The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
It was bad.
Real bad.
But I'm actually fairly positive about MS getting into the chromium landscape and back into the game. Let's face it MS had lost all of its influence in the browser world before dropping IE and making this move. It is a Google/Chrome dominated world at the moment. But by adopting Chromium, MS can "catch up" on a technical level and also wield significant power inside the Chromium project itself. They have money and they have an experienced browser engine engineering team. They will be able to provide some balance to Google in this ecosystem. If push came to shove, forking chromium wouldn't be an idle threat from MS. They will have some power.
On a technical level it looks like a move towards a mono-culture, but politically it looks like a chance at more balance and diversity to me.
We had a customer push us to support Edge.
The dev team (3 dudes) just looked at eachother and laid down the "No, Firefox or Chrome...".
It's just so much pressure to dance around the "this one does this, that one doesn't" and generally we rarely run into any Firefox and Chrome issues. Edge, just not worth it for a small team.
I'm glad we probabbly can direct them to the new Edge now (after some testing).
IE11 is another story, though.
It's a pet peeve of mine that apps don't support Edge/Trident, Vivaldi, etc. It's easier to write cross-browser code than ever, but it seems like we're in the process of reverting back to the bad old days when IE6 was the only browser people supported, but it's Chrome now instead of IE.
People are literally doing User Agent Sniffing again, and even though these browsers carefully craft their UA string to pass naive checks, the sniffers are hacking around that and urging me to "Download Chrome" to use a website.
Notable Offenders: Google Hangouts, and banks. Not impressed, Google.
We treat Chrome/Safari/Edge/FF all as 1st class browsers and haven't had many problems (aside from Safari lacking U2F and exotic CSS props like motion-path).
mix-blend-mode is another thing that EdgeHTML doesn’t support that I was using for a bit, but I stopped using it because I kept finding critical bugs with it in Chromium, most notably https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398 which was impossible to work around, simply stopping rendering the page after 8192px!
1. The :focus-within CSS pseudo-class doesn't work
2. object-fit only works on images
3. These SVG loaders don't work: https://samherbert.net/svg-loaders/
I lived through the IE6 years, so I was never thrilled with any version of IE I had to support, but Edge was actually a good browser. Strange UI, solid engine.
...and that's one of the reasons everyone hates Edge. I'm a long-time IE user and that stupid dumbed-down UI is absolutely repulsive. If they'd just put the Chromium engine in the normal IE UI I bet they'd get far more users naturally using it.
I'll be glad if/when Edge (blink) is deployed with a windows update.. the sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned.
We've been using TypeScript for all scripts longer than ~20 lines for years - so we got async functions for free (it compiles async/await TypeScript functions to IE11-compatible ES5 just fine).
Not to mention all the issues you'll have if you try to use CSS Flex or Grid.
Support IE11 only if you absolutely must, is my advice, and do that with differential serving: https://philipwalton.com/articles/deploying-es2015-code-in-p...
https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/doing-differential-serv...
I'd rather not support a dead browser, that's been dead for years now, that has clear replacements and alternatives. Not to mention security concerns above and beyond development pain..
[1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=async-functions
[2] https://caniuse.com/#feat=fetchThe beauty of the approach is that the big pollyfill payloads are only borne by the users who choose (or likely are forced by employers) to use those browser versions.
Why though?
I would be surprised if they still want to be a customer.
I just can't get behind this lazy "small team" excuse; it's really unnecessary hubris.
I worked on a "small team" of 1 (just myself - I was the only dev) for several years on an enterprise webapp. The kind that does complicated stuff - not a simple CRUD app. [Sidenote: I would have killed for a team of three!!] Yet I supported Edge since the day it came out and never dropped support of IE. In fact, I even supported old versions of IE (7 and up) until the day Microsoft EOLed older version of IE (that was January 12th, 2016, FWIW). It honestly isn't very hard these days. Annoying sometimes, yes, but not difficult.
I suspect the agility of any team is heavily influenced by not just numbers, but tech debt, and other choices.
All future work we do is compatible with Edge, it's not like NOTHING works with Edge, but to say "We support Edge"... customers expect that to mean everything.
Fortunately I don't think we'll have to have that conversation anymore.
Still not an excuse to alienate your customers who want to use a browser that comes with their OS. Enterprise customers never want to go through the hassle of installing external software company wide just to use your services.
Lots of customers still on Windows 7... that's bad, but we can't change that.
I also called for it to happen over 5.5 years ago:
I get that they wanted to use the same browser as Electron, now that they own it...it just sucks.
> WebKit and Firefox are good starting points, and both could use the extra help maintaining their open-source core.
If Firefox needs "help" from a big boy like Microsoft, it is probably the worse starting point. If WebKit is a good starting point, why is Blink worse? Chromium is more than Blink, and means that the moment Microsoft started with Chromium, they were already close to done. Whereas with WebKit, they would still have to build and test a shell.
It doesn't suck.
