework though, in a lot of projects. From. Net standard to . Net core is a lot easier.
Seems pretty reasonable to me, updating other things ( eg. Android) have caused more issues than this.
As someone who uses visual studio + code literally every day, I'm not sure what you're referring to with most of these complaints.
The project/solution files are bog standard xml, and well documented, but in general you shouldn't need to touch them.
The migration from framework to core 3.0 is now very simple thanks to xaml support, but it used to be a huge hassle. You can literally just edit the tags in your csproj/fsproj/etc to enable different target frameworks, or you can use the ui [0], and then you'll need to do a nuget reinstall. One command [1].
As for running into bugs, they built bug/feature requests into the visual studio 2019 ide, or you can access it via the website [2]. They are usually very responsive, typically something within a couple of days.
> The project/solution files are bog standard xml, and well documented, but in general you shouldn't need to touch them.
Project files are "bog standard" XML (except for all the weird magic, like variable resolution and conditionals), but solution files are some unholy VB-like abomination.
But regardless, that doesn't help much when the schema is clearly not designed for human editing (incredibly verbose, UUIDs everywhere for references, etc).
> The migration from framework to core 3.0 is now very simple thanks to xaml support, but it used to be a huge hassle.
No idea how a GUI description language is supposed to help you here.
> You can literally just edit the tags in your csproj/fsproj/etc to enable different target frameworks
Didn't work for me.
> or you can use the ui [0], and then you'll need to do a nuget reinstall. One command [1].
Keep in mind that that command is free to update dependencies as it feels like.
I'm so completely not a Windows developer or a C++ developer, but seriously, the experience working with Visual Studio on Windows/C++ when I didn't really know what I was doing - but I had to do undocumented things (I needed to get Haskell to talk to some Windows apis, for which no bindings exist) - was incredible. Second to none. I'm half thinking about changing career direction it was so nice.
1. Navigation: subjective so gonna let that slide.
2. Downright bullshit. You are starting to whine.
3. Subjective but far from something that makes the IDE a "piece of crap"
4. You are starying to sound like you are in the wrong industry.
5. No. Change the .csproj and drop the AssemblyInfo.cs usually work for something that can actually be migrated. If you expect any project that targeted Windows to just migrate to cross platform using a NNF you are an idiot.
At the very least you could have given an example of an IDE that you consider is better. You were just talking out of your arse.
> 1. Navigation: subjective so gonna let that slide.
If you're going to pick a mode of navigation then at least commit to it. It's subjective whether or not any particular choice is good. The quality of the implementation, not so much.
> 2. Downright bullshit. You are starting to whine.
Sorry for wanting a package manager to... manage packages, I guess.
Or maybe it's configured wrong? I guess it's too much to expect two Microsoft tools to work well together..
> 3. Subjective but far from something that makes the IDE a "piece of crap"
Do you never edit your project files from outside the IDE?
> 4. You are starying to sound like you are in the wrong industry.
Compare a typical SBT build definition[0] or Cargo.toml[1] to a typical VS solution[2] or project[3]. Which would you feel the most confident about when modifying by hand?
(Hint: For me, it's definitely not the one that is full of autogenerated cartesian products.)
> 5. No. Change the .csproj and drop the AssemblyInfo.cs usually work for something that can actually be migrated.
So why couldn't Microsoft include a tool for that migration? That seems like table stakes for such a migration project. We're not exactly talking about 2to3[4] or rustfix[5] here...
> If you expect any project that targeted Windows to just migrate to cross platform using a NNF you are an idiot.
Amazing how Microsoft are completely unable to even get close to what the Wine and Mono people did years ago.
> At the very least you could have given an example of an IDE that you consider is better. You were just talking out of your arse.
Throw a dart and you'll find something. If you want the out-of-the-box live-in-your-IDE experience then JetBrains' stuff is miles better than VS. Personally I moved on to Spacemacs[6] after a few years each of VS and IntelliJ.
What is your definition of developer-first? My experience working at Microsoft in 2015 was the opposite of what you describe. They were too focused on supporting legacy MS that they couldn't innovate or find and keep talented developers in open source because they were forced to adopt tools and frameworks that were crap compared to standard open source development tools.
The only reason people went there usually was for the money and once they got enough to follow their passion, they left because none of them were passionate about Microsoft.
I don't think becoming a target for malicious actors is the reason for Chrome Web Store reviews being awful, see the threads I've linked to above and explore the rest of the links. Chrome Web Store reviewers are simply not properly trained and qualified to do this job, and the review process dictated by Google does not leave much room for improvement. Reviewers make an awful lot of mistakes and they usually do not listen to reason, the only thing that works is to document everything and make it public.
I've had some issues during Firefox extension reviews too, and Mozilla employees have usually changed their opinion after feedback. When they've made a mistake, sometimes they said they were sorry, which was a decent thing to do and it felt right. They talked and acted like human beings whom are capable of compassion and reasoning.
The "old" Edge store was utterly mismanaged [0]. I'm glad they've improved if this one is different, but they definitely left a sour taste in my mouth.
[0] I required Native App Messaging and needed to include a 32 bit binary to read an SQLite database. The extension was rejected and was only told to wait while they worked on this feature (which was already in a tutorial I was following). Nobody ever contacted me back for over a year until the news broke that they were moving to Chromium.
>More importantly, during extension submissions and reviews I did not feel abused as a developer, something which I cannot say about the Chrome Web Store
I suspect that would change if Edge gained significant market share. I think what happens is that as these platforms grow, they get targetted by spammers, malware, and scammers and consequently their processes harden and tolerances go down.
Since the extensions are identical to Chrome, they should piggyback on that store’s decisions. Or both should. That might ease some pressure and benefit everyone.
Google has for its entire history had strong ties to building a developer community. For instance Google Summer of Code [0] and here's a list of Google APIs with 179 current APIs [1].
Conveniently leaving out the hundreds of times that Google has randomly terminated APIs or entire products with minimal if any forewarning, or reduced API functionality or pricing without forewarning, and the complete and utter lack of support [edit] Google provides to developers who don't already have their own twitter following.
It's almost as if Google is a massive organization running hundreds of initiatives spanning decades, making it difficult to simplify things with a single description.
