Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge | Hacker News Reader

Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge

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I'm still sad they didn't partner with Firefox instead. It would suit the strategy of The New Microsoft very well to ensure competition in the browser market, and making an Firefox-based Edge plus a Firefox-based Electron clone would've been an amazing way to do that. They've shown competence in embracing, extending, and contributing back to OSS (eg they were instrumental in Nodejs getting to its amazing cross platform support).

Plus their browser would be faster.

I don't get it as well, what's the strategy behind that? They just reinforce Google's dominance so one of their main competitor just becomes stronger.

The license is probably a big reason. Firefox is GPL, so Microsoft wouldn't be able to add any proprietary components to it.

> Firefox source code is free software, with most of it being released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 2.0.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox, it's released under MPL. But sure it's more restrictive than most code in Chromium.

The most restrictive license in both Firefox and Chromium is LGPL. In Firefox, the LGPL bits are carefully walled off in one .so/.dylib/.dll. In Chromium, the most core KHTML bits are LGPL.

As for whether there's a lot of MPL or a lot of BSD code probably doesn't have much practical effect for compliance. In order to comply, it's easier to publish all the code than to try to do the minimum for each component on a per-license basis.

Chromium has been designed to be embedded in other applications. Gecko, as far as I've heard, is a clusterfuck to get working in anything but Firefox.

There's plenty of community forks of Firefox, if a few devs can maintain a fork on their free time, Microsoft has for sure the resources to deal with it.

I don’t think forks are the issue.

MSHTML and EdgeHTML are also used as embedded components in non-browser windows software. (E.g. you can write UWP applications powered by JavaScript and rendering UI using EdgeHTML). Gecko supposedly doesn’t work well for embedding in that context.

khtml was designed to be embedded. I don't know about webkit/chromium stuff

I'm not a programmer myself, but it's my understanding that chromium is pretty well suited to being embedded.

Just look at how successful chromium has been in this space, stuff like Chromium Embedded framework, Electron, the myriad of chromium based web browsers etc...

WebKit was designed to be embedded. Chromium not really despite the CEF and Qt efforts.

I'm sad too but the reality is Firefox is being slowly smothered by Chrome's ubiquity. Only a tiny minority of Web developers test on anything other than Chrome and mobile safari.

Firefox is my favourite browser, I use it every day but I often have to work around bugs in websites caused by this lack of testing. I think Microsoft don't have a choice if they want their browser to be popular it has to just work and the only way that is possible is basically for it to be Chrome.

That can change in a heartbeat. It has changed many times before.

Maybe it could if Google didn't own so much of the web and it's surrounding ecosystem. I'm not aware of any challenger to Chrome in the browser space.

It could change via legislation. The more Google owns, the more it’s opened to potential anti-trust drama.

So far only the EU is putting their foot down on that front, leading to mostly localized responses by the likes of Google.

We already went down that dead end road with Microsoft in the 1990s. What's different today?

> Only a tiny minority of Web developers test on anything other than Chrome and mobile safari

I work in a web dev shop and nearly everyone here uses Firefox as their main dev browser. We do run tests on other browsers as well but we mainly develop with Firefox and its tools.

Although part of the reason could be that we know most of our customers use it instead of Chrome. Don't ask me why, but if I had to venture I'd guess it's because Firefox is quite popular in my country for some reason.

Depends on the country. Firefox seems more popular in Africa, Europe and Asia, compared to Chrome.

While not 100% representative of reality, Google Trends gives that view of Chrome vs Firefox: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/GEO_MAP/1554809400?...

s/Chrome/IE/;s/Firefox/Navigator/, hello early 2000s again.

Not even Mozilla like Gecko though, hence their effort to replace it with Servo, and for the time-being to replace components of Gecko with stable Servo components in Firefox (the Quantum project).

They're not actively planning to replace Gecko with Servo, but rather to incorporate improvements from Servo into Gecko.

It's a strangler pattern.

They're going to replace gecko piece by piece until it's all servo.

I'm not sure why people are saying they like or don't like gecko. It's just old tech and they're replacing it from the ground up but doing it in a sustainable way.

In the end servo will be dropped and gecko will just be gecko newer version.

