Hacker News Reader

Comment by alanfranzoni | Hacker News Reader

What I find a bit curious is that's a fully Chromium based browser, it's not simply based on the Blink rendering engine. So, it will be much closer (probably) to Chromium/Chrome than other blink-based browsers like Brave or Opera.

I'd really like to understand the rationale behind this choice. What they'd like to leverage from Chromium that Blink alone wouldn't have?

View on HN

Opera and Brave are both chromium-based, rather than just using the blink engine. The official webdriver plugin for opera [1], published by opera, refers to their browser as "chromium based". The brave browser [2] is open source and you can see it syncs from Chromium

[1] https://github.com/operasoftware/operachromiumdriver

[2] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

Opera's built on top of the Chromium content API (approximately Blink plus things like networking, some OS integration stuff, etc.), rather than a fork of all the UI code; the UI is a completely separate implementation and shares nothing (and this is very obvious if you look at early releases of Chopera, with it having much fewer features than Chromium of the same period).

> UI is a completely separate implementation and shares nothing

Not completely true, many "model" part is shared with Chromium code (given the liberal license) while "view" part can be different.

It's likely because of Electron. Microsoft already creates applications for Electron (which is Chromium) so maintaining that compatibility is likely a high priority.

I'm not aware of any third-party browsers using Blink that aren't actually using it via part of the Chromium stack, usually by including the content layer. Blink doesn't officially support direct embedding by anything other than the Chromium content layer.

It's hard to glean technical details from the post, but "We will move to a Chromium-compatible web platform for Microsoft Edge on the desktop" indicates to me that this will be Edge based on Blink, not the full Chromium shell renamed/rewritten to be Edge. Hard to tell though

Or it could be the other way around: a Chromium shell still calling EdgeHTML render processes?

It's really not clear in this blog post. What does "Chromium-compatible web platform" mean? Which part of Chromium is the "platform" in question? This blog post doesn't have enough answers.

Pointed out in other threads, the GitHub README has more details: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge

I still feel like I've got a ton of questions left unanswered, but the README helps.

As impressive as chakra is, V8 is the same in contrast to edgehtml to blink, they don't see the value of fragmenting support, and V8 really is getting very powerful, a blink+chakra browser would likely be more of a nightmare to developers

I disagree. Chakra is a lot more js spec compliant and close to v8 than edgehtml and blink.

They already had chakra working with nodejs.

Rendering engines are mammoth projects. I’ve contributed to Chakra, v8 and nodejs. They are somewhat manageable codebase. Blink codebase is insane.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com