I applaud the death of IE and Edge. One thing I'm worried about though is that Chromium may take over the market and we end up with websites working only in Chromium based browsers and other important browsers like Firefox and Safari get left in the dirt.
This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too.
Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).
It seems very unlikely:
- Mozilla has been in a far worse uderdog position before during the IE6 era, with way more incompatible sites and less funding.
- Mozilla is not for profit. Fighting for the open Web is one of their goal. It always has been. They are not perfect, but their track record is damn good compared to almost any player of their size and impact in the tech world.
- Mozilla strongly invested in their own tech, including rewritting the browser rendering engine and taking huge risks such as create a bloody hole new language, rust, in the process. To my knowledge, the "oxydation" project has been a success so far, and rust is proving everyday that it's a positive force in the world as well.
- Firefox is the only decent mobile browser. I can't navigate the web without the ublock extension. I just can't.
- Mozilla keeps innovating. Their last brillant idea, the tab container, is worth switching on it's own.
- Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side. Even during the V30 to v50 transition period where Firefox was, at the time, clearly an inferior product, we kept using it to support it for the sheer ideal of it. We hoped it would come back from it, and it happened: Firefox is now a fast, lean and fantastic browser again.
- Privacy concerns are (FINALLY !) being taken in consideration from the crowd. And Chrome is terrible at this, so moving to a chromium core, while technically not related at all because you can set it up the way you like, would carry the stigma.
All in all, I'm incredibly optimistic about Mozilla et Firefox's future despite the market share taking a serious hit.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock/review...
I use Firefox. I always have. My experience is totally different to yours. Before FF57 it was a single process and it ran nicely on a 4GB machine with a 2009 Intel Atom processor. Afterwards it became much hungrier for memory and processor. I had to buy a new computer. (I tried Chrome of course but it is hungrier.)
The later is a more complicated matter, as it was 10 years ago, with different expectations, hardware, user base and web.
This is not my experience. On my MacBook Pro it is slow and tends to cause system lockups on a regular basis. Everytime there is a new announcement about how the new Firefox has improved performance and stability I give it a try and each time am disappointed.
On my phone the Firefox browser is almost unusably slow and slow enough that it can't replace Chrome. Mozilla has released other mobile browsers which perform faster but they lack the features I need in my browser.
[1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3213031/computers/best-web-b...
I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’ve never had a lockup in that entire time (and I run Beta), as far as I can tell, it is the fastest of all my options.
The very last thing that I notice any difference on is energy usage, for which Safari is still king. I don’t use Firefox on my iPhone, as there’s not much point (I wish Apple would change their restriction here).
For this it's become my main work browser. At home I mainly use safari and it works great for 15-ish tabs.
Watching youtube in 1080p it struggles and CPU goes up, fans are on.
Scrolling Heavy e-commerce sites (amazon, jumia)... CPU goes up, fans are on.
Yet, run chrome on these same sites, with the same settings and no fan noises/frezes at all.
I don't know how true this is when considering all the calling-home (split over multiple settings in about:config making it difficult to disable) in modern firefox versions.
> Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side.
A lot of geeks are moving away from it to forks or to other browsers like qutebrowser, which actually makes senses considering that mozilla keeps trying to sabotage the poweruser demographic.
I agree but between a broken leg and cancer, you choose the broken leg.
> A lot of geeks are moving away from it to forks or to other browsers like qutebrowser, which actually makes senses considering that mozilla keeps trying to sabotage the poweruser demographic.
This has always been the case. We try alternatives, that's what we do. It's sane, and no matter Mozilla's behavior, we would do it.
Although I would have loved even more choice (or MS championing the superb Firefox rendering engine instead), I think we're already well off with two fully featured and completely open source browser engines.
> building a fully featured browser engine from
> scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80%
> of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible
> task in 2018.
Absolutely! > I think we're already well off with two fully
> featured and completely open source browser engines.
Well, that's the problem. The death of Edge brings us one step closer to a browser monoculture.Which is apparently something developers want, since apparently none of them were working in the industry the last time we had a monoculture.
It doesn't matter if HN uses Firefox. It doesn't matter if web developers like us the world over use Firefox.
Ezra and Taylor just want to manage their personal brands and don't care about all that nerd stuff.
We'll build for where the audience is, and they're not going to switch for any of the reasons in this thread. It works good enough as it is.
Yes, Chrome is open source, but in marketing/critical mass terms this is no different than last time.
Watching Mozilla align Firefox's extension API with Chromium's, I'm a little surprised that they haven't already made the move. If browser evolution continues along the current path, I predict Firefox will switch to Chromium within 3 years.
> Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).
It's already happening. Until a year or two ago, the only time I ever opened Chrome was when a page using some sort of experimental API ran slowly or not at all on Firefox. Now, the number of mainstream websites I see with serious glitches in Firefox is increasing by the month.