There are no concrete plans for that either.

Thats literally the point of using a strangler pattern.

Concrete plans lead to making hard to change decisions before you need to.

Well, then there's no way to tell whether they're using the strangler pattern, or simply not replacing Gecko with Servo at all. I find the former to be highly unlikely though, given the amount of work that would entail.

They might just have stayed with Trident then. The problem they're solving with this move is developers not testing in Edge, and Firefox is facing that problem more and more as well.

I had a chat with an MS guy who had some insight on this issue. There was some internal discussion about it, but there were 2 issues re: firefox which led them against it (and they're somewhat related).

Firstly, I'm paraphrasing here, but FF isn't as much a business as it is a religion (re: privacy). You can read a lot in to that, but I understood the gist of what they were getting at.

Secondly, somewhat relatedly, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google. MS building on FF could mean Google would reduce their search deal, meaning MS might end up being forced in to increasing their funding for FF to help keep it an entity capable of operating at its current size. Or, FF simply becomes smaller, and MS has tied themselves with a shrinking partner.

However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors, and ends up losing share, so why fight that?

You could argue Google is a religion for some people. Google Chrome is the popular browser. And doesn't #2 apply on Google Chrome as well?

> However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors [...]

Recently, yes. Because they screwed up their MSIE market dominance with embrace & extend. With which market dominance they put the WWW in a dark age of incompatibility. From which Mozilla and Firefox (and Konqueror, Safari, and Google Chrome) eventually flourished.

> You could argue Google is a religion for some people

It's also concurrently a massively profitable business.

> Secondly, somewhat relatedly, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google

I don't get that one because Chromium IS Google, it's not even a primary funding, there's just no separation between the two. They just handed the web business directly to their competitors, no matter how they try to spin it. At least with Firefox, MS could still have influenced the web, with Chromium, there's just no way, they are insuring that MS will have no influence whatsoever and Google is even closer to a monopoly.

The difference is that Google can't decrease the funding to Chromium to harm Microsoft "because Chromium IS Google".

With Chromium they have much stronger cards. It already starts- they are decoupling Chromium from Google services and leverage the core. They are adding features missing in Chromium. Many if these changes Google will have to consider also or look like they dont have their consumers interest at heart and lose share.

Certainly a brilliant move by Microsoft, since 0 money is made by the browser itself it really doesn't matter to them.

I think that's reading too much into it. They're ditching Edge/IE because they lost the browser wars. Switching to Firefox, who did worse than Edge/IE in that war doesn't make sense. You're just trading one loser for a worse loser.

It's not 'reading in to it' so much as relaying the gist of a conversation I had with someone fairly high up in the browser team who was privy to the decision making process. I specifically asked about FF and he gave some of the main internal back and forth arguments (though I've certainly distilled it down!)

How easy is it to embed the Firefox core though? I know several projects embedding Chromium, such as Steam for example. Haven't seen anyone doing the same with the Firefox core.

Making Gecko embeddable is admittedly not on Mozilla's priority list. Certainly not since they abandoned the idea of XUL.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Usage

Other web browsers using Gecko include Airfox, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox, HP Secure Web Browser, Oxygen and Sylera (for mobile).

Other products using Gecko include Nightingale, Instantbird and Google's picture-organization software Picasa (for Linux).

TenFourFox dev. It's not.

Mozilla used to support embedding, and this is what largely powered Camino and K-Meleon back in the day (embedding Gecko within a native widget toolkit), but disabled this in 4.0 due to maintenance concerns in the service of making it a brave new XULRunner world.

Virtually all of the remaining Firefox and Mozilla derivatives are still essentially XULRunner applications even though XULRunner itself has gone by the wayside. Also do note that many on the list someone else posted are actually forks. TenFourFox, for example, is a heavily modified Firefox 45; Waterfox, Pale Moon and the UXP project are based on Firefox 52. Even K-Meleon today is XUL-based.

The New Microsoft is just PR due to the fact they are not the top dog anymore. It's good for us, but it's important to remember that it can change at any moment, or sometimes, that because it's not really part of their core value but just the way they want to look like, they won't make the best decisions according to openness and standards.

