Microsoft’s Edge for Mac browser now available in preview
theverge.com
theverge.com
it can run Extensions from Microsoft and you can install additional extension stores (like google) with just a click. (of course not all extensions will work, like 1password+app didn't but 1password x, did)
It takes a lot to make me get off of Safari. About the only time I do is when I must have Flash for streaming services and then I use Chrome's integrated flash support.
I guess if MS adds all of the proprietary features of Edge on Windows so that macOS users can run locked in Windows web apps that might be a highly attractive reason but it seems they're not going to be doing that.
I'm wondering if they're using integrated Keychain support? I guess if it's build on Chromium perhaps not. Frankly for me that's a non starter.
ah sorry can't answer that, the first thing I did was checking out 1password. I mostly replace 1password as the password manager for my browsers.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security
that specifies this restriction. Maybe I couldn't find the reference.
I'm pretty sure the Chrome folks removed it because they didn't think the Keychain was secure (at least from the readings I've done).
All macOS apps have full access to the Security framework in macOS including Keychain and keychain element management.
What's gonna be the advantage of using Edge over Chrome from a developer standpoint?
Quick edit: extracting the contents of the installer, it looks like maybe it wants to install the Office auto updater at the same time...
There's a `send_event` binary in the package which appears to post data to https://self.events.data.microsoft.com/OneCollector/1.0/
For a web browser, it seems a bit gratuitous. I'm holding off for now.
For what reason have they purchased that domain instead of hosting it under microsoft.com ?
As a web developer, I only want to build to the security level my site needs, not the security needed for Microsoft logins.
Still the Microsoft we know and love.
Not that I'm saying your assertion is wrong, but the end result of this move by Microsoft means that Chrome could be used as nearly a drop-in replacement.
I figured Chrome-in-Edge-on-Windows was meant as a stopgap to fix a browser that was already included with the OS. With OSX, they could simply stop offering the browser and it would have the same net effect.
I am a bit biased after your comment. Microsoft Edge is going to have Blink as an underlying rendering engine, the same as in Chromium, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi etc. etc. You have pointed out that it might "help web developers", then could you explain me how there might be some difference (even negligible) in rendering between those browsers since they all run on the same technology? It's not Trident nor EdgeHTML anymore, there won't be any star-slash-backslash, -ms prefixes, filter() nor other hacks [0] that we had to use for IE. It does not look like Microsoft is going to fork Blink anytime soon, because it will be quite the same thing as they would stay and continue development on EdgeHTML engine.
I don't see any advantage of having Edge on macOS, FreeBSD, Linux, etc. for web developers. However, in case of end-users the cross-platform browser have more sense, especially when they got used to specific features and ecosystem. Lack of macOS browser might lead to churn or a problem with adoption to it.
I realize this is an edge-case (pun not intended) but just pointing it out.
[0]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
Microsoft has also shown a lot of interesting in being a synchronizer of a user's bookmarks/tabs/etc across devices (and services). The Microsoft Graph and especially the Timeline is a big cross-platform push for Microsoft. The Browser is the biggest "event surface" for the Timeline (both in displaying past activities and centering present ones).
They obviously don't control Google's Blink. They could fork it, but in that case they'd have to maintain a browser engine again. If Microsoft could/wanted to do that, they could have just stayed with the old IE Edge.
It doesn't matter if it's in Microsoft interests to fork Blink, as that would require maintaining their fork. Which they can't. If Microsoft were able to maintain a browser engine, they would not be switching to Blink in the first place.
That's a strawman. Microsoft already had a browser engine, no one's talking about writing one from scratch. They are unable to maintain one.
> For starters, even if they fork, they can still keep cherry-picking fixes and new features from Google's Blink.
Yes. All of them. Because otherwise they aren't compatible with the Google-controlled web anymore. That kind of "fork" is pointless.
Microsoft had to choose between adding their own enhancements and standards (the reason for having an engine into the first place) and playing catch up to Google. With Blink they can have both.
Apple decides to use KHTML instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows a very small team to focus on user experience, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Safari. Eventually Apple forks KHTML into WebKit.
Google decides to use WebKit instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows Google to focus on unique features like process isolation and the new V8 javascript engine, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Chrome. Eventually Google forks WebKit into Blink.
Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows Microsoft to focus on privacy-related features, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Edge Chrome. [What will happen next?]
The HTML spec is HUGE, and getting to a point where a new engine can successfully render all the quirks of HTML, CSS, and JS (and WebAssembly, and...) is a harder and harder task every year. Look how long its taking Firefox to get their Rust rewrite going. If you want to focus on end-user features, it makes no sense to start by arbitrarily making a new browser engine that's goal is to... successfully replicate the behavior of existing competing engines (since that's the real standard). If your competitor is open source, then just use that, and focus on what you want to provide.
It is my opinion that people have severely misinterpreted the power dynamic here. Every Windows machine will soon ship with a browser that, as is evident in this very thread, is "basically Chrome"... minus all the Google ID stuff. This is a nightmare for Google, what do they have to offer? "Download Chrome so we can track you!". That's the way its going to sound if Edge Chrome correctly puts its privacy features front and center. Meanwhile, they're getting support for CSS grid or whatever-js-feature for free from Google's hundreds of workers on Chrome.
Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of the browser engine they already had.
> This is a nightmare for Google, what do they have to offer? "Download Chrome so we can track you!".
The same things they offer now.
"Download Chrome because it's a better and faster browser!" It doesn't have to be true, people believe it anyway.