I used to put it down to my plugins, but there are some sites (which of course I cannot name) that don't work, even with noscript / ublock disabled.
It's not Firefox's fault if people aren't testing their websites on both browsers, just like it wasn't Firefox or Chrome's fault whenever people only tested their webpages with Internet Explorer and its mess of exclusive APIs and deviations from standards.
- Firefox Focus is switching from Chromium Engine to Gecko Engine.
- Huge amount of work in WebRender, they're starting to test it. If it lives up its promise Chromium Engine might fall far behind in terms of performance.
So maybe you're right but from what we can tell right now, the current trend for Mozilla is to remove the last pieces of Chromium and bet everything on a new generation engine which is not Chromium.
I feel like Debbie Downer from SNL back in the day, so let's hope you're right.
Let me explain: there is no true open standard (as explained at https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/). You don't realize this until you make HTML5 games or apps, like when Google decided to break tons of HTML5 games with https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...
So basically it is already really hard to support all web browsers out there, since there is no "standard". So what you do is you limit yourself to a few, and display "Best played in browser X", because browser Y has these strange issues, and might introduce others with a new update, and the same for browser Z and F.
So if you make rich web content such as games, the ecosystem will automatically push itself to a limited amount of web browsers.
- Build some webapp and get it working correctly in Chrome
- Test on Firefox. It works 90% of the time. 9% of the time it's relatively easy to support. 1% of the time it isn't worth the hassle.
- Test on Edge. It works 80% of the time. 10% it's an easy enough fix. 10% you have to move heaven and Earth to fix and when you contact Microsoft, they know about the issue but won't do anything to help.
- Test on IE. It works 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time you start looking for a new job so you don't have to write the same code a second time for IE.
That is Firefox. Shuttering that kills the project. It's like, I don't know, Tumblr deciding to ban porn or something.
Much like the debates about other developer tools in fact (text editors et al).
I use Firefox for casual browsing, but all work-y stuff I do in chrome. Sometimes I'll start debugging a site in Firefox and then some behavior is a bit "off" or missing and I just go back to Chrome.
And the only reason I'm using Firefox is because it's not Chrome. I wanted a different browser that looks a bit different to always be aware of the difference between work and personal.
100% agree here. I'd be way more worried about monoculture if any other browser would be discontinued, but the MS browser history was and is just a shitshow.
<rant>
I can't even remember how many years MS and even some people in my vincinity were going on about how amazing the new IE (or later Edge) were and that MS would totally be changing their ways now. Usually, if you used their browser for more than five minutes, that sounded more like a bad joke.
To this day, the (properly updated) Edge on my dev machine does user interaction orders of magnitude worse than FF/Chrome. Tabs frequently stop functioning properly and even won't reload anymore, until you find out that some subprocess crashed and you'll have to close and re-open the site to try again. The adoption of new web standards happens at a crawl.
Yet, at the same time, their "Edge is totally a next-gen browser! Promise!" rhetoric leads to actual companies prohibiting users from getting and using an actually useful browser like FF.
Their dev story sucks, too. The best of their jokes was when someone wanted to convince me on how cool VS2015 was for HTML/Javascript development. Yes, I totally want a 16GB+ IDE that literally can take minutes to load from an SSD and frequently freezes to do nimble HTML editing m(
The funny thing is: They actually arguably fixed that one in the mean time (VS Code), but their browser politics remained. Perhaps this signifies the same shift there?
</rant>
TL;DR: I actually wouldn't mind that much, but MS has been repeatedly overselling and underdelivering for years and just slows down everyone else doing it.
I know what you mean, but that is mildly amusing and not entirely false.
Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on webrender.
From a security point of view, I think that's true. What are other problems?
I think everybody using the same rendering engine would be a net positive.
> proprietary company moving fast internally and shipping anything and evetything without following a standards process.
Well, that's the thing. What's to stop Google from doing that?It won't be as overt as Microsoft ramming shitty versions of IE down people's throats for a decade, but please rest assured that Google's goal is profit and domination. I'm not saying they are worse than any other for-profit corporation, but they are a for-profit corporation.
> It was a complete and totally different time for the web
You lack a very basic sense of vision. You understand that the past is different from today, but seem unable to comprehend that the future might be different from today.20 years ago: Microsoft was doing a pretty good job with the web! IE3/4/5 were consistently better than Netscape. Developers generally welcomed the IE monoculture because developing for both Netscape and IE was a real pain in the ass.
10 years ago: Microsoft had a stranglehold on the web and it suffered greatly, to the point where governments had to intervene (the EU mandating browser choice, etc)
Today: Google is doing a pretty good job with the web!
10 years from now: ????????????
If you don't have a large team of developers and a few millions in the bank you basically don't have a chance.
As Google keeps pushing more and more features in the browser the bar keeps getting higher and higher. I'm actually surprised that Mozilla still manages to mostly keep up, but since it's mostly running on Google's money it's still not quite a relief.