I particularly enjoy that they've kept the ability to mute single tabs by clicking on the speaker icon on the tab which google recently removed from Chrome and not having to go into the flags settings and switch the "mute site" right-click option to "mute tab".

Feels like a snappier Chrome with better video playback.

I think this is a good step, but the cynic in me has to ask: How many services were removed, and how many replaced? It's good that things like Single Sign-on or Google Now aren't there (by default), but is it fair to assume they've just been replaced by Microsofts versions (i.e. whatever Live is called now and Cortana)?

Cortana hasn't made it in yet in any form. Bing is the default search engine, though.

The Single Sign-on was replaced with Microsoft Account (for home users) / Azure Active Directory Account (for enterprise users) single sign-on support.

I guess one person’s cynic is another person’s realist.

In what world would Microsoft not provide access to their own version of SSO (and therefore sync)?

I wonder if we'll get Edge for Linux then... Considering the shift MS products have gone (VS Code is great!) I would be happy to give it a try.

Out of curiosity, why use Edge over Firefox?

It doesn't use Gecko.

Sounds like a downside to me. Did you use Firefox recently? It's super fast.

Chrome is still faster. It's natural (and healthy) that users choose the fastest choice.

While I use Firefox daily on Ubuntu there are still some pain points that affect me directly

* Offscreen canvas. E.g. samples from here do not work for me https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/08/offscreen-...

* There are two problems with development:

  1. Firefox does not catch some exceptions. This problem is fixed in 67 version so I can wait (but I still need to wait).

  2. Firefox crashes for me randomly sometimes when I restart React dev server.

To be fair offscreen canvas is just a few months old and still experimental. But everything that can speed up the canvas is welcome!

It depends how you look at it. E.g. gfx.offscreencanvas.enabled landed in Firefox 4 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=709490

Offscreen canvas is disabled by default on Firefox because it's still experimental, you can enable it though. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/OffscreenCa...

I know that. Still two problems:

* Samples in the link I have given are still not working even if you enable gfx.offscreencanvas.enabled. Therefore I conclude that this is not working at all.

* As well this is good option for development but Firefox 44 was released in 2016. I think it is safe to assume that Firefox will never release this or at least will not release in acceptable time frame. Most probably we will see messages like this soon "We see you use Firefox. This feature is supported on Chrome, Chromium or Edge browsers. We recommend using one of them if you need this.".

Firefox 67 is in the current Developer channel, so you don't have to wait any longer if you don't want to.

Thank you :)

I use Firefox as well, but my main browser is Chrome. I just prefer the rendering on it, and the overall seamless integration with Google products which I use a lot. It's not uncommon for me to spin up 3 different browsers though to test various things from 3 separates 'angles'. Granted I might not get the seamless Google integration but at least it would be an alternative option. I like options.

I am not using a browser that's partnering with CloudFlare, given their huge support for extremist right-wing organisations and sites, and their history of supporting online criminals (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/spreading-the-ddos-disea...).

Conversely, I’d never use a hosting provider I assumed would deplatform me in response to the slightest outrage or corporate coercion. That’s why I’ve been avoiding GoDaddy ever since 2007: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2661752/myspace--godaddy-s...

Cloudfare has removed support of at least one right-wing website. And CF support orgs from all across the board.

I'd love to be able to run it on my CI server so I can run automated tests on it as well.

Apparently it's mostly a "when". https://twitter.com/kylealden/status/1115307632124780545

"our build system runs on Linux"

I wonder if that was a "thing" a few years ago, or Linux being used as a build step in windows development a new thing at Microsoft.

I feel bad for Opera, seems they stand to lose the most in this battle of the Chromium forks. They have a really good product that I use as my main driver after being fed up with Safari on macOS, but Microsoft is well poised to deliver a compelling experience across platforms (fingers crossed for Linux support at some point.)

They were bought up by some Chinese firm though and thus a lot of people lost trust in them. Not sure if anybody has done extensive research into what type of telemetry they gather. I would recommend FireFox but I never gave up hope for FireFox so you could consider me a fanboy. However FireFox Quantum has changed a lot of people over to it.

Firefox still has some UX deficiencies on macOS, I do use it on Windows though.

