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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

I've talked to some people on the team who works on Edge, and they are a fantastic group of people.

They know they are in an uphill battle, and everyone is writing them off, but they are doing damn good work.

Edge's performance is getting leaps and bounds faster every update, they are doing incredible things for battery life on many devices, they are catching up to google for web API support, and nobody is taking them seriously.

I know nothing about what it's like to work at microsoft, but whatever they are doing with the Edge team is working. They know their product isn't perfect (what is?), and they are just trying their damn hardest to make it better.

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Edge for Android and iOS is an interesting move: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/10/05/annou...

I like the role reversal where an MS browser on a Google OS might have merit...like being able to run ad blocking extensions.

It's a good bit ludicrous that they are providing Edge for IOS / Android but not for previous versions of Windows.

My life as a programmer would be better if I didn't have to support IE11 / Windows 7, but instead of doing that, they spent some time getting it running where no one wants it.

Edge for android and iOS use the built-in rendering engines on each platform.

Edge for Android is using Blink, Edge for iOS is using Webkit.

They could give you "Edge for windows 7" but it wouldn't be the same rendering engine from Edge on windows 10.

...except that they could? It would probably be simple to port the engine from win10 to win7, in a way that it wouldn't be to port it to a completely different os that is also mobile.

Mainstream support for Windows 7 ended in 2015. Do you also want them to support edge on Android 4.3? Or are you a little more pragmatic in expecting users to update more than once every 7 years?

If you refuse to make your app installable on your own OS that half of the world's desktop computers are running, you don't need to wonder that it is not gaining market share.

If only Microsoft lets older Windows to install Edge. Yet they are stuck with IE. The only way to use Edge is to upgrade to Windows 10.

IIRC it's because the APIs that Edge uses are only in 10.

That's all well and good, but somehow every other browser manages to run on Windows versions before 10. It's kinda bad that Edge cannot.

But it's a goal of those browsers to run cross-platform, it's explicitly not a goal of Edge.

Just like how it's not a valid criticism to say that it's bad that Boeing can't make cars. They aren't trying to...

> If only Microsoft lets older Windows to install Edge.

> But it's...explicitly not a goal of Edge.

No criticism sticks if we just define it as a non-goal :P

I think the criticism was for that decision itself.

And if you get to define what someone else's goal is you can stick any criticism.

It's kinda bad that Edge cannot run on multiple platforms, until that happens it will keep getting the same (or less) use.

Edge also runs on iOS and Android now. (Albeit using each OS's respective rendering engine.)

Edge is a glorification of the latest and greatest Windows 10 features: such as handwriting support and pen-note taking.

These features don't exist in Windows 7. The Windows 10 Win32 API (yes, its still getting updated) has much cleaner and better support for handwriting features on websites.

The other browsers are cross platform because they're mouse and keyboard based. Modern Windows 10 design is evolving more and more towards the active digitizer stylus however.

I dare you to find a browser as well suited to Pen / Stylus as Microsoft Edge is. Heck, I'm 100% certain that Microsoft Edge is the only "good" Stylus-based browser.

Windows 7 is already out mainstream support and has only 3 years more of security patches. Unless you are telling me you are one of the very few people still on Windows 8.1, now is as good of a time as any to plan for a migration to Windows 10.

At my workplace, most users are on Windows 7, and few on Win 10, and fewer (if any) are on windows 8.1

Migration to windows 10 is not going to happen until it is absolutely necessary.

Would you expect Linux users at your workplace to still be running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)? Or to be a bit more generous, Windows 7 SP1 is closer to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). Neither of which have been supported for at least half a decade.

Even Windows 8.1's equivalent Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) fell out of support two years ago. Though arguably that's intentionally unfair because Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) is the closest LTS and still has support for less than two more years (through April 2019). Though that's quaint in comparison to Microsoft's generous extended security support of Windows 8.1 until Jan 2023.

The reluctance to migrate users by corporations creates its own worst enemy. The longer you wait the tougher it is to migrate, the more versions you skip in the middle. That's both a detriment to user learning (they miss transitionary learning steps and evolutionary UX migrations), and a one of those "doctor, it hurts when I migrate because I do it so seldomly, so I migrate less often and it hurts more" problems. The less often you distro upgrade the more problems you have so you loathe to distro upgrade creating more problems. Maybe distro upgrade a bit more often? I realize that is a radical assertion in modern corporate IT, but it seems like a common sense one.