Is MS foolish enough to believe they can have influence on the evolution of the web through github.com/google/chromium pull requests?
Alternatively, has MS has given up? Perhaps they are content to rebrand Chrome and collect the bing.com seignorage from new Windows installs.
Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.
I mean, "influencing the web" or otherwise, they accept heaps and heaps of patches that aren't about their core business. The Chromium project is really healthy.
> Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.
They can fork, but they probably won't need to. Even if they wanted to maintain an entirely separate shell, it is basically trivial to link such a thing in to Chromium.
It's not like Gecko is an inherently inferior engine by any stretch, and it would significantly bolster their marketshare so that developers actually have to test against it.
For most users, the web browser is one of the biggest attack surfaces and having arguably the best security team behind the browser engine is a good thing.
Yes some of that might be thanks to PZ, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it?
Choosing Mozilla’s platform would have been better for code diversity, which has its own distinct security benefits.
Like if you have 3 different crypto imlpementations, you have times more teams that have to get a thing right. It seems way easier to try and get it right just once.
Perhaps there's a holistic idea of "if one browser has an issue, at least it doesn't affect 100% of them" but given what CVEs look like in reality (often variations of the same attack across multiple programs) it seems like the cost/benefit would not be in our favor
Not everyone gets hit with every attack. Biological systems work this way too.
This happened with Cisco routers back in the day, Juniper had to add a flag to make a routing protocol compatible with Cisco because Cisco implemented it wrong but had so much dominance that Juniper had no choice if they wanted to get in the game.
Without serious competition you eventually get IE6.
Is this really true? someone posted somewhere(can't find it) where it shows Firefox has a worst security record compared to Chrome.
Also, in the past, Firefox was left out from hacking browser competitions because it was to easy to hack.
Outside of the security teams, I think it's actually that Chromium is much better fuzzed and scrutinized. They just have so many more resources, including those for security.
Most of what I've read relates to Microsoft products - and I'm not saying that Microsoft is better/worse than the rest when it comes to security.
The web is the safest, most battle-tested sandbox environment to run apps in. It’s so safe that you click random links all day long, running 1000s of apps and never have to worry.
I’ll take web apps over native apps from a security perspective, thank you.
There are better ways to sandbox applications in 2020.
This is true despite the fact that on iOS, sideloading custom apps without a developer account is extraordinarily inconvenient.
What's sad is that Windows 98 fully supported desktop-based HTML+JS apps ("HTA Applications"), with access to native resources (using COM via `new ActiveXObject`) and it works with IE11 still - Microsoft just never pitched it as a serious development platform for some reason. Just imagine what today's world would be like if Microsoft did pitch HTA as a successor to VB6 (instead of the quickly-abandoned WinForms platform, now barely on life-support) (I'm mostly thinking we wouldn't be stuck with excessive memory consumption in Slack, and these apps would be able to use things like native context-menus and accessibility features)
That would have been a security nightmare.
Sadly, that doesn't make it wrong per se, just deeply discouraging. It makes me think we're past the point of no return.
Edge still has (had?) so many rendering issues on sites we make. One thing I find really impressive about Firefox, despite the completely different engine I _very_ rarely find FF-specific bugs.
Many (all?) Oslo postcodes start with 0, and their site truncates the 0 when you try to enter your postcode. Their stated solution was to use Chrome, so they don't get any of my business.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/sec-forms.html#number-state-typ...
> User agents must not allow the user to set the value to a non-empty string that is not a valid floating-point number. If the user agent provides a user interface for selecting a number, then the value must be set to the best representation of the number representing the user’s selection as a floating-point number.
If Chrome is your only target, the standard ceases to mean anything. The real standard is just whatever Chrome does.
I think it will be around anyway btw, although I'm perhaps less sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX3ZABCdC38
Friends from SGI recruited me (second attempt) in March 1995, I joined in early April but in the server group. I thought a lot -- but worked too little due to server commitments -- during the month of April, about "the scripting language" which was suggested to be Scheme when I was being recruited, but which by the time I joined could not be Scheme, due to the impending Java deal between Netscape and Sun.
Java meant either no scripting language, or a kid-brother language, which meant C-like syntax, primitive vs. object types as in Java, and other unfortunate consequences.
When I transferred to the client group in early May, I had to produce a demo very quickly. I chose first class functions and (barefly there at first) prototypes as the building blocks. The rest is history.
The Belgium Post built a whole web app+service architecture on LiveConnect.
Think of LiveConnect as "Active Scripting" on MS's platform, which enabled Java components to be developed and glued together by JS.
I finally got transferred to the client team one whole month later, in early May. Then I had ten days to demo-day.
Why do you feel compelled to make up a story? Because it sounds nicer to you to denigrate my work, it seems.
So, thank you very much for laying down the foundation for a whole generation of new programmers!
Because randos on the internet (especially business types) love to make stuff up in the name of puffery and deifying. Legends are rarely true.