No, Microsoft is the same. My comment doesn't imply that Microsoft is somehow simpler than Google. The point is that the two people above me are disagreeing because they're over-simplifying these complex entities.
Did you really feel the need to criticize the poster, instead of the post? It's not just a meme, it's reality, and a result of how Google is run. People create new services to get promotions and then abandon them. With no recognition from maintenance, they wither and die, and are terminated. It is not inconceivable that GCP could suffer this fate too, judging from leaked communications.
I just setup Edge a few minutes ago. There are two options "Inspirational" and "Focused" that show no crappy tabloid news websites and one that does - I didn't pick that one :)
Also, happy to report that 1password has an extension for Edge as well - that's awesome.
Only thing I'm missing is a dark mode extension. I don't trust the somewhat sketchy ones that I see so far on the store.
> I just setup Edge a few minutes ago. There are two options "Inspirational" and "Focused" that show no crappy tabloid news websites and one that does - I didn't pick that one :)
I chose focused. It's a nice option.
Too bad it doesn't respect your search engine preferences, because any searches you do with it seem to always go to Bing, regardless of what address-bar search engine you have selected.
If you enable dark mode in your Windows settings, you can just use the built in browser dark mode. This is also a setting in CSS to enable dark mode when this is enabled. Last, you can install extensions from the Chrome Store.
I believe this may also be dependent on whether you're on a personal machine or enterprise network. My Edge start page has a gear with the Page Layout options (Focused, Inspirational, Informative) and also radio buttons for Page Content with a choice between Office365 and Microsoft News. My default displayed Office365 (recent documents opened list) without any of the MS News agg tiles.
In my opinion, this does more to keep Google in check than had they gone with Firefox's engine, or stuck with their own. (I know not everyone agrees)
People use Chrome because they consider it a better overall experience than other alternatives, and I happen to agree. (again, I get that not everyone here agrees with that) For whatever reason, Google has the resources and talent to make a browser that is preferred to the alternatives, by most regular users.
Chromium based Edge allows users to get the best of Chrome without the worst of Google. Google knows that if they get too aggressive with decisions that are biased toward Google's bottom line (such as how they handle ad blocking and various privacy features), Microsoft can easily push back by changing these decisions in Edge. This is a very good thing.
True, there is also pressure on Google from Firefox (people can abandon Chrome for Firefox if Google is too aggressive), and there is also Brave (and others) if you want the benefits of Chrome/Chromium without the worst stuff. But moving to Firefox is simply too big a move for most users and many don't like the downsides [1]. And Brave has their own revenue model to protect, and they don't have the deep pockets Microsoft has to resist the temptation to make decisions that benefit their bottom line in the short term.
[1] In my case, I do a lot with MIDI in the browser, i.e. connecting a digital piano and using it within web sites that support it. Firefox doesn't support this yet, after years and years of talking about it. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58 There are a ton of other things, but that one is a deal breaker for me. Works beautifully in the new Edge.
Exactly. I hope MS will also take Android and release an MS version of it. Privacy oriented, no Google apps (that can't be removed either).
This would put more pressure on Google than privacy fines from EU. Competition works best. I'm not an MS fan (using Linux at home, with vscode), but I'll happily switch.
I wondered why MS didn't do this or partnered with Ubuntu instead of closing their Windows Phone business, fully giving up the mobile market.
Right... I mean, a certain very strategic kind of competition. Co-opetition? Direct competition would be simply offering a competing fully in-house browser or competing fully in-house mobile OS. This is kind of sneaky in that it lets Google do a lot of the heavy lifting, while still being able to yank the things (or add the things) that Microsoft wants.
With regard to Edge adopting Chromium, I have to wonder whether Google sees this as a victory, or if they feel like Microsoft pulled one over on them.
I am done with that after all the crap that previous software with admin rights installed. I cleaned it up and swore I would not install anything that required admin rights again - for my own security and peace of mind. What does it need admin rights for?
Why do I need to give Adobe admin rights to install Photoshop? Why do I need to give Microsoft the same to install Word? And now for a web browser?
If I'm installing something low-level like a window manager or a keyboard shortcut tool, I get it. But for a normal mainstream flagship consumer application, what on earth do they need admin privileges for?!
I hate the fact I have to hand over the keys to my computer just to run basic industry standard software and I have no choice because it's industry standard and I have requirements to use it.
Well, there is an extremely simple reason: because these tools are installed for all users, not just your own. Doing it any other way would be wasteful on an actual multi-user machine. But some tools do support it - both Chrome and Firefox can be installed without admin privileges. There is also the fact that Office and many other products rely on demons starting at boot time, which can only be installed with admin rights. The same applies to all popular Linux distributions (even more than on Windows, since you can provide a nice current-user only installer on Windows, but any common program package on Linux requires admin rights before you can even access it).
On the other hand, for most people this admin vs regular user separation is almost meaningless and provides little extra security. Sure, if I install malware as admin it will be harder to get rid of it, but except for that, it can hurt me just as much, since all of the files I really care about (documents, photos, game saves etc) are already accessible with my user, and any program running as my user can already connect to the internet and send information about what my user is doing (not to mention bother me with ads). Some of the really damaging ransomware that recently made the rounds didn't even require admin privileges, it simply encrypted data in some common user-owned folders, if I'm not mistaken (it probably did need some privilege escalation to spread, though, which is a big problem on office networks).
So all they should require is to be dragged into the /Applications folder (or /System/Applications in Catalina). That's it.
That's how a macOS app should be installed. That should be the end of the process unless it needs to install kernel extensions (and even then, from Catalina onwards, such extensions should become userland extensions).
Applications also don't need to be (and third party apps on most single-user systems arguably shouldn't be) in /Applications. Users can put apps wherever the heck they like (I keep mine in ~/Applications which even gets the same icon automatically if you create it).
Apple could really streamline this because all apps that can be drag-drop installed really belong in one's own home directory, where they'll be seamlessly migrated when you move to a new computer, or brought with you if you have a roaming profile. As it is right now, I just keep both Applications folders in my Finder Sidebar and remember that the bottom one is "mine."