As another data point, RHEL 5, released two years before Windows 7, apparently has paid support available through 2020.

I agree with you though that migrations increase in pain the longer they're put off.

I looked it up because I was curious. [1] Apples to apples it looks like Windows "extended support" is closer to RHEL "Production Phase 3" support (not to be confused with RHEL's "extended support" which is vaguely "we'll keep the wikis lit and maybe answer if you hear ghosts"), so by that measure RHEL 5 ended "Phase 3" support in March of this year. With Windows 7 getting another 3 years of "Phase 3" support it looks about like RHEL and Windows' timeframes are very similar in this case.

[1] https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/

While I agree with your main point, I find it odd that you'd even factor in the non-LTS/bleeding edge releases of Ubuntu vs Windows (10). The closest I can think of in the Windows world would be Windows Insider builds but those are a bit more akin to nightly releases (though that characterization is a bit unfair to Windows Insider). Yes, you qualify that with the "intentionally unfair" but I fail to see what it adds to this to compare apples to oranges.

Point being, even.04 Ubuntu releases vs Windows seem to be the better metric if we're talking about support. Anything outside of those (non-even.04 Ubuntu or Windows Insider releases) you get the benefit of being on the bleeding edge, but you're going to be poked more than usual.

I feel like I did address this criticism in the middle of my comment, even if perhaps I glossed over, both with the "unfair" jab and the hand-wavy "more than half a decade" mention because I glanced at the LTS support numbers, too. I made sure I included the only .04 LTS release as old as either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 that was still in support (until 2019).

[For completion's sake: 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is the roughly closest Ubuntu LTS to Windows 7, and hasn't been supported since 2013. 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) was the closest LTS to Windows 7 SP 1, and also hasn't been supported since 2013 (on Desktop).]

I used the more closely aligned dates because Windows and Ubuntu have been aligned to similar-ish 6 month cycles for a while now and especially in Windows 10. It's interesting that the LTS equivalents are in opposite parts of the cycle with Ubuntu LTS in the Spring and Windows LTS in the Fall. But even accounting for LTS versus LTS, the fact of the matter is that Windows extended security support still dwarfs the comparable Ubuntu timeframes and few are complaining that Ubuntu's support windows are too short. Of Desktop LTS support, Microsoft's seems almost by far the longest of any Desktop OS/distribution and no one is expecting Desktop support for even a Linux LTS distribution support like they expect from Windows.

(Reply to point out my own cultural bias before others do: technically both Windows and Ubuntu LTS is their respective Fall release, because the two are headquartered in opposite hemispheres. Which is one interesting explanation to the six month-difference between the two groups.)

So maybe people would be more willing to migrate, if the new version respected their privacy?

Unless there is no option to keep the chattiness of the system only to user-initiated connections (and keep that option on the same value after updates!), many people simply won't migrate.

Windows 10 FCU (the version released this month) continued the trend of making the privacy options as explicit as possible (and making them much more opt-in in the onboarding/setup process). Microsoft also apologized about updates resetting privacy options to defaults.

YMMV, but I feel that Windows 10 is respectful about my privacy and that Microsoft has been working to address every concern people have had.

Have you tried the FCU recently or do you intend to keep grinding the same ax from two years ago indefinitely?

Yes, I do have one machine with Windows 10, yes, it is updated to Fall Creators Update and yes, I did have to rerun the clean up script, because the preferences were reset again (not talking only about privacy related ones).

But thank you for reminding me, that any criticism not towing the party line is met with derision.

My criticism was not meant to be derision. It was genuine curiosity to ask how up-to-date you have tried to be. "Privacy issues" still seems like every other comment about Windows 10 here on HN and elsewhere like Ars Technica and The Verge. It's a very repetitive refrain at this point (y'all are quite a vocal minority).