What really turned me off is how long it took them to implement video autoplay blocking. I sent them about four dozen requests, reports and outright pleas, and they didn't even add it to the roadmap until after I had given up hope. They were about two to three years late on that one.

Chromium's dev tools are still ahead by a mile as well, the Performance inspector has saved me days worth of debugging time.

I wondering if you aware the profiler tool that FF has https://profiler.firefox.com/

I somehow managed to miss that, thanks. It looks exactly like what I needed.

A lot of the Opera die-hards I know of moved on to Vivaldi which is trying to be the Opera folks remember. (It is also Chromium based, though.)

How many of these are enabled on Chromium (as opposed to Chrome) to begin with?

Hope they haven't got rid of the killer feature - the offline dinosaur game.

The dev build is pretty good. I could see myself using the new Edge if it had Windows-specific features or support for things that typically only work on Edge/IE.

Well time to lobby for MRU tab switching in their community forums, don't want another chromium situation with the next big browser.

Will they do a Chromium edge for mac ?

Wait, did MS drop the internet explorer branding ?

Yes, it will be later released.

The branding died with IE 11.

IE11 is the last version of IE and came out in 2013. Internet Explorer as a product and brand has been dead for quite a while.

Dead is not quite correct. IE has been put on a permanent feature freeze, but MS has committed to keep releasing security updates for IE11 during Windows 10's entire lifetime. It is also the only browser shipping with the current Server editions. So I would argue that immortal would be a more accurate term.

Undead, perhaps?

There's no dark mode in dev or canary.

Wow what are even some of those services?! "IOS Promotion Service"?! Realised where part of chrome's "memory hog" stereotype may come from...

Some of those services seem to be target specific: Everything starting with "Chrome OS" aren't part of any chrome build outside Chrome OS.

IOS Promotion Service might be https://codereview.chromium.org/2643723004/, so that's running on iOS and nowhere else. As for its value, that's for somebody else to decide (or everybody for themselves).

(Disclosure: working on Chrome OS firmware, which shares approximately no code at all with the components that end up in Chrome userland or any of its derivatives)

So when they say they removed these they mean source code wise not just some compiler flag? Thus making it a proper fork that will deviate over time, not some simple Chromium renamed project. So we may or may not see them pull in Chromium changesets depending on needs.

My biggest hope is that no matter how much Microsoft changes (Chakra instead of V8 would be very interesting to see) that it will remain fully and properly open source moving forward. I wanted to see the original Edge go this route but at least now they can.

Funny how these are now all browsers derived from work by Apple.

Webkit based on KHTML, component of KDE.

This is true as well, although my understanding is that they reworked all of that original code if I'm not mistaken, but nonetheless, a huge amount of credit belongs to both KDE and Apple regardless, which I find fascinating because: Google, Microsoft, and even Amazon (with their Chrome fork for their Fire tablets) benefited from it.

There is a lot of Mozilla brigading on these articles, so I think it's important to point out that they're in a very small minority. The vast majority of developers have already voted with their feet on this and the results are in: People don't want Firefox. We want Chrome.

Furthermore, practically nobody is wringing their hands over having a possible "mono-culture" and neither should they be. That's just another Mozilla party line. Every consulting firm I've worked for in the past decade has pretty much ignored Firefox and lived happily with that decision.

Interesting observation Wayne. The lack of a rebuttal to the facts presented here, in addition to this comment holding the prestigious bottom slot seems to underline your assertion in a spooky way.

I wonder how many people you need to over-represent a minority mind-share on other topics here...

Disabled "Ad blocking", turned on PlayReady DRM. Bring on the new webbrowsing experience.

Please read article properly - “disabled or replaced” services.

Currently I am using Edge chromium with ublock origin installed. So they didn’t block anything related to ads

Please don't spread fud. It says replaced or turned off.

Their DRM makes Netflix 4k. Chrome already has DRM.

Chrome has a built-in ad blocker that blocks the ads Google finds too disruptive for the users: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chromes-built-in-ad-blo...

I'm betting none of those would be an 'Ad by google' in which case this is very unethical (I'm pro adblocking but google is targeting competitors)

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