In an ideal scenario, users could still drag apps to the "one" Applications folder and if they are not an Admin the app itself would actually be stored in a default-invisible ~/Applications. Then when you opened "/Applications" the system would show you the superset of both locations.
This is of course nearly exactly how the Windows Start Menu works except that it always had "installers" do the work of putting those program shortcuts in the respective directories, and only well-behaved apps ever asked which place you wanted apps installed.
Technically, an application bundle can be located anywhere on a Mac; there is no installation process, they’re self-contained and always have been.
The question of how a regular user could be allowed to install something for all users in this fashion, placing the app bundle in the /Applications folder, is no different than when using an installer: ask for an administrator password.
"Doing it any other way would be wasteful on an actual multi-user machine."
On Windows at least, UWP apps are deduplicated across all users on the same system so when user #2 installs the same app already installed by user #1, it will just point to the same existing shared instance of the app's files. I don't know much about MacOS but I'd guess there's a similar packaging system. These systems also incorporate sandboxes which address the other problems you mentioned in your last paragraph.
The problem is just when the OS teams can't convince other developers (even ones inside the same company in Microsoft's case) to actually use their packaging and sandbox systems.
> Well, there is an extremely simple reason: because these tools are installed for all users, not just your own. Doing it any other way would be wasteful on an actual multi-user machine.
It wouldn't be wasteful if I didn't want to install it for the other users, which I might not.
The amount of hooks that Adobe Creative Cloud claws into your OS is enough to make any software developer want to rip their hair out. Anytime I notice my mouse lag for a moment or an Explorer window hiccup, 30 seconds later I get notification that there is a new update for the Creative Cloud app...
I recently noticed some adobe process trying to access a random ip address and promptly blocked it, because it was probably analytics. Then it started retrying it more than once a second. This makes me think it's even worse inside than I feared, so I'm using gimp now. It's pretty good!
Do "Show Files" in the Installer app's menubar and it'll show you everything it's installing.
In this case, it's installing Edge and the universal Microsoft AutoUpdater app. Given the range of stuff that thing has to support (including all the Office apps) and the privs it will need to run at to do so, I think the admin requirement is not entirely unreasonable.
If Office 365 can use the Apple updater, so can Edge. Or they can do whatever Chrome does, it doesn't require admin rights. I don't think Microsoft can talk about secure and private and then require admin to install their software. It is archaic.
If someone told the young Linux freak me back in the early 2000s that one day Internet Explorer’s rendering engine is based on the KDE rendering engine I would’ve probably died laughing and frozen in horror at the same time.
Yeah, I realize there’s probably nothing left if the old KHTML but it still does give me a chuckle.
An open source project released by Apple, that Google added a bunch of features to - including DRM, and Microsoft adopted to help unify the web for internal enterprise apps.
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/79.0.3945.117 Safari/537.36 Edg/79.0.309.65
"Edg"* , like Chrome, like Safari/AppleWebKit, like KHTML, like Gecko, like Mozilla 5.0.
My lord, this ridiculous header is f'ed (and I don't mean this string, just this entire ridiculous slow-motion trainwreck that requires every browser to pretend to be every browser that ever came before).
\* presuming that spelling means 'please don't lock me out like Edge' -- modern Chromium Opera identifies as OPR, similarly
I wish they had thrown in with helping Firefox instead of handing even more web influence over to Google. A percentage of what Microsoft spent on EdgeHTML contributed to the Firefox project—ideally as employee time—would go a long way, along with the counterbalance of putting the Firefox engine and code base front and center of more Windows users.
Sadly Chromium is WAYYYY easier to development on than Firefox. Had Mozilla spent effort making the base of it as a framework in the same way Chromium is, they may have considered it.
There is a reason why Electron, QT etc use Chromium.
Kind of a shame.. There are a few areas where FireFox absolutely smokes Chrome. The way it reflows some heavy DOMs interactively is almost magical in comparison.
Curious, what makes Chromium better in your opinion? I have probably just touched the surface of the dev tools on both and haven‘t used any features that I would be missing on either.
It's a blank browser, has barely any "Google" specific stuff in it ready to go. It is easy to develop for, doesn't require cross language compiling (rust/c++), builds fast, easy to understand how the different parts work (at least for a browser developer it should be), has documentation, is meant to be used to develop your own browser.
Are you sure Chromium builds fast? lol, it takes my laptop with 12 cores and 64gb of ram over an hour to compile from scratch, not counting the ~20gb of git history to download (I maintain an internal build at work).
Limiting the threads as somebody elses said. For chromium no one really builds it on a laptop, everyone in my team used a build server or a 32 core monster desktop.
They worked on it a bit [0] but it has been abandoned along with all the other embedding efforts over time. As someone who embeds Chromium (via CEF) only because it's easy, I would really appreciate (and have been shouting into the wind about) focus on the embeddability of Gecko.
I suspect that their work in using Electron for things like VSCode made switching Edge over to Blink more enticing. I wonder if they ever considered looking at the Mozilla frameworks
Unfortunately historically there was a history of Mozilla not being a very stable platform to develop on top of (though I have no idea if Chromium was worse). There had been at least two separate embedding APIs that have been abandoned (the original one in the ActiveX control era and the external one after they moved to Hg), at least three Electron-like things (prism, XULRunner, and positron), and the field of corpses of Mozilla-based apps (I've worked for two, there were lots more).
Maybe they're better at API backwards compatibility now? Not sure; I'm unlikely to try again given previous experience. Which is a shame; I still use Firefox since it was called Phoenix…
If anybody has more recent experience working on their stack, I'd be happy to be correctly though. Preferably with examples of projects that _haven't_ been burned.
Cynical thought: in no way am I claiming this was the only reason for Microsoft choosing Blink, but it’s probably easier to find and replace Google analytics APIs with Microsoft endpoints than it is to add them into a code base after the fact.
That's pretty misleading. When you want to sync state across Chromium installs, you use a Google account, and that's really just scratching the surface.
Chromium comes with quite a bit of Google baked-in.
I don't see why they would've done that, given how much it was baked into other stuff behind the scenes throughout the years. Auditing it would be a massive undertaking that I'm not sure even the most well-off organization would like to try.