It's also a criticism that I'm having an increasingly hard time understanding or sympathizing with, because the privacy tools in Windows 10 do continue to get better and more transparent with each update. I am starting to wonder if this criticism is simply the easiest excuse available (because it will always be hard to 100% satisfy a tinfoil hat that "there are no magic hidden NSA bugs"; I read Slashdot for long enough to know how deep that rabbit hole sometimes goes), and that there is no actual way to satisfy this criticism, it will just continue to haunt every time Windows 10 is even remotely brought up in conversation for the rest of time.

Apple was able to create exactly two checkboxes in the system settings:

1. Allow telemetry 2. Allow sharing telemetry data with third-parties.

There was no need to "improve privacy tools". There is simply an option to not send anything. You don't need to research "what's new in this version". One checkbox, done, forever. The result is verifiable on the firewall.

I'm sure, that if Microsoft did the same, including respecting the setting, everyone would be happy wrt telemetry.

And then we could discuss forced updates.

The privacy options started as one drop-down with only three choices, one of which was unavailable to choose for non-Enterprise consumers, which is nearly the same number of options as the checkboxes you reference. Some complained that wasn't enough options so now there's a half-dozen checkboxes.

The telemetry Windows 10 didn't allow you to opt-out of at launch was the same telemetry every version of Windows since Vista (including 7) have not allowed you to opt-out of (including Windows Error Reporting, which even Windows XP had a stripped down version of that). There's a bit more of it in 10, but it's not like it magically appeared overnight...

Now there's half-dozen or so checkmarks, all in one spot, with a lot of information (and links to a lot more information) on a lot of detail as to what each checkmark includes (and what is impacted by turning it off). It's overkill compared to Apple's "one checkbox", but a lot of voices shouted they wanted a lot more information and a lot more ability to pick and choose.

The same people that trust Apple to just have one checkbox and be done with it, are some of the same people that want 100-page documents with specifics from Microsoft and why we've come to this page full of checkboxes and tons of stuff to read impasse. This is part of why I'm getting cynical about privacy complaints and feel like this discussion isn't going anywhere productive.

The problem wasn't enough options (though not enough transparency still is). The problem is the one option that anyone wants and is still not available: do not send anything. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Null. Radio silence. As if the computer wasn't even connected to the Internet. I don't believe it is a difficult concept to understand, except for those that do not want to understand. (the Enterprise version exclusive option is not that either. The "Security" level still collects and sends data).

Meanwhile, all the new options look like convoluted way to not change anything, but being able to demonstrate to regulators and PR, that something is being done. An effort for show, do not care about the result.

The reason, why Apple can do one checkbox and everyone is happy, but there is a higher standard for Microsoft is very simple: Apple has demonstrated, that they can be trusted, while Microsoft has demonstrated exact opposite. Dragging their feet doesn't exactly help. Even Canonical when they did their misstep with Amazon, had a lot to do to repair their reputation. But they honestly tried; Microsoft didn't start yet.

But Apple's "one checkbox" doesn't even act like you want. It still sends quite a lot of data back to Apple for various reasons.

It silences telemetry, but not the other services, I know: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490293 (scroll to cca middle).

Still, silencing a Mac on the network is way easier than silencing a Win 10 machine. It is not only the telemetry and the visibility into which process does what, but also the control over updates and persistence of your rules. Silent updates that change or misinterpret your settings (firewall rules bound to executable version, then updating this executable and applying default rules instead of yours are definitely not my favorite experience) significantly increase the time and effort needed, compared to other systems.

It still likely violates EU privacy laws: https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/en/news/dutch-dpa-micr...

If they introduce highly illegal telemetry and dial it back to slightly less illegal, then it's still illegal and yes, it very much makes sense to keep grinding that same axe from two years ago until Microsoft abides the law.

Upgrades of Linux distributions typically are actually upgrades and if they're not, you'll find a not-shit upgrade path somehow, be it by switching to a different distro or to a different flavor of the same distro.

With Windows, it's very much arguable if the upgrade from 7 to 8.1 or to 10 is beneficial (or even legal for you to do, thanks to the increased surveillance) and if you dislike this upgrade path, then you can't easily switch to the next operating system, run all your same applications and continue using most of your configurations and scripts.