I don't think this is even remotely true. Those same arguments (using apis, good security, good ui, speed, etc) could be made for any piece of non-trivial software. But there's no way a browser is "on par" in complexity with an operating system.
It's probably not the best metric but my checkout of the Linux kernel (a very advanced OS with support for many architectures and devices) is at about 14 million lines of C code (per sloccount), although if you remove device drivers and only count the "core" of the kernel you end up with about 3M lines. I don't have any browser source code available on my computer but a website[1] says that Firefox 20 (released in 2013) was around 4M lines of code and was rising quite fast.
Again, this is comparing apples to kernels but it shows that it's still within the same order of magnitude as far as code size is concerned. The maintenance burden alone on these large codebases is huge, you need teams of engineers just dealing with things like testing and regressions. The bar is extremely high for competition, you won't have two clever engineers write the next killer browser in their basement.
Now consider how many websites that exist with all kinds broken code, use of dead APIs, old versions of, well, everything. Yet a modern browser can display those sites just fine 99% of the time. Users expect this!
Making a modern browser that works across all those nearly infinite combinations is considerably more difficult than making a kernel boot on a new board with a plethora of datasheets out in the wild to download at your leisure.
If edge dies, and FF shrinks further (both of which seem likely), FF will in effect be reduced to an alternative implementation of chrome; not a implementation of a web browser. Both Edge and FF already include chrome-quirk emulating features; you can expect those exceptions to become the norm.
Apple - for all it's wealth - isn't likely to bother bucking the trend here. The same forces pushing MS affect Apple too; and given their high-end only marketing and various political factors, they will be completely ignored in much of asia - and that's a lot of devs creating a lot of stuff that is likely to depend on chrome-only features eventually.
I presume you mean that Safari doesn’t support experimental standards that Chrome is pushing because they align with Google’s businesses strategy.
This is exactly the problem with a browser monoculture. If we’re not lucky Google will be the new Microsoft.
Google owns Android, which is the Windows of the mobile world. They push a development monoculture based on their platform. They leverage their de-facto monopoly in some sectors to penetrate other sectors. They hoover up young developers and keep them in gilded cages that encompass as much of their lives as possible. The only difference is that their cash-cow is advertising rather than an office suite.
Google IS the new Microsoft. They are MS just before the Halloween Papers and the antitrust trial: rich, dominant, and mostly well-liked by the dev community at large.
Better analog would be Wayland-Yutani I guess. The corporations that are manifesting currently are nothing that the world has ever seen before in size and interconnections.
Not that I'm against it, it's just my observation. I'm an avid customer of both.
But worst of all, it seems like Apple just doesn't care. Bug reports don't seem to be read at all, while when reporting an issue for Chrome you usually get a reply within 24 hours.
You mean the actual reliable standards -- and not just rushing to add shiny stuff before it's standardized?
Safari does tend to release features a bit later than Firefox or Chrome, but it’s also an open-source, standards-compliant browser that includes almost all modern web tech that the others support. In daily use, I rarely find anything that isn’t supported, with the one exception of issues around WebRTC that have been fixed for some time.
The comparison with IE is flawed.
Also Microsoft are victims of their own legacy, namely what they did with Internet Explorer. Changing the box model, not adopting standards, not fixing bugs, causing no end of headaches for people having to support IE and so on. Trust needs to be earned.
Apple had the same problem and briefly tried to have Safari on Windows but that didn't work out well and honestly I don't think they were ever that committed.
Firefox is a viable alternative bit they still do stupid shit. My favorite is prompting me to restart to install an update when I open it. Well I just opened the app to do something but sure I'll interior what I'm doing so you can install an update that you could've done when I wasn't using it (ie like chrome).
It's 2018. The era is office like updates is over.
If you install locally. Example downloading the nightly build to a local dir or installing in windows you may receive notifications of a new version when you open it but you can safely dismiss them with one click and update next Thursday if you like. At no point will it decide that its time whether you like it or not like windows update.
It's the best they can do. Windows carries a lot of baggage and bad decisions around its OS design. One of them is that when a file has an exclusive lock (eg an .exe file that's running) it can't be deleted. NTFS and Windows Kernel don't implement reference counting like a proper OS.
So Firefox (or any software package with in-place self-update functionality) needs to wait until the application is shut down to perform updates. Firefox team chose to do it before launching the app. They could have done it after closing it. Both approaches have their pros and cons so it's not easy to criticize them either way.
I know this because my company pushed out a Group Policy update a while back that removed the ability of users to add/remove scheduled tasks and it broke Chrome updates across the company.
Also, this problem (not being able to patch a running app) is unique to Windows because of its terrible file locking implementation (that are the result of a bad decision made decades ago!). In Linux you'll get Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox updates along with everything else and it won't disrupt your use in the slightest. You can restart the app to apply those updates at your leisure!