They probably can't, especially if the engine interfaces with proprietary code or is deeply linked to the kernel for example. It's likely part of the reason why they never got it updating as frequently as the Chromeium counterpart can, as this is entirely userspace.
Left side is actually sharp, with subpixel smoothing. Right side is awful (just like many parts of post-Vista Windows) with apparent grayscale AA.
This is something they actually got right; it's one thing that was terrible about IE and the old Edge, and that I'd bet was subconsciously turning many people off (in my case, consciously making me want to tear my eyes out). If you can't see the difference, open dev console on the screenshot and run:
If this doesn't work in the new Edge, try in Chrome (not sure if Edge supports this zoom mechanism). You should definitely be able to see the difference in sharpness.
Edit: Maybe also worth mentioning, Firefox's bold font rendering is one thing keeping me away from it. Lack of the above zoom mechanism is another. Not sure if I'm alone in these.
All in all, I'd say the one on the left is more pleasant to read and easier on the eyes, despite being "thinner". The jagged edges on the right feel on my eyes like the sound of relentless blackboard scratching.
>Right side is awful (just like many parts of post-Vista Windows) with apparent grayscale AA
By "post-Vista" you mean Windows 8 and later? Vista and 7 (its refinement) were the peak of subpixel-antialiased ClearType with the Segoe font. It was with Metro and its animated, rotation-enabled, mobile-first design language that antialiasing was downgraded to greyscale.
No, I mean since Vista and later. Ever since DWM was introduced, anything rendered on a DWM surface (or something along those lines, I don't know the details) has been blurry. The taskbar text is an easy example. The Metro UI did extend that to even more places, though.
> Firefox's bold font rendering is one thing keeping me away from it.
You are not alone. Firefox font rendering actually upsets me. Comparing to Chrome rendering, it's just a non-starter.
I have brought this up many times, but I get blasted for it. Apparently it's all based on opinion alone and you and I have a very minority opinion in these tech communities. I suspect that the silent majority is with us though.
Yeah, exactly. I get blasted all the time for it too. Same suspicion here about other users being on our side, though they might not be able to put their finger on what the problem is.
Well, to me it is a big deal. I'm not trying to make it one, it just is. Best analogy I can give you is probably the one in the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057875
We’re getting far OT. But the two US parties being identical, policy-wise, may have been an insightful oberservation during, say, the Clinton adminstration. To repeat it today is just completely ridiculous.
I’d be afraid that they would cause politburo style politics wherein it’d be a pretty big umbrella but ultimately it’d result in the main faction always winning. At least with with Repub/Dem bipolarity there is room for movement and adjustment (to the right or to the left).
I'm going to take a guess that this is mostly due to the use of Skia. I think the problem is not so much with the rendering of fonts (which is still likely DWrite) but with the compositing of them onto the canvas. There, it's extremely difficult to get gamma right.
I am sympathetic to this, as I've spent a lot of time at the low levels of this stuff. Unfortunately, one problem is that there is no one "right answer," and not really a lot of authoritative guidance on what's preferred. Some people prefer higher contrast, others prefer minimal distortion of the shapes and spacing. It's always a tradeoff.
Is there anyone who cares about "minimal distortion" except devs or other people working on UI-related stuff? I know I don't even know what the ground truth is supposed to look like, so I'm not even sure I can notice distortion. I certainly don't care.
Well, there are many forms of distortion. When it comes to spacing in particular, yes, there are many people who are quite sensitive to it, others less so. You can Google "keming" for more information on that.
I can notice bad kerning, that's not what I thought we're talking about. We're just talking about the distortion difference between these renderers we have, not arbitrarily terrible distortion. And awful kerning is not the kind of distortion a renderer like Chrome's has.
It was my hope as part of Edge migrating to Chromium that they’d contribute proper native-appearance font rendering, just as they’ve been contributing a few other things now (“To date we’ve made more than 1900 contributions across areas like accessibility, modern input including touch, speech, digital inking, and many more.”).
Chromium’s Windows font rendering is better than it was a few years ago (when it was really pretty awful), but as you say, it’s still not right. Firefox’s font rendering is much truer to the platform conventions.
I hope that this is still on their radar as something to improve.
> Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point.
If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch.
If you mean Edgmium (New Edge) over Edge Classic, it already replaces Edge Classic (entirely) when you install it, and there's a slow rollout through Windows Update already happening, with an attempt to converge on everyone having Edgmium sometime this year and Edge Classic dying a final, sad death (RIP, good friend, you served some of us well). They say fresh installs of "Windows 10X" the hyped dual screen build of Windows will only have Edgmium, and that'll likely make its way into other Windows 10 images over time.
At $dayjob we do SaaS for the US banking industry. We see 65% IE11 and 70% Win 7 in our stats as of 2020-01-16.
We even see a small percentage of XP and IE8 (which we haven’t supported since MS dropped support.) might just be UA spoofing to support some crazy old internal app at a bank.
>If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch.
LTSC/LTSB versions of Windows 10 (i.e. the ones that enterprises are supposed to use) don't have Edge and there's no way to install it. The same goes for Windows Server 2016 and 2019.
Enterprises are not supposed to use LTSC/LTSB builds as daily machines; those are intended for critical services and embedded systems. Microsoft keeps saying that in their documentation. Businesses should use the Current Branch for Business and stop shooting themselves so much in the feet with Windows updates.
I've heard the 2025 date before, but I think that is only based on a "time since release" metric.
For IE versions the support windows have always been "X years since release (or perhaps X years since the next version), or until all Windows variant released with it are EOL". If Win10 is indeed evergreen, then that second part will never expire. Perhaps they'll count the biannual Windows feature updates instead of Win10 as a whole, and so count it from when they stop releasing install media with IE11 on them, but as that hasn't happened yet, we'll still be some years away for IE11 stopping. Even then '11 will still be around in some environments for a while after EOL.
We only recently got rid of IE8 support for some of our clients as they stopped using it. That was mainly because of the then upcoming EOL of IE8 in sync with the EOL of Win7/Win2008 (the last versions released with IE8). I hear some are not so lucky... I expect IE11 to be a problem (though an increasingly small one, thankfully) for some time to come.
In any case, can you link (or screenshot if it doesn't cooperate with deep linking) to an official page listing 2025? I'm not seeing that.
>Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and the most current version will continue to follow the specific lifecycle policy for the operating system for which it is installed. To find the lifecycle dates for all operating systems, search the Microsoft Lifecycle Database here.
You should see IE11 usage drop significantly now as big corporates adopt Edge as the default. Edge can seamlessly switch over to the IE11 rendering engine for predetermined lists of legacy sites, so there's no reason for corporates to force IE11 as the default browser any more.
Unfortunately, "unofficially" doesn't fly in a lot of workplaces. Until MS pluck up the courage and do everyone a favour, IE11 will continue to haunt developers. Now we got Legacy Edge too, whoopee.
> If you’re an IT administrator, you will need to download an offline deployment package to pilot within your corporate environment—the new Microsoft Edge will not automatically deploy for commercial customers. Additionally, none of the Microsoft Edge preview channels will update to the new Microsoft Edge, as they can be used side-by-side for testing and validation.
So many of us still need to support current Edge until IT decides it is time to move on.
I'm really curious why they released to stable with so many basic features missing. For example, your bookmarks won't sync between devices (although that was recently re-enabled in the preview channels). It sounds like they're not pushing out automatic updates right now anyway, so I'm not sure what this announcement amounts to. Why not wait until the 20H1 Windows 10 feature update (which sounds like the update that will include the stable version of Edge) is released to mark the first stable version? Just seems like a weird release schedule.
The blog posts mention that releasing it today is a shot across the bow for Enterprise. Given Enterprises like their year+ efforts to "test" software before ever deploying it, they want Enterprise to start that process today, ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it.
It's also a very subtle signal for several reasons to release it the day after Extended Support for Windows 7 ended. On the one hand, it supports Windows 7, so there is a possible mixed message there, which is why it is subtle. On the other hand, some of these Enterprises should realize that the last time the browser team at Microsoft did a release like this after/ahead of a Windows EOL they highly revised their browser security support policy. (Back with IE11 adding support for a couple older versions of Windows and Microsoft immediately dropping support for IE <11, despite earlier "bundled with Windows support timeframe" promises.) It can be seen as a very subtle "IE is dead, move on from it, already, you dinosaur customers".
> If you’d prefer not to install Microsoft Edge manually, you can wait for it to be installed in a future update to Windows 10, following our measured roll-out approach over the next several months. We will start to migrate Windows 10 customers to the new Microsoft Edge in the coming weeks, starting with a subset of Windows Insiders in the Release Preview ring.
I'm guessing 20H1 will be released sooner than several months.
That says they are starting now, so they are starting with 19H2 (in Release Preview to start, which is still 19H2 by the way, then into the wilds). "Several months" here could mean they want everything done by 20H1 (somewhere between March and May, given the usual pattern). I don't know if that also means that they are planning to move to packing New Edge in the RTW images for 20H1; so far 20H1 on Insiders still seems to have Edge Classic. But the clear thing is that these are clearly parallel rollouts right now.
I actually gave Edge Dev an honest try for a few months using it as my only browser. At some point it just stopped syncing bookmarks between my various computers (all Windows), and that was the breaking point for me. I went back to Firefox. I may give it another go if they can fix sync.
So as somewhat of an outsider to the 'web game' as far as most people here (at HN) are concerned, but a relatively aware patron of web browsing software, I'll add my thoughts on the 'web browser' game...
I feel like most people's browser of choice is chosen for reasons specific to their needs. For example: I think that Firefox gives me a bit of additional privacy. I think that Safari gives me that additional privacy as well. Some people may feel like Chrome just works. Some people just use what came with their OS.
When I do front end work, I tend to always test it in Chrome first. Their devtools make that part of my job (quickly finding issues with the frontend) a lot easier. Once it works in Chrome, I'm sure that the code is working, and any problems I encounter will just require browser-specific tweaks.
Anyway, long story short...I think that Microsoft really needs to pick something that Edge is best at if they want people to have a reason to use it (PS loading a highly browser-optimized page some number of milliseconds faster than the competition just doesn't do it for me, personally). Their niche has always just kind of been "well it's what comes with the OS" - and that's a fine way to get a userbase for sure. I'm not faulting them - but if that's their intended userbase, then I feel like they're putting a lot of effort into this whole browser game.
I guess at the end of the day, I don't trust IE or Edge or Chrome for my every day use. Whether that's poorly placed mistrust or not, I'm uncertain. But in either event, that's how I feel.
"The thing" for Edge is likely going to be the integration with rest of Microsoft ecosystem. Management tools, security tools, authentication etc. Of course these things matter mainly for organizations, who are otherwise running Microsoft stuff.
They are basically paying you a tiny bit to use Edge and Bing with their rewards program. You get points, which can be converted to Microsoft Gift Cards and some other stuff.
Microsoft with New Edge seems to be trying to hit the same or a very similar "think that it gives additional privacy" spot as Safari. By being Chromium-based and Chrome-like it maybe is the "new" cross-platform Safari now that Apple retrenched and decided to stop bothering with making Safari cross-platform.
Meaningless. There are people claiming with a straight face that targeted ads make user experience better. Wholesale collection and aggregation of personal user data will continue unabated.
It's only meaningless because "only what is needed to make your experiences better" means anything that is useful for advertisers. I've never seen a company that purported to be more benign than that.
As a kid, anytime I stayed home sick from school, I watched TV. I would see only advertisements for catheters and guaranteed-issue life insurance. They didn't occupy much of my conscious thought. They were annoying at worst.
When I watched TV during prime time and on the weekends, though, the advertisements were for toys and products that interested me. In the blink of an eye, my entire outlook worsened because I needed those things and didn't have them. The advertisements were also a great distraction from homework and chores.
Targeted ads degrade user experiences for me because it's a reminder that someone or something that I don't know, knows about me.
It's as if a stranger came up to you on the street, knew what brand of toilet paper you used at home, and asked if you wanted to buy more because you're almost out. Naturally you would wonder how this stranger knows these facts about you - do they snoop in your trash? Do they observe you in the bathroom through the window? Do they come in your home while you're away? We would consider such a world where this was normal to be Kafka-esque and dystopic. Anyone who gives an iota of care about personal privacy and dignity could (and arguably should) find implementation of the digital equivalent equally repulsive.