There's also still a monetary cost to upgrading Windows.

I think this is a pretty apples-to-apples comparison: the timeframe in question for Ubuntu has just as many ups and downs as for Windows in terms of upgrades. It includes the Gnome 2 -> Unity -> Gnome 3 transition. The systemd transition is in there somewhere.

That kind of supports my point that if you were sticking to Ubuntu specifically you've seen a lot of change during the support lifetime of Windows 7. No IT department in their right mind would still be running a comparable Linux distribution on user desktops as old as Windows 7, and those Linux distributions have changed nearly as much as Windows 7 through to Windows 10.

Monetary cost is apples-to-oranges and irrelevant to the point I was trying to make, but: the Windows upgrade from 7 and 8.1 to 10 was made free for consumers and small businesses, and Microsoft has aligned with Apple that starting with Windows 10 upgrades are free for the support lifetime of the hardware; businesses above a certain size (the most likely ones to be conservative in their IT) have always paid for the latest version of Windows with their software assurance agreements, regardless if they deploy/upgrade to it.

Similarly alternative distributions are great, it's nice to have alternatives, but are also irrelevant to my point. Certainly in the Windows 7 support lifetime maybe you moved Ubuntu to Mint because you thought Unity was a mistake and maybe by now you are considering moving back to Ubuntu now that it is switching back to Gnome. The point is that you've still done many more distribution upgrades than Windows upgrades in the same timeframe and don't question it. (For the most part you'd still want the latest kernel and applications support, you mostly aren't just leaving machines be and not upgrading them.)

Not having more options in Windows upgrade direction is a fair complaint, but the point was that Microsoft in return granted one of the longest security support lifetimes of any desktop or mobile operating system out there.

I think it is useful to have that perspective on that, regardless of what you think about Windows or Microsoft. Whether or not Windows is moving the direction you want it to, the fact that so many people have the option to rest on their laurels for three more years before the next major scramble to a supported Windows version for their desktops (I'm ignoring servers and embedded appliances, this thread has always been about desktops), is largely unprecedented outside of Windows, and the refusal by some major corporations to keep Windows up-to-date would be laughed at if they were running Ubuntu or macOS.

> The point is that you've still done many more distribution upgrades than Windows upgrades in the same timeframe and don't question it.

Which is not the point I was making there. The point was that Windows Upgrades are subjective, whereas when Linux Upgrades are subjective, you can hop to the next OS.

Many end-users have no problem doing even twice as many upgrades, as long as what they're getting isn't worse. And often you're even able to avoid UI changes by making these sidesteps. For example, you could've gone from Ubuntu with GNOME2 to Ubuntu MATE or even Xubuntu and you'd still be using essentially the same UI as you've been able to use since 2002. Program compatibility wouldn't really change then either, it's still Ubuntu, still Linux under the hood.

I also really don't feel like it's fair for you to act like Ubuntu is the only distribution. If you know you want conservative, boring, then you'd install Debian. openSUSE Leap would also be an option, for the most part not quite as conservative as Debian, but at least it's out of its experimenting phase. And if you don't mind monetary costs, then SUSE Linux Enterprise will give you 10 years general support + 3 years extended support.

Lastly, the upgrade isn't just subjective for many companies, it's even likely illegal due to the increased telemetry. Either because they're in a field where by law, they have to abide to user data protection, or because they have contracts that ask for secrecy. And I do think that that is a very legitimate reason to not be upgrading right away or at all. That one, however, is on Microsoft.

I work in an environment that despite having varied departments and significant bureaucracy, and some software written to run on Windows XP and not updated since... has 100% of Windows clients on Windows 10 with the latest cumulative updates.

And shockingly, everything works. Business happens. It's not actually a hard transition. (Actually, at a former employer, they scripted the upgrade process and shipped it.)

If it can work in my environment, it can work in any environment, and nobody has any valid excuses.

> they are doing damn good work.

I've been using it for a while. Overall, it feels significantly faster than any Chromium-based browser I've used. Chrome, Brave, etc. are simply no longer good enough.