If the file name was the last hard link to the file, the file itself is deleted as soon as no program has it open.
The situation is not very different from now with Chrome implementing unfinished proposals.
When new APIs are in development (in a standards body) by all means implement the incomplete/early version in your browser! Just put a warning somewhere for developers that changes will happen and that they should expect to have to update their code along with the standard as each iteration comes out.
Microsoft made a huuuuuuuge mistake by implementing an unfinished API and then refusing to make breaking changes later. Breaking changes are to be expected when you do stuff like this!
Back when MS did this they were still highly arrogant about their position in the browser market and probably still thought they could get away with their usual "embrace and extend" bullshit... Where they decide "the standard" regardless of what any standards body or the rest of the world/community thinks.
BTW: I've recently found this MSDN blog with explanations on some of their decisions (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/)
Coupled with an indiscriminate upgrade policy it is actually reasonable to deprecate features from chrome.
Most of the things you said I agree. But honestly the box model is one of these. The additive model standardized by W3C isn't really popular in the web designer crowd. I cut my teeth in an era where W3C and standard compliance were huge things, so I accepted the additive model without question. Nowadays though many designers opt for Microsoft's "broken" box model aka subtractive model through the box-sizing property.
- Edge is (kindof) available on Android. It uses the Chromium engine, but includes bookmark and password syncing with the desktop version.
- Firefox will (depending on platform support) update in the background and notify you to restart (Windows), or it will apply the update at app start (macOS).
Similar to how pacman (by default) removes all modules for the current running kernel, during an upgrade?
..which then breaks pretty much everything that relies on dynamic module loading, such as USB.
It's similar to how, when you install a kernel update, new devices are not recognized anymore because the loadable kernel modules on disk are for the new kernel version, but you're still running the old kernel version. (There is the workaround employed e.g. by Debian where old kernel modules are left on the disk until they're cleaned up manually, but that opens the "manual cleanup" can of worms.)
I think it should be possible under Linux. Firefox could pass the old libraries as file descriptors to its child process and and the child could dlopen those through /proc/self/fd/... . Or a more robust mechanism along these lines. But I wouldn't seriously suggest that Firefox should do something like this, restarting Firefox every once in a while is fine.
It's 2018. If you don't want to deal with updates like that, then stop using a shitty OS like windows.
I think everyone wants healthy competition in the web browser space, but I didn't want a closed-source browser that didn't run on Mac or Linux with a UI I can't agree with and an already disappointing track record. It only hurts worse that I humored Microsoft once when they forced my browser back to Edge only to discover that practically I still couldn't stand it.
Maybe we should feel bad here, but I don't. If I feel bad for anything it's for the good people at Microsoft that brought us this great piece of engineering delivered in such a disappointing fashion.
I don't use Edge (or Chrome) because I don't trust the companies that make them, and it's one small piece of my computing life I can withhold from them. So...there's nothing they could do to make Edge good enough for me, without fixing the lack of trust I have toward Microsoft, which I guess is a marketing problem, but also a behavior problem. (Surprisingly, though, I think I feel less animosity toward Microsoft than I do for Google these days. Which, is hard for me to believe about myself, given how long and how much I've hated Microsoft over the years.)
Disagree strongly. Reasons:
- Google has been extremely pushy with Chrome, including lying (IMO) about it on their front page, a place where no other ads have been shown ever (IIRC).
- Their own products often don't work in other browsers. Might be an honest mistake but personally I really don't buy the idea that Google cannot afford a QA team, so I'm going with the idea that they classify all this as "really useful bugs".
- People keep telling me that Chrome is better. I've tried to like Chrome (before I started shunning Google, I used to be a fanboy) and for me it could never replace Firefox for work (development, support and research). So I go with "better for some people".
- Today I'd argue that more than ever Chrome is a worse choice. It's not like they've stopped sending every address you type in back to their AI, and recently they've strayed so far from "Don't be evil" that even they realized it was becoming a joke. (Something something about animals on a farm and pigs painting the barn wall at night.)
That, and popping up that "works better in chrome!" thing on every one of their web properties for a few years.
Install Acrobat Reader? If you didn’t notice the checkbox, Chrome’s now your default browser.
Don't release a browser which cannot be made to adblock. I suspect that 90% of the vaguely techy world laughed at Edge the moment it's clear they'd have to accept autoplaying videos on webpages again. And like it or not those reactions filter through family and friends pretty effectively.
Now they're starting to push it on mobile too. Swiftkey just added a non-removable bing search bar that also prompts you to install Edge for Android.
One of the things that pushed me away from Edge. Being pushy is not the same as being persuasive.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/force-1080p-n...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/netflix-1080p/cank...
Tab Set-aside, the thing where you can suspend tabs and then bring them back later, instead of having a browser with dozens of open tabs all using up memory.
It integrates with OneNote and pen input, you click the "add notes" button and the open web page turns into a screenshot with a OneNote toolbar for highlighting and drawing on it, which can save or share the note.