You say "someone or something," and to me, that's a pretty big difference.
I don't care if things know about me. If there is an actual human being who is directly looking at me, associating it with my face, etc, that is a lot more bothersome than some machine that is doing that.
I understand that many people here don't make that distinction. I do care about privacy in some ways, but when you I "arguably should" find machines invading my privacy to repulsive, I guess I have to thank you for putting the word "arguably" in there, because I would argue that. It just doesn't bother me, and I am happier for not having one more thing to be bothered by.
I agree that there's a difference, but it's not necessarily one that the primal part of my brain cares about, regardless of what I know at a conscious/intellectual level. Furthermore, data that a machine knows is just one step away from becoming data that a human knows given sufficient curiosity or happenstance; a step into which you usually have no insight into whether or if it will occur.
Yeah, I hear ya, I guess my primal brain is different than yours.
For instance, sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed by what I purchase at a store. (even if it's just that I'm buying a lot of junky, easy-to-prepare food at the grocery store) I've never once felt that way checking out at Amazon. Not even a teensy tiny bit. And that would remain true even if I suspected (or knew) that some human at Amazon was looking closely at the orders.
Buying something at a store isn't a good analogy. Uninterested members of the public being able to casually observe you buy something at the store is a perfectly normal part of society. A better analogy for today's internet is if you walked to the store holding a big sign with your credit card bill, texts to your friends, and a list of places you went today printed on it, and the street on the way was packed with people who were there for the sole purpose of taking pictures of that sign and selling them to whoever will buy. Targeted advertising would be the people who bought those pictures knocking on your door.
Seems like a pretty extreme analogy, but ok. Having someone knock on my door is kind of a pain, since I have to get up and answer it. I'm not sure it is comparable to seeing ads on web sites that I am on by choice.
I guess I have enough concerns in my life that actually have measurable impacts on me that such things seem pretty trivial.
This is an interesting debate, and one where I fear the young generation's attitudes seem to differ. My 16yo says she'd rather get targeted ads than non, because it's just more relevant and she might want to buy those things. She has zero concern about the psychological manipulation factor and assumes she will just say no if she doesn't want a product.
I guess I can see where she's coming from, as I don't avoid physical stores when I'm not planning to buy things. Window shopping is fun. But still, I think all that tracking has a dark side that's difficult to convey to the generation that grew up taking it for granted. Are we just old and fear the new and unknown?
The one thing I definitely hate is how bloated the web has gotten. Everything works great on my old computers that I switched over to linux, until I need to just google (duckduckgo) some simple piece of information on a forum. And then I find myself fantasizing about upgrading to an i7 so I can read the same basic text that could be read online when 1ghz processors were a pipe dream.
Edit: and this is with ad blockers and anti-trackers turned on. The whole browser experience is just slower, and I think the act of having to scan and block all that cruft must have an impact. Browsers used to function on Windows XP machines back in the day, right?
In addition to other answers in this thread: It's a form of cultural bubble.
A lot of 20th Century pop culture was driven by or at least responded to advertising. When advertising has to hit the broadest demographics and speak to the largest audiences it has more pressure to be creative and interesting, so that people talk or think about it.
It also lead to interesting moments of discovery when ads found audiences outside of what they expected.
Targeted ads are more often preaching to an already sold choir, so they can just be lazier in almost every way. They break expectations of novelty in ads. They lose the ability to drive the discovery models that were the original driving force behind why ads even exist in the first place. They add yet another unnecessary border wall/bubble effect where we struggle to find shared cultural events/jokes/touchstones between groups of people, because just about no two people (even inside the same demographic group) are seeing the same ads these days.
Advertising is a distraction and an attempt at psychological manipulation. That is obviously a worse experience, unless you're actually into being distracted/manipulated. The weasel words "targeted ads are better" imply comparison to untargeted ads and is a disingenuous statement.
It doesn't have to make it worse, just not make it better. Almost no one ever says "I love using such-and-such a website, the adverts on the side are just so relevant".
When I'm looking for something, I'll usually have already done a thorough search around on google, ebay, amazon etc... and it's unlikely that targeted ads will show me something I've not yet seen.
I am so sad about the fact that Edge can no longer read epubs and seems to have (so far) sub par pdf reading. It's been my go to pdf reader for a while now and I love the way it scrolls. It is so smooth - just like preview on a mac. I haven't found anything else that comes close to edge for the smoothness of its pdf reading on windows, so I will definitely be holding out on this update for as long as I can. I don't really need two chromium based browsers on my PC anyway.
Yeah it's amazing how incredible Calibre is at organising books but terrible it is at displaying them.
As a matter of fact though, I think I have found a very good epub reader which I don't see mentioned very much called Cover.
It is ridiculously smooth at displaying epubs, maybe even more so than edge. I was reading an epub with tons of images and I could swipe left and right between pages multiple times without waiting a second for reflow, almost felt like swiping a pdf. Whereas on all those other apps the book was blurred and did not scale how I would expect it to, to fill the screen. On cover everything is displayed how I think it should be displayed without changing anything. So yeah, cover A+
Agreed at Calibre! Ihave the same qualms with EPUBReader in FF, it does not get close to what edge was capable of. I'll take a look at cover at home as I sadly cannot install it at work.
Extra sad because Microsoft briefly had their own PDF program (Reader) in Windows 8, but removed it in favor of making Edge the default program for opening PDFs.
Huh, I'm happy to see it's still available. I sold my Surface years ago and tend to not look at PDFs on Windows anymore, all I'd noticed was that I didn't have Reader installed anymore.
Yeah, I threw a sizeable PDF (800MB textbook) at it and it's choking pretty hard compared to old Edge to the point where it's barely usable.
Not a deal breaker for me because I don't have a touch screen and use an external PDF reader (sumatraPDF), but if I was using edge for heavy PDFs I would be rather disappointed
Seems fine for PDFs that are a bit less extreme, but nowhere near as smooth as old edge.
800MB textbook??? What kind of textbook is that and how many pages does it have? Or page dimension/image resolution??? That is a very very large size for a pdf.
