Microsoft Edge preview builds for macOS | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Edge preview builds for macOS

blogs.windows.com

Discussed a bit yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963291

It's just their Chromium shell, and not using their own rendering engine. (In case anyone was wondering if this was about EdgeHTML being ported.)

EdgeHTML is being killed on Windows as well. Chromium with Microsoft chrome is their new default browser.

EdgeHTML isn't getting ported. It's dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML

This was just a matter of time coming. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Linux port soon, if fact I'd be surprised not to.

The motivation seems to be to establish a solid consistent foundation layer for Microsoft to deliver cross platform Electron apps, like Teams and VS Code. EdgeHTML is no good for that, so it got ditched for Chromium.

I’m really interested to find out how they’re approaching privacy. If they take a strong stance, this might be a good alternative to chrome for those sites that support nothing else.

Windows itself is not a bastion of privacy.

I see your point, but I'll add that telemetry is focused on making sure stuff works, whereas selling ads based on your data is focused on making money from you.

Telemetry can be disabled on Enterprise: https://www.kapilarya.com/allow-or-prevent-telemetry-in-wind... but I agree it would be good for Microsoft to allow this to be disabled in Pro.

Motivation is irrelevant if I don't want to share any data as a user.

edit: Besides that, the telemetry service has caused multiple problems on different systems already. I just don't see any results from it compared to previous versions of windows.

Last I checked windows now has ads in it. Those ads may currently be totally untargeted, but that's a small comfort and I wouldn't count on it staying that way forever.

> a good alternative to chrome for those sites that support nothing else.

Edge is literally Chrome with Microsoft slapped on top of it.

No. They're working on a big privacy dashboard which blocks tracking cookies as well as other stuff: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/whats-next

Video: https://edgetipscdn.microsoft.com/insider-site/images/whatsn...

Still not buying it. I don't trust Microsoft at all with privacy especially with what they did to Windows 10.

Telemetry & spying is everywhere with everything that they build now even in their calculator[0][1].

I would stick to Ungoogled/Chromium, Safari or Firefox thanks.

[0] https://git.io/fj4Wl

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/148

Don't worry, it's all for your benefit. How else would they know what divisors to optimize first for?

Why not just use Brave then?

I personally ditched them due to them pushing BAT to heavily on those that don't want to participate and Sync being broken randomly.

Broken on Debian stable due to a sandbox issue not solved for many months.

Not willing to compromise security to run Brave which it seemed the workaround at the time did.

From a practical standpoint exactly what does Google collect from one’s browsing activity when they use Chrome? Not sure I’ve ever seen the technical analysis of what kinds of exposure users have.

I'm sure it's not limited to this but there are a lot of dark UI patterns in Chrome, e.g. any Google web login also logs you in to Chrome so Google "has permission" to record your browsing history and other browsing data.

I mean, I think Google gathers browsing history through other means (being embedded on a huge proportion of all webpages), but in the case of Chrome/Chromium, there is a separate password for the sync artifacts, I think at least in principle they are stored separately (especially since they now include passwords, social security numbers, etc.).

My sync password is different from my account password, I think it generally unlocks both at once if your sync password is the same as your account password, and you log in to your Google account.

I think this is also possible with the way that Microsoft has made "Edge" work with Microsoft accounts rather than Google accounts.

After the blowback from auto sign-in they added an option to disable that on both Chrome and ChromeOS.

Settings -> Advanced -> Allow Chrome Sign-in

If you want even more control use ADMX (enterprise policies) to permanently disable it. For example on Windows visit Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\ in either HKLM or HKCU and set SyncDisabled 1, EnableSyncConsent 0, BrowserSignin 0.

Full list/docs:

https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3

I deal with it by having a separate google profile (“user”) and barely using it outside of gmail and google docs. I just let it sync.

Nowadays your Chrome Sync/Backup is encrypted with your G password (and you can change it to a separate password if you wish), but a lot is still sent to Google (and IIRC by default): https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/9116376?hl=en ("Learn about other Google Services")

Why not Safari? It's fast, power-efficient, and native.

And a lot of stupidly optimized-for-chrome sites break in it. Plus extensibility is limited.

Maybe if everything you use is a web-app that makes sense, but I avoid that like the plague. Maybe in the wonderful world of Silicon Valley you can rely on that, but in the real world internet connectivity can be choppy, especially when inside trains and planes.

Most startup workplaces these days use a lot of SaaS apps. Not like you have a choice to avoid web apps.

Nowadays many applications, and especially most big-name business application suites (G Suite, Microsoft Office online, etc), are converting all their web applications to Progressive Web Apps, adding Service Workers and such so that they work just fine when you're offline and sync to backup document changes and such whenever you reconnect later. Give it a couple years and it won't be a problem anymore.

Are these publicly-available sites, or private web apps?

I can't remember seeing sites that break Safari, but I'm sure I'm just lucky.

In my case our SSO requires a FIDO U2F hardware token and Safari doesn't support FIDO U2F at all. Someone wrote a third party extension but I can't get that working.

> In my case our SSO requires a FIDO U2F hardware token and Safari doesn't support FIDO U2F at all. Someone wrote a third party extension but I can't get that working.

If there is one specific website that requires Google Chrome, you could use Google Chrome for that and use Mozilla Firefox for everything else?

It's our SSO, so its every internal tool we have. Gmail, Slack, Jira, Confluence, GitLab, etc.