It has that dropdown tab bar preview thing which FireFox has only recently sort-of-cloned in its alt-tab-with-previews feature.
It sends your browsing history to Microsoft by default.
for a tablet-style browser it is more tablet-y, large-buttons, touch-input focused than IE11 was, so even if that's not innovative or distinguishing it fits Microsoft's dreams for Win 10 a lot more than IE did.
I'd never heard of this, so I thought I'd give it a go: it's not on the right-click menu but on a separate icon on the top left, where the System menu should be so I'd never looked there. It turns out to be handicapped by not being able to save/restore individual tabs, you can only push all of them off and then restore ones you want.
Edge is rather hostile to tab-heavy users in other respects - it doesn't restore them after close, and it just makes them smaller and smaller without any kind of scrolling. So beyond about 20 tabs it becomes hard to use, and you'd never reach 200.
As for tab-heavy users, I find FF Quantum to be horrible in this respect, and I keep missing Chrome, which allows a ton of tabs and resizes them, albeit slightly unreadable after ~40-70 tabs, but at least I can see the icon, which is usually enough to find what I'm looking for. FF resizes until ~5 characters of the title are still visible, thereafter requiring "< >" arrows to scroll through tabs... unfortunately if you click one of those arrows too fast (twice in < 1 second), it will skip 10-20 tabs or jump to the completely opposite end(!), which can be frustrating to get back to the tab that is just barely hidden off-screen. I have seen this complaint in forums but still haven't found a reliable workaround other than editing some javascript relating to the default theme (I forget the details)? I have reverted back to tab/ctrl-tab to cycle through tabs.
I use Tree Style Tabs.
It's a pity firefox still doesn't support it properly by allowing the top tabs bar to be hidden without userChrome.css hacking. I just ignore the top ones for now.
So for me, the fact that I don't need an addon to do that would definitely have sent me to using Edge over Chrome or current Firefox, if I were on an OS that included it.
You knowblike Google do if you access any of there services not in chrome "download chrome here", "this site works best in chrome".
If they are going Chromium based, its only to ensure everyone uses their chromium browser
A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.
The other thing is testing if some CSS is acting up in a specific Browser/Browserversion/OS/Screensize/Phone combination; that is probably a job for QA.
https://www.browserling.com/browse/win/7/ie/11/https%3A%2F%2...
Standard VirtualBox is either bridged or NAT, never had a problem there.
> and then trying to update itself with another multi-gigabyte windows update
Now THAT one is a real problem. MS to this day didn't bother to release a Service Pack 2 for W7.
I appreciate that they have these, but it's a real annoying hoop to jump through, and I've long suspected the hope is you'll just have your company buy a cheap windows box for testing.
I can test the other browsers without doing this dance.
I'm a web developer with an Android smartphone and Ubuntu as my main OS, Windows as my secondary.
My primary means of testing on iOS/Safari is to be very careful about which features I target by checking caniuse.com and the JS compatibility list. And that doesn't protect you against iOS randomly doing something stupid like pretending to give you access to localStorage in private browsing mode but actually write everything to /dev/null instead.
Luckily Safari has one fourth the userbase so it's a little easier to ignore them.
Microsoft could change the game by open sourcing Edge, but I guess the key goal is getting all that user data, not having the best browser. (But, Google manages to get all the user data and have a mostly open source browser that people unbelievably have a lot of positive feelings about.)
Then I stopped and none of my customers ever complained. Either nobody uses IE/Edge or the web applications I work on are too simple and render well in every browser on every OS.
Actually I remember a few complaints: somebody using IE7 (?) on Windows XP when it was already EOL (my customer decided not to support it), a bug of Safari we investigated and worked around (can't remember the details), something not working on Chrome because I tested on Firefox (my bad, one such a bug in 10 years.)
Am I sorry about the death of Edge? Not really. Safari next, but being Apple what it is, this is not going to happen. I wish we have only browsers that work across operating systems.
With Chrome/Firefox, I can test in any version, as well as the development versions. And I don't have to jump through any hoops to do it.
As long as that's the case, support for Edge/IE is always going to be a second-class citizen for me. Safari, too, since that's only on Mac OS, and God help you if you need to debug web apps for iPads. There is no good way, and the only tool you have is a shotgun (dev tools don't always work with BrowserStack & mobile Safari, and we currently have an iPad, but no Mac to debug it with.)
Why invoke God, a Mac is a few hundred $s?
Honestly I think second class citizen is acceptable, even preferable. Chrome is always available if the site is just too compelling to ignore. But most of the web is user-hostile, and directs its barrels at Chrome.
The same can't be said about Windows Phones
If you look at the global marketshare, Android dominates iOS.
The point is that I can test on Windows without a Microsoft device or giving money to Microsoft to install Windows somewhere. I have no way to test anything on iOS or even Safari.