It's certainly not a typical PDF, but it's 1400 page physics textbook which seem to all be excessively large and unoptimized.
Originally it was completely uncroped, and OCRing it seems to have grown it even larger.
Not too familiar with details with PDFs but I suspect it's just a huge DPI render (maybe designed to go towards being printed) that could probably be reduced significantly if it was designed for normal consumption.
All things considered it's amazing it works at all, but old Edge handled it a lot smoother.
That's a problem the Firefox PDF viewer frequently suffers from as well. Give it a big complex PDF and it can choke very hard on stuff that Acrobat reader or xpdf open in under a second.
I think generally scrolling is less smooth than in the old edge. That was one thing they got right and hopefully we'll see improvements in this area upstream in chromium.
I don't get why Microsoft gets a pass here vs Google, given its insane mal/ad/spy/ware crap default settings in Windows 10, including sending MS all kinds of telemetry, logging into Windows via an online login etc.
It's nice to see MS pushing for tracking protection as well. Firefox now takes the lead on privacy issues. Google will try to hold it off as not to hurt their own business. People will eventually migrate away from Chrome because of this and the tracking/ad business will go down. Now is a good time to do some thinking if you're in the online tracking and/or ad business.
One of the reasons there are so many incompatibilities between browsers in every era is that the web is not built out of a small set of primitives: everyone that wants to provide a web interface must implement the whole set of WWW standards (html, scripting, css, etc), which is very difficult and error prone.
If there was only a handful of primitives to implement, and everything else was built on it, then it would be much easier to stay compatible.
This is the kind of situation that has led to IE6 dominating the web, then motivating Google to create a browser, take the market and then Microsoft finally dropping their web engine and taking up Chromium.
Aaaaand the EULA and menu buttons are in Italian when I download from the en-us version of the site. I knew there would be 90 languages, but I didn't know I'd need to learn all of them to use Edge!
Massive for corporate, since it supports Enterprise Mode lists for IE11 backwards compatibility. We can all finally use one single browser, with single sign on to our apps, and support for new technology.
I love firefox. The only big difference for now is that it is better integrated with windows. You can swipe back on the trackpad to go back and use your touchscreen seamlessly (even the keyboard pops up correctly without screwing the size of the window) Firefox doesn't do that well.
I love firefox too, it's my go-to browser at work on Linux and at home on macOS. It really isn't as well integrated into macOS either though, especially compared to Chrome and Safari. The trackpad support (or lack of it) would probably have been a deal breaker when I got a mac if I wasn't already a long-term Firefox user and quite Google-sceptic.
> Why is Microsoft tracking "even worse" than Google tracking?
Without specifics is hard to know what the message you replied to meant but one thing where I find MS tracking worse than anything Google can do on the Internet right now is that MS tracks and reports my local OS use (what applications I install/run, how long I run them, what files I have) while an Internet tracker can only get access to what the browser allows which generally limits sharing the type of information I listed.
EDIT: And pretty much all browsers have an Incognito mode or you can use TorBrowser which goes beyond that but I cannot similarly defend myself against my own local OS privacy invasion.
Because Microsoft is also collecting data from the OS level as well if you're using Windows. It's easy to keep sensitive data out of Gmail. It's hard to keep it of your computer entirely.
And if you do webdev, chrome dev tools are still the best. While firefox tools keep getting better, i still find myself regularly launching chrome just for those.
I feel the opposite, I prefer the Firefox dev tools by far. The CSS Grid and CSS Animation tools are lacking hard on Chrome. I feel though that overall they're close to equal, some tools are better on one platform than the other, but it's personal preference at the end of the day.
I don't agree. I think it is just what you are used to using. I'm used to Firefox and find their dev tools to be superior to Chrome, but I'm pretty sure that is just because I'm just more used to Firefox's dev tools (having used them since the firebug days).
I feel like I regularly see similar comments, touting the superiority of Chrome devtools. I haven’t used Chrome in a few years; what do they have that others don’t?
At home, it's already my main browser. Love the work they are doing on it and it's a nice alternative to Chrome (everytime I try Firefox, I go back to Chrome, so...)
Of all the times I wish MS had written their own browser, this would be the first not in jest. The web is not open if only 2 orgs can hope to stay functional displaying it.
Yes there are problems to everyone using the same software but there are advantages too. One drawback is that potential security issues would affect "everyone" but on the other hand the same fix works for "everyone".
If the common software is open source it serves as de facto standard/reference implementation so you don't have compatibility issues. Standardization processes try to address this without reference software but IMO that is a lot more effort (in terms of engineering hours) to get it right so you can have a fully featured standard that is clear, has no bugs and has multiple perfectly standard compliant independent implementations.
After all software is just a tool to serve a purpose and our decisions in this area should be driven by pragmatic reasons alone. If we can serve the same purpose with much less effort by having everyone build on top of/use the same common base why not.
Similarly I'd rather see everyone just use Linux instead of all the different popular OSes we have.
I love that I can now use Edge when using Google services such as Gmail and Chrome when accessing Microsoft sites such as Office 365. That way neither company can log me into the browser itself when I log into their sites. This should reduce abuses by both companies.
Google has an option that says "By turning this off, you can sign in to Google sites like Gmail without signing in to Chrome." But it doesn't work, which is a blatant abuse by Google. Adios, Chrome! I will now be using Edge when logging into Gmail.
For those already using Edge for its greatly superior DRM, the new browser may result in a big nosedive in performance for streaming video! Providers will be happy to supply cheaper Widevine-encrypted content instead of Playready but this will cause a big increase in CPU cycles when watching encrypted videos. Fortunately users may opt out of using Widevine by disabling the Widevine DRM flag at edge://flags/#edge-widevine-drm.
To be honest, I paid more attention to the Russian version than I would English. I kinda know how to pronounce it, and it's fun to see if I can figure out any of the words.
Was just about to have a look at the latest download for this for MacOS, and found out it downloads a .pkg rather than a .dmg (which is how standalone apps typically install).
So, looking into the .pkg file I notice that it's also bundled Office16_all_autoupdate.pkg, which has a 'Microsoft AutoUpdate.app'. Inside the contents of that app is another app called 'Microsoft AU Daemon.app' which contains various M$ Root Certs and a string 'Microsoft Update Assistant launched'...