Question about MS strategy: why would someone use this over Chromium or Firefox?

I assume they bet on people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff and corporate people who use macs but work with MS infrastructure (like Exchange and Sharepoint).

> people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff

Why would those people not use the chromium browser?

If Microsoft integrates all the functionality of the original Edge into Chromium Edge, then it will be a great browser to use on their Surface line of tablet computers. Without those features, it’s a non-Google Chrome with a large company backing its feature updates and contributing to the codebase’s continued improvement, along with syncing features and potential better integration with Windows. Firefox has a lot of good features still, but its small usage amount has made some development budgets ignore it or drop support of it on some sites I have visited.

Yeah. Our postal service's website has a small badge on every page. It translates to something like 'developed for and in Chrome'.

They must be bragging about it, or something.

It reminds me of all those 'best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600' from the beginning of the century.

It's much faster. Microsoft ripped out about 30 different Google-specific components, I think @ericlaw tweeted the list a little while ago.

Additionally Microsoft pay attention to developers. Chrome Devtools has has a Headers tab, with response headers and then request headers. There's a seperate tab called 'Response' which only contains the response body. I fed this back to Google (suggesting a request and response tab with headers and body) and (per Google) the response was from an engineer saying they personally liked it so therefore there was no reason to change it. Microsoft's feedback was they're actually looking at more logical layouts.

Well if it comes pre-installed with windows then that's one big reason. As a power user, I'd probably install another browser. But given that this is basically Chrome, there's not a lot of reason for an average user to switch.

This is Chromium. Maybe you mean Chrome. Someone would use this over Chrome if someone doesn’t want to be surveilled by Google. Of course now you’ll be surveilled by MS. It is better when your surveillance dossier is split among multiple entities.

Chromium _is_ Chrome minus the Google stuff IIRC

On Windows (and corporate environment) one reason is that it is easier to manage. Comes with Windows, updates via Windows update and Microsoft provides support (for those with agreements).

Chrome based Edge has nothing to do with Windows update

I don't quite see that I should be using Edge on Mac because Edge on Windows is easier to manage.

If you are using Windows and Mac, you might want the same browser on both.

Chrome based Edge will make Chrome based Chrome redundant in Windows, imo. I'd hazard a guess that Microsoft sees an opportunity in macOS to spread their influence. Workers using Windows with Edge want the same browser on their Mac.

Well speaking for me personally, Firefox runs terribly on my Macbook and it would be nice to have an alternative to Chrome.

this is not my experience, firefox quantum has been always faster and reliable than Chrome on MBP.

Do you have a newer MBP? I'm running Sierra on a 2013 MBP. I suspect part of my experience is due to Firefox relying more on the GPU than Chrome, and the GPU in this laptop sucks. I haven't experimented with turning off hardware acceleration in FF though.

yes, late 2017 MBP - ff Quantum does not use GPU on my MBP (when being on battery as well - pretty same performance) - that said, I dont use FF for any graphics heavy workloads - just normal stuff (jira, a few cloud consoles, gerrit etc)

I have similar problems, Firefox is noticeably slow.

Nothing wrong with Safari, in my experience.

Firefox runs rather poorly on Mac.

That's a terribly sweeping generalization, and is clearly not everyone's experience (see for example tshanmu's comment a few minutes before yours).

Have you filed a bug report with specifics of the poor behavior you experience, so that Mozilla engineers can potentially investigate the issue?

That's not been my experience.

I think you can ask yourself that question with a lot of Microsoft products these days, and we use (and like) a lot of them at my place if business.

I mean Microsoft has the upper hand compared to Google or AWS because they are better at GDPR and privacy shield stuff. Microsoft is also miles better in terms of enterprise support, but it’s those reasons and not their solutions that sell.

I think MS is making money elsewhere so they don't need browser market share but they do need to provide a browser.

How come that every single Microsoft application for MacOS requires an installation? It makes me suspicious that they're gunking things up unnecessarily.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19967190

Microsoft's added value right there.

Let's say Microsoft finds a way to gain a large market share with Edge. Couldn't they cause significant damage to Google if they enabled ad blocking by default? 90% of Google revenue is still ad revenue. Say they got 50% market share. If all of the sudden 50% of internet users started blocking ads, wouldn't that be a pretty bad thing for Google? Like put them out of business overnight kind of bad? While not hurting Microsoft at all?

I wonder if Google saw this vulnerability years ago and so they decided to build Chrome to protect themselves.

Finally, IE come back to Mac, since IE5 in Mac OS 9.

IE was the default browser in original Mac OS X as well. Safari didn't ship until 10.2 I think.

10.3 or 10.4, IIRC.

Looks like we're both half right: Safari shipped as the default on 10.3, but Safari 1.0 was made available for 10.2 as a separate download before that.

IE 5.2 was damn good.

A delightful browser on a delightful UI. Truly we are blessed.

I installed it an noticed they have their own App Store.

As someone who develops a web app with medical content, this can't come out soon enough. We'll finally be able to get our windows 7 loving clients off of IE11.

You can drop support for Windows 7 in January, same as Microsoft. Unfortunately, IE11 is a component of Windows 8.1, which will be supported until 2023.

Why do I get the feeling this will be used by developers to say they tested Edge when they really didn't?

A mix of cynicism and experience, I would say.

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