When I test my site in Safari in an iPhone and an iPad, I’m fairly sure it works on every other reasonably recent (think three years old or maybe even older) iPhone or iPad. Android? Well, there are so many browsers on so many different Android versions, am I supposed to own a fleet of devices, each with a fleet of browsers? (Plus the fact that I can’t really justify purchasing a flagship Android phone for testing, so I only have a crappy one and I hate every second with it; that’s more of a personal thing.) So in the end my attitude with testing on Android is don’t even bother.
Working across different OS and devices has pretty much been Google's go-to strategy, and it's worked pretty well for: Web Browser, Office Suite, and Cloud Storage (not naming them all). In retrospect, I would say an F-up by Microsoft and Apple was fighting interoperability. It worked for years in a PC world, but as the world became more mobile-centric that strategy faltered.
The timing was right to deliver a browser that "works everywhere" for most people, while IE and Safari wanted to maintain the walled garden experience in their own domains. For a lot of people (and also generalizing in the non-technical population), being able to stick with a single browser _feels_ like a win because of the consolidation. Someone who owns a Windows laptop and an iPhone could now have their bookmarks and account synced across devices with the (nearly) same browser.
My main gripe with Chrome is that there isn't mobile adblocking built in, and there is no mobile extension support. (This is where mobile Safari + Firefox Focus for adblocking actually outpaces Chrome). If Google can address this, then that would be a game changer for Chrome on iOS.
Microsoft knows IE is a sinking ship, and their best bet in the browser market is to take a page out of Google's playbook. I'm not sure if Apple actually cares or if they have too much of an exclusive (maybe a better word?) mindset to want to open Safari up to Windows and Android.
From a business perspective, there's a lot to be gained by being a leader in the browser market. Chrome is a great way to lead people into Gmail, Drive, Docs, etc. (more Google services). If Microsoft is going to make a play, now is the time to do it to attempt to pull users. They are already losing the cloud fight to AWS and the browser fight to Chrome (and the mobile OS fight to iOS and Android). If we start to see more cloud-based desktops, such as an improved Chrome OS, then Microsoft is in trouble since Windows is their last bastion left. I am all for hopping on the dissing-Microsoft train, but there's actually some respectable forethought here.
Now the pressure is on Google to keep innovating Chrome, as they would love to have people signing up for Google accounts and using Chrome prior to pushing out a better Chrome OS (which I think will be the cross-platform Android successor). If desktops head in that direction, then I would expect a sizable amount of people to migrate away from Windows to Chrome OS (if it works on desktop/tablet/mobile).
Then, I honestly wonder what Apple will do. They are clinging to the iPhone and iOS for dear life. It makes up a ton of their business. Apple nailed it with creating the top UIs on mobile and desktop (my biasedly-objective assessment), and having cross-device syncing with Messages, Calendar, Notes, iCloud, etc. (Also, having a UNIX-based desktop is niceee). Now I wonder if they will do anything with their device prices. They really have a lot of potential to acquire Windows converts, but Apple is so tied to hardware manufacturing revenue it's a pseudo-Catch-22. At ~$1k for a phone, ~$500-$1k for a tablet, and ~$1k-$2k for a laptop, that's inherently not something a mass-adoption level of people could comfortably afford. There's a question of how price sensitive consumers are, and what Apple stands to gain/lose by changing from more products -> more services (revenue from digital/ads/data/subscriptions). I don't know these answers, but this is something Apple will need to address in the near future.
What things are approaching: AWS runs the internet, Chrome is the door to the internet, and iPhone is the foundation that provides utility to reach the internet (while Android phones do the same for more people). It equal parts interesting and unnerving.
I doubt this can/will ever happen, considering Google's (Alphabet's) main revenue stream is still advertising, they would be chopping their own legs off by including adblocking.
In practice Chrome is not that cross platform. WebGL is an example: Chrome renders differently due to its use of ANGLE, has bad performance due to its GPU blacklist, etc. If you want to support Windows you have to test on Windows, period, regardless of browser.
More generally this take was good back when IE was dominant. Now it's just terrible: Edge is resisting the monoculture, not propagating it. Chrome is working hard to make the OS irrelevant by defeating platform conventions. Standard Mac UI idioms like Quit and Hide don't even work properly in the latest Chrome. Eventually the platforms will become an undifferentiated soup with GMail key equivalents and innovation in OSes will end; why even bother to have more than one OS if it's just to run Chrome?
Unless you have SR-IOV setup this doesn’t tell you if the website is slow because of lack of GPU acceleration or something you could fix.
Still at least you can see if it actually works, unlike Safari.
The broader point is that applications may perform or behave radically differently even under a Chrome monoculture. So you're still on the hook for platform-specific testing, if you actually care.