It's stunts like this which make me not trust Microsoft very much. I want nothing to do with Office, nor a one-stop-shop port of Windows Update. God knows what telemetry MS will try to upload with these products, but I'm not buying it.
I've been using it all afternoon and I must say it is very snappy, crisp and pleasant to use. Microsoft has cleverly copied Chrome and made it better. A bit of the ol' Embrace and Extend of the past? I've tried Firefox but it never feels right and I switch back to Chrome. I'm not switching back this time. They even restored a feature that Chrome inexplicably took out -- the option in history to restore all your open tabs that went away when you accidentally closed the browser.
Edit: I even like Bing better. What miracle is this that the top links aren't advertisements?
I switched over to Firefox about 6 months ago, and I'm surprised by how much I love it. It's great to be able to have separate home and work accounts while still being logged into the same gmail account. Plus, there's certain interface decisions like putting Undo Close Tab in more places that makes it a nicer experience. The only issue I run into with Firefox is my company's intranet site makes me login once per day where with Chrome it doesn't.
Does anyone know what the UI of Edge is written in? Since it runs on Mac as well, have they ported some of the .Net UI frameworks to Mac or is it native all the way?
Edge (and Chromium) both use a custom C++ UI framework. Chrome wrote the framework to be cross-platform, so Edge was able to take advantage of that to deliver the macOS version. AFAIK there's no WinUI XAML components being used.
Everything I've heard is that touch support is completely destroyed in this one.
This completely destroys my main use case for my Surface. I need a tablet with a web browser that's designed to be used in portrait mode without the Type Cover attached.
Can anyone here recommend a UWP web browser I can switch to when the real Edge goes away for good? Or if none exists, can someone recommend a cheap 12"+ tablet that runs a mobile OS?
I don't think it evoques a flat letter 'e' at all, it is highly reminiscent of a blue Firefox logo though (so IceWeasel probably, if I remembered that logo), IMO.
I wish Microsoft wouldn't alpha-test their browser-experiment on real-world-users. Since Edge is out, I find it totally useless. It has also been a total fail on the accessibility front. To release something that is inaccessible from the start is no longer acceptable in 2020 methinks, especially from a big player like MS. The word that comes to mind is embarrasment.
So if I remember correctly this is another step in the history of KHTML -> WebKit -> Safari -> Chrome -> Edge.
I’m sure much has changed internally but still, who would have imagined that KDE and Apple would be the ones to produce the dominant core browser architecture for the whole world?
Not completely related but does anyone know of an epub reader with the quality that Edge had? The EPUBReader extension in FF works but the rendering and UX is a lot worse. Calibre on the other hand is a great management system but with a horrendous reader.
Tested it out a few weeks ago and discovered Netflix was limiting the streaming bitrate on it. Turns out Chrome and Edge can play at 1080p now, but the bitrate is reduced(much) over what I see in Safari and the Netflix app on Windows.
* 4K Ultra HD exclusivity is limited to PCs running Windows 10. 4K works in both Microsoft Edge and Netflix app. Only 7th Gen Intel® Core™ processor or higher devices can decrypt PlayReady 4K DRM. Netflix Ultra HD plan required.
Interesting, I did report the issue. Worth looking at again but I don't have a 4k display and it may still be reduced nitrate. The quality difference was very noticeable on something like Lost In Space.
Anyone know how Ad blocking works for Edge on iOS? I’m getting better results than Safari and while I see AdBlock Plus in edge settings, there’s nothing to unable under Content Blockers under iOS settings.
Tried to download it for macOS. It displayed a license agreement/download page in Polish (I assume.) My browser language is English, and I'm in Denmark. Maybe some other day.
I love Edge. It's very quick and feels super stable. However that new icon is terrible. It looks like laundry detergent branding and it only vaguely resembles an e.
I know this isn't contributing to the discussion, but Vimium extension is honestly my only reason to keep using Chromium-based browser. I should give this a try.
Presumably because Chromium and related technologies (e.g. V8) have far more investment by the community than Gecko and SpiderMonkey. MS already uses Chromium/v8 in some of their products like VS Code.
I haven't looked into it but I hope that the use of the Chromium engine means web standards and feature support on par with Chrome and Firefox. They mention less fragmentation for web developers so I hope that that is what they are alluding to.
I will "probably" never use this browser but I just hope that it doesn't open a new set of issues to deal with. I don't think it should
We have effectively lost a competitor. Microsoft is now contributing to Chrome development.
The best long-term outcome for the web would arguably to have been for Microsoft to put more resources into their in-house EdgeHTML browser instead of throwing it out and reskinning Chrome.
It's beyond reskinning. They can change anything they want to.
Let's say Google says they don't like some privacy feature because it hurts their bottom line in terms of ad revenue. So they decide not to have that in Chrome.
Sure, people could switch to in-house Edge or Firefox. But they don't want to switch, because for whatever reason, Google is better able to make a browser that people like. Attested to by the tiny market share Edge has (and fairly small share Firefox has, notwithstanding its popularity within the HN community).
Switching to Chromium based Edge is a much easier move for users, assuming Microsoft decides to second-guess Google's decision, which they can do easily and have strong incentives to do -- keeping in mind that the number one complaint people have about Chrome is that they don't trust Google.
Microsoft is now contributing to Chrome development.
And now everybody can benefit from their hard work.
But somehow it's better for them to duplicate work for their 1% marketshare?
Lots of people get angry about this kind of stuff. "I'd switch to Firefox if it supported Fluent" is something I have read multiple times in discussions about browsers.
It was bad.
Real bad.
But I'm actually fairly positive about MS getting into the chromium landscape and back into the game. Let's face it MS had lost all of its influence in the browser world before dropping IE and making this move. It is a Google/Chrome dominated world at the moment. But by adopting Chromium, MS can "catch up" on a technical level and also wield significant power inside the Chromium project itself. They have money and they have an experienced browser engine engineering team. They will be able to provide some balance to Google in this ecosystem. If push came to shove, forking chromium wouldn't be an idle threat from MS. They will have some power.
On a technical level it looks like a move towards a mono-culture, but politically it looks like a chance at more balance and diversity to me.