That being said, I'm considering switching to Quantum. Edge breaks the 1Password plugin[1] and Microsoft is closing the bugs "as designed" or they have lost all traction. Breaking a password manager relegates the entire browser to non-starter, it doesn't matter at all how good your other features are.

[1]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor... , https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...

Was Brave ever good enough? I thought it was just Brendan Eich's swan song

I used it for a very long time and loved it. It's perceptually faster/more lightweight than Chrome, I think that's a goal? The adblocker was workable, but nowhere near uBlock. It's close but noticeably slower than Edge.

Firefox on mobile is an utter trainsmash, so I use it there out of necessity (Chrome doesn't have add-ons/adblockers).

> nobody is taking them seriously

Chrome and Firefox run on Mac and various unices. Edge is just a pain to take seriously for me, a « various unices » user.

I would take them significantly more seriously if they open sourced the browser. All of their accomplishments may be impressive but it's a moot point if they're all being kept to themselves.

They are getting there. They already open sourced their js engine [0] and some parts of the rendering engine like the WebGL stuff [1].

I remember reading that it's a goal of them that they want to open source it, but it's not an overnight process.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore

[1] https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebGL

ChakraCore is definitely a step in the right direction. Kudos for that.

Their WebGL thing isn't, though. That's just a code dump, a year outdated, with no history. It's still developed in private and isn't getting updates.

I wish I could actually take advantage of the great stuff they're doing, but it's still just too unstable and I have issues on too many websites. Every time I try to use Edge I end up switching back to Chrome within a week.

> nobody is taking them seriously

Because it's 2017 and I'm STILL having to write workarounds for IE.

This is absolutely valid criticism. Of course the devteam is "good people", but the issue remains that Edge created yet another browser fork while IE11 is still around and actively used. Also Edge is still behind with several features (like server-sent events).

For those saying Edge is different than IE, is there even an IE team anymore or did they just become the Edge team now? Either way the development strategy is not great.

And let's not forget the worst thing about this: __Edge can't be installed on windows 8.1 or less__

By far, this is stopping most users from leaving IE.

No one is using Windows 8.1, statistically speaking anymore, and Windows 7 only has 3 years left of security fixes remaining.

we have 7.5% IE11 traffic on our ecommerce site (US, diy home remodeling). more than Edge which is ~5%.

7.5% is a huge number.

IE11 traffic includes Windows 7 users. Windows 8.1 users is a tiny fraction of that 7.5% as most of that is likely Windows 7 since that's the new Windows XP that corporations will use for as long as it has security support because they are afraid of change.

ETA: Plus the people that missed the Windows 10 free upgrade for Windows 7 (intentionally or accidentally).

Well, if Microsoft would quit spying on people and quit intentionally breaking things they might not have to fight to get people to upgrade.

As things stand, Windows 7 is probably the last Windows several companies I know are going to use unless Microsoft coughs up something before they get forced to upgrade. Win 10 is sufficiently different that they are actually considering Linux.

And, with the fact that everybody is moving to WebApps (hack, spit), it probably doesn't matter.

The Ghost Stories of Windows XP we will tell around the campfire for decades to come seem to indicate that companies will always hard-headed stick with Windows versions beyond their useful lifetime. "Quit spying" seems like a red herring in that regard, because if that wasn't the easy excuse there are more right behind ("our apps don't work"; "the new app system is hard"; "we hired a VB6 programmer once in 1999 and we know this app is critical to our business but we don't expect to put our money where our mouth is and hire someone to update it for 2017"; etc).

The way Microsoft likes to shuffle project teams, it's a bit of a ship of theseus. It's a very strange philosophical debate if the Edge team is the "same as" the IE10/11 team. The Edge team is definitely not the IE7/8/9 team, that I'm sure of. The Edge team can't possibly be the IE6- team, because that team was entirely disbanded. The IE10/11 team inherited the mistakes of the IE6- team by way of a need for backward compatibility and the backward compatibility plan put together by the IE7/8/9 team. Does that backward compatibility arc define what was the IE team? If so, then the Edge team is definitely not the IE team, having for finality killed the backward compatibility story of IE7/8/9.

The point is that the criticism applies regardless of which specific product or people because it is all the "microsoft web browser" group.

But IE is not Edge.

Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!

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