Can't expect a small rag-tag group like Microsoft to compete with a rich corporate behemoth like Mozilla, I guess :)
Exactly, which was 2 updates in 2017 and 2 updates in 2018; Microsoft isn't even attempting to play in the same ballpark as their competitors.. which is doubly frustrating every time Windows 10 tries to convince me that edge is better and that I should give it a try.
I actually like this kind of stability that Edge offers.
This is at least partly self-inflicted damage by Microsoft. Edge only works on Windows 10, which not only excludes all of the regular Win 7 and 8 desktops that haven't been push upgraded, but also kiosk-type devices and at least some VDI (which use Windows Server with a "Desktop Experience" that does not include Edge).
So Microsoft ended up with IE11, which is supported but frozen, Edge that doesn't even run on all Microsoft platforms, and no browser for Macs (because IE for Macs is long dead). So if you are trying to deliver or support a Web application, Microsoft aren't helping, hence "just download Chrome".
Firefox didn't support enterprise Windows deployment as well as they could have (though they now seem to picked that up), and can't match the market power of Google. I would like to see a grass-roots move back to Firefox, but it's going to be up-hill work.
You can get free virtual machines for testing, but it's still a slow, annoying and irritating experience to test in a Windows virtual machine.
That and the fact that IE has always had terrible developer tools.
I'm sorry, are you developing for your own personal pleasure or for a business? If it is the latter, keep your opinions to yourself and do what is in the best interest of your employer/clients.
Bing is terrible, but I don’t think Edge is.
So instead of giving users more control over the update process and the telemetry settings, without dirty tricks to reset these and so on, they decide to use another browser. Fine, but that doesn't solve their basic problem with the perception of Windows 10.
Right now, I'm just happy that I am able to put IE behind me at work. TBH, I like having some competition. I think the single bigest miss with Edge is the fact that people search for "Internet Explorer" and many wind up running that in windows out of habit, and those that know better prefer Chrome or Firefox.
Beyond that, the fact that it's shoved in your face at every other turn. Chrome syncs my settings cross platform. And I just haven't liked IE/Edge UI any time I've tried either. Despite issues I have with Chrome, it just works more like I want it to than the alternatives.
Frankly, I'm happy to see MS making a shift. A lot of tools have been made using Electron from MS at this point, with more in the works. So it makes sense that they'd make a shift. For that matter, I'd like to see better platform support with Node style APIs for application development in general, which may be the final target for these changes.
The net effect is that, stuff that Google tries to pull (like auto logging in accounts in Chrome based on your gmail) will still be negative for Google and still cause people to switch; because you have options. On the other hand, devs can expect code behavior to match more closely now even in MS Anaheim because its underlying rendering engine is now the same as Chrome. It's not monoculture of product choice, it's monoculture of underlying rendering engine, which seems like a good thing to me.
Yup, because it doesn't have the market share to justify it.
Plus, for many years, IE compatibility was an extremely unpleasant aspect of my job, and I'm certainly not alone there. Mainly because they didn't really care about improving it or keeping track with browser standards after "conquest accomplished". Some people get what they deserve.
An extremely recurrent issue with windows 10 updates (in particular, the big ones that happen every six months and behave like a complete OS reinstall) that manifests in so many different forms.
I've seen it do stuff like only breaking UWP apps while leaving everything else intact. I've seen it break UWP apps + the start menu. And then I've seen it do the login breaking thing. The thing those symptoms have in common is that they were always solved by simply making a new user profile and logging into it then transferring the user data into the new profile, proving that the root of all horrors comes from bugs in the user profile migration that windows does during updates.
I'm always horrified by the process not just because of the bugs but also because of how inane UWP is. Every new profile created will also get its amazing share of UWP crapware downloads, because of course it wouldn't make sense for software to be installed system wide, nah let's do that every time a profile is created and let's pull the microtransaction ladden mobile games while we're at it. Creating user profiles takes so much time on older acquaintance computers with spinning rust too.
They can change the tech as much as they want. They can hire armies of engineers and make the browser 1000% faster than Chrome... but if they reuse the stupid logo it will fail again, and again, and again until they give up and forget that logo ever existed.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-edge-hit-by-many-of-...
At least in Germany the perception of Chrome is "Google spyware". That is also the reason why in Germany (and I think in many other EU countries, too) Firefox has a much larger marketshare than in the USA. Since Windows 10 already has its spyware image in Germany, this just reinforces the impression (right or wrong) that Microsoft wants to become an even more spyware company.
P.S.: Of course I test my work in Edge.
But to be serious, they are just the better browsers. Maybe the trident engine or whatever it is called right now does perform very well and I see no issues. I just cannot understand how anyone opening the settings of Edge would not get an instant aneurysm. I can't believe that people think this to be the "the new way" of structuring settings. It is just horrible and unusable.
But changing just the engine probably means the horrible things about Edge are here to stay.
I am no web developer, but if I have an application on the web, I do test compatibility with Edge.
Win10 does have serious issues, the engine of Edge was one of the things not relevant to the topic at hand.