"Download Chrome because Edge doesn't support Youtube!" They totally didn't intentionally break Edge.
The stated goal of the EdgeHTML rewrite was to "be fully compatible with the WebKit layout engine used by Safari, Chrome and other browsers. Microsoft has stated that "any Edge–WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing."" [1] It seems the hardest way of doing this is black-boxing WebKit and making a parallel implementation.
What's going on here is that browser rendering is being commoditized. Just like OpenSSL, or Clang, it doesn't necessarily make sense to implement these on your own anymore, there's no clear business reason. There is little to be gained from having a better flex-box implementation, but lots to be lost by having a worse one than the dominant browser. Using Chrome's source disarms this problem.
> "Download Chrome because it's a better and faster browser!" It doesn't have to be true, people believe it anyway.
I mean, maybe... that's not what's won every previous iteration of the browser wars. Its been either through exploiting an existing monopoly (IE, Safari on iOS) or merit (FireFox). Sure, doesn't have to go that way now, but I don't know why we assume that people are going to be moved by "Chrome is faster!" advertising on something that most people prefer not to care about probably.
> "Download Chrome because Edge doesn't support Youtube!" They totally didn't intentionally break Edge.
They can do this regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. If anything, using Chrome makes it more blatant that they're purposely doing it since there's no plausible deniability that its a weird rendering bug in Edge's code. So this seems neither here nor there, if any Edge with any engine got popular then they could choose to go this route and then maybe we'd have an antitrust case on our hands. Unless the argument is "Microsoft should stop making browsers altogether", not sure what the point of this is (maybe that is the thing that is being proposed?).
Of course MS should keep making browsers. That gives them control over the UX, just not over the rendering engine.
My point is that assuming that Blink Edge means that there is now a variant of Blink not controlled by Google is optimistic.
> Its been either through exploiting an existing monopoly (IE, Safari on iOS) or merit (FireFox).
Yes, but which way is Chrome winning? I don't think it's merit, at least not solely.
They rewarded googles shitty behaviour by becoming dependent on them for a rendering engine, and any chance of forking is pointless because they’ll be back where they started: using something different than google, and thus ripe for shit code on google properties.
- Chrome ads on the google.com landing page
- Pop-overs when you log into gmail
- Inside the security alerts when you log in with a new device
And probably lots more than I haven't found. Is there any other product that they push so hard?
And the best way to fight this is with a browser that ships with the OS that takes you to Bing instead of Google.
Either way, this seems orthogonal to the question at hand. Google will push Chrome in all those places regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. Having complete parity with Chrome rendering seems at worst neutral, and at best competitive as Google now needs to rely entirely on marketing (or on features present exclusively in Chrome and not Chromium). I'm not saying Google doesn't have many cards left to play here, but this move is absolutely a net positive for Microsoft in this fight.
Nobody is rewriting Firefox into Rust. Servo is a new research engine not intended to replace Gecko, and some Servo components are being reused back in Gecko (Stylo and WebRender). These are fairly self-contained. The bulk of Gecko is still that C++ codebase and it's here to stay.
"Look how long Servo, one of the few examples of a mostly-from scratch browser engine that we can look to and thus compare (although technically some components of Servo are borrowed from Gecko so even it is not fully a from-scratch effort), is taking to write."
The point was to find any comparable effort to demonstrate what an undertaking this is. Servo was started 7 years ago by one of the few companies with engine expertise. Although, granted, I agree that perhaps framing it as a rewrite might lead you to believe more effort is being placed there than actually is (although I don't think it's totally unfair to look at it that way given their original embedding goals).
(And before someone replies with Kiwi, I personally am not comfortable using a (practically) closed source fork of mobile Chrome mantained by a single, unknown individual)
That said, unless they support Firefox style privacy containers, Edge is a no go for me.
I will still use Safari on iOS, but for macOS and Linux I am all in for Firefox unless another browser supports container privacy isolation.
dang it would be good to get the title updated.
But it is dog-slow compared to Brave. I cannot imagine switching to a browser that is anywhere near this sluggish.
How do you even market this? The whole point of IE11 is to ensure legacy IE compatible apps don't break. But then you can't advertise this with thought the huge caveat that it's a benefit on Edge Windows only.
Regardless, if you want to take the browser market seriously, you need to be cross-platform. Especially if all the hard work of cross-platformness has already been done for you (as is probably the case with Chrome).
You get weird Microsoft ID stuff instead.
Safari also suffers from slow adoption of new standards and a dearth of extensions compared to either Chrome or Firefox.
I uses Photos as a personal photos archive, and it works.
And Safari is just a web browser, and the best one at that IMHO. It's fast and sleek, with the smallest browser chrome of them all. And I'm curious which standards it (you must mean WebKit) has been slow to adopt. I doubt there's enough of them, compared to Chromium, to call the whole browser slow to adopt.
I use Safari even for Web development purposes, as I personally don't need anything else besides the stock Inspector/Console. Hence extensions don't matter to me as much.
For Photos the argument pertains because it doesn't tie in with any other photo storage services except their own. For instance macOS has my Google account information and the ability to use it for Mail, Contacts, Calendars and Notes but Photos won't use Google Photos to store web albums.
Safari is an app using WebKit which means if WebKit is slow to adopt than Safari which uses it is also. Some of the technologies I care about that Safari/WebKit has been slow to deploy include WebRTC, a variety of standards around progressive web apps such as service workers and the Push API and support of open audio and video codecs.