Sorry for going off-topic on rant here, but yesterday I had a 3 months old win10 workstation refuse to start the built-in calculator app. It worked fine the evening before, and no updates were installed in between...
This is apparantly a common problem for many users. I found lots of possible solutions, but of course, none of them worked for me. I took ownership of install dirs, redeployed the appx, every hack I could find...
Eventually I gave up and copied calc.exe from a win7 computer -- of course it doesn't run on win10, that would be too easy. So I installed a third-party calculator and apologized to the user on behalf of Microsoft...
> Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10
Nothing will change my perception of win10.
I also test in Edge, always looks good and then I close it.
Worse, you can’t even save from it. IIRC my first interaction with Edge was trying to grab one of my scripts or config files off GitHub. Opened the raw text file and couldn’t save it. Searched frantically for “how to save from Edge”, got joke answers like “you can print it”. What a disaster.
If Edge were multi-platform, then I'd consider it worth my time. But as Mac, Chrome OS, and Linux users continue to grow, I'm not going to waste my time making sure it works for a small amount of Windows users who barely even use the browser to begin with. Not to mention I'd need to dual-boot or run a VM just to test my work.
Encouraging the best-working alternative is the creation of monoculture?
C'mon
The thought of having to do anything remotely similar to that makes me shiver. Since MS made me go through that years ago, I simply will not go through that again. They did such a poor job with IE and it takes time for wounds to heal. Might sound a bit pathetic, but working life without having to develop for IE is much nicer. Chrome, Firefox and Safari generally behave in a similar manner. Yes, there are some inconsistencies, but nothing like IE. Especially the earlier versions (6!).
https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-...:
> The Spartan rendering engine (edgehtml.dll) is a new component and separate from Trident (mshtml.dll). The new engine began as a fork of Trident, but has since diverged rapidly over the past many months, similar to how several other browser engines have started as forks prior to diverging. The new rendering engine is also being built with a very different set of principles than Trident - for example: a focus on interoperability and the removal of document modes.
I remember the Second Browser War, and I find your account disingenuous at the very least. (And that's even before mentioning the bundling tactics)
I think your post here is more about your own PTSD from having to support IE6 than it was about my post. :S
my last interaction with edge was that it crashed twice on the path to downloading chrome - as in, clicking the "X" to quit it wouldn't work and I had to kill it in the process manager. This was on a pristine Windows 10 that was just installed.
Very often when I had to use it (or didn't notice that windows opened it for some reason) I also could not close any tab.
The problem with Edge is it's missing features other browsers have had for years, including IE. Microsoft just needs to add those features, not reinvent their browser again.
I'd have loved to if it'd work on my development environment (! Windows) They should be focusing on porting IE to other operating systems and not leaving the control of a core component of their offering to somebody else.
They've been doing some good stuff lately, and I'm sure this is another honest attempt towards doing good to developers, but they got this one completely backwards.
Chrome out-innovated Firefox for a lot of years and won the demand for a web browser (and now sell to it).
The new Firefox, is similar to the new ground breaking features of a Chrome when it had come out. A few years of recommending Firefox will have an effect.
Today I use Chrome, Chromium and Firefox. Firefox is my daily driver and it is no slower than Chroumium
Multi-Account Containers let you keep multiple sessions, to avoid that problem: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Besides, we have already settled on Google, Linux in Cloud, Windows on consumer and corporate computers. Its simple process of elimination. Market is deciding what should get eliminated. Anything that doesn't have a steady or abundant flow of resources behind it will die eventually. Of course ethics and morals don't stand chance when it is survival of the fittest but that has been the case for billions of years.
I already know the results of my tests. It won't work so I won't even bother testing. Because Edge doesn't support WebGL2.
On a related note, Microsoft gave the NSA complete backdoor access to Skype years ago[0], not to mention Outlook.com and who knows what else the NSA "needed" to build Prism and other tools, which remote contractors in Bahamas apparently have access to (thanks Snowden!).
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
I doubt Browser's engine has much to do with application UI, which was the main issue of edge.
Especially after Mariani left almost 2 years ago to join Facebook. I assume everything went to shit shortly before he left.
It doesn't matter how good Edge would be. The damage is done.
It's like the old adage: You cannot un-kick someone in the face.
Then there is the rapid adoption of mobile platforms, which have become mass-market while at the same time evolving very rapidly, new versions every year. The result is a dispersive medium, a combinatoric sea of browsers, iOS and Android versions, and a crazy variety of form factors.
Simply attempting to adhere to web standards is not sufficient.
It is sufficient. The trick is to be good at marketing. What I mean by that is to niche your product properly and not to care about the rest.
Gives you a much better overall structure for you business in every regard as well.
I can discuss this point further…
The other point here is the question of wether we should force browser vendors to comply to standards. Like we did back then on the desktop to end the browser wars.
Again, I would discuss this point further…