Thank you for clarifying.
In 2001, Apple could have picked Gecko but forked KHTML instead to create WebKit/Safari because it was smaller and seemed easier to work with.
It doesn’t change the fact that back in the day, high profile companies picked WebKit—Google, Blackberry, Nokia—for their browsers.
In 2013, Google forked WebKit to make Blink and nowadays, Microsoft, Opera, Brave and others have picked Blink/Chromium for their new browsers.
Even as Mozilla is making great strides with updating its engine (was Gecko; now Quantum), nobody else is going on that trip with them.
"I can code in X so I should be able to jump in to any other language and get to speed instantly." is obviously wrong.
You can nest functions nicely and work with closures when it makes sense, if you like that sort of thing.
The async programming model is also really nice to work with.
You also don't need to create classes for every noun, verb, and adjective in your system either - when all you need is a function, you just write a function, not some weird object to hold it.
You also don't have to write a f after all of your decimal values to tell the silly compiler that you mean for 0.25 to be a float. (this one truly does not matter, but there are a lot of little things like this that add up)
I know you can do a lot of that in C#, but its just so effortless in javascript. You just need to be more disciplined about how you code it
So we switched to chromium/Blink in late 2015. Much later, when I visited Apple in early 2017, a devrel friend asked why we couldn't use WebKit. A WebKit founder in the meeting agreed with me that there was no way for Brave to do so on Windows w/o running out of capital. DRM again was an issue too, without WideVine. Don’t blame startup for not carrying a full engine — that needs deep pockets. While MS does have deep enough pockets, it is starting by using chromium/Blink and slow-forking.
The reason you gave here for Brave not choosing Gecko (or WebKit) is interesting – but given Microsoft's deep pockets and tech know-how those reasons don't apply to them.
I think this is a strategic blunder on Microsoft's part and I say this as a Linux user. :)
Microsoft has now warmly embraced Linux – and I think they could have chosen this time to warmly embrace Mozilla. Oh well.
I hear what you're saying – but! – a tech giant has to play the long game. The Web is an open (for now) platform and Microsoft, like Apple, like Google, need to have their own web client/server implementation. Makes no sense to be beholden to Google imho.
I'm stunned at how little desktop browser share Edge has (4.6%): https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... – however, changing browser engine is not going to change that, is it? I suppose, if Google and Microsoft end up equally and democratically sharing Chromium development then all's well.
Given the recent layoffs at Mozilla it's a pity (in hindsight – for the benefit of the open web) Microsoft didn't back them :(
Anyhow, thanks for the response.
The usual answer to that complaint is that Gecko is harder to embed. MDN pages on the subject even mention it’s deprecated and that the documentation is obsolete.
[1]: https://servo.org/
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> I don't see why it's Microsofts responsibility to do whats worse for their products, users and business just to bring some sort of benefit to Mozilla which has awfully mismanaged over the past 10 years or so. The browser monoculture didn't happen over night it happened thanks to years of neglect from the other browser engines. I don't like this situation and don't even use Chrome myself but this is the reality of the web today.
I would wholeheartedly agree with you if Firefox Quantum wasn't so damn good.
I didn't use Firefox for years except for occasionally testing sites. Quantum blew me away in terms of rendering speed; it reminded me of Chrome in the very early days. I know that benchmarks say Chrome is still ever-so-slightly faster, and I can't explain that, but Quantum legitimately feels quicker when I use it. At worst, it's certainly not a downgrade from Chrome.
I do wish Firefox's interface was cleaner—the pocket integration and similar stuff just feels like icky clutter to me—but I've been able to mostly clean it up via about:config tweaks, and none of that's relevant to the rendering engine.
That Firefox managed to do all of this with much more limited resources than Chrome, and despite how many sites nowadays are built to target Chrome specifically... it's seriously impressive. I'd love to see what the engine could do with Microsoft's additional resources behind it.
Can almost guarantee this will happen in 2-5 years.
Given Microsoft's history, I don't see Microsoft and Google playing nice for too long.
Will it have bugs that make the web unusable? Probably not. What makes it bad? The world's biggest ad company is in charge of it, so privacy is at risk.
Apparently it was not so bad that we needed a multitude of JS to JS compilation stages and instead could just, you know, execute the same JS in the browser that we actually wrote.
Also, MS invented DHTML and AJAX single handedly, against backlash from "pure" web developers.
Starting mid-2006, I spent almost a year building a full-stack internal SPA for tracking manual and checklist testing at my company. I made the (then brave) decision to target Firefox instead of IE6, which everyone was using at the time - since FF was more standards-compliant.
It was a very good decision in retrospect. But I had to spend 4-5 weeks just getting the front-end to work in IE6. So many HTML/CSS hacks, trying to wrangle the layout engine to do my bidding. Check out the Wikipedia article on the Acid2 test, and the image at the bottom of IE6's rendering, to get an idea how far IE6's layout was from standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2
I am a web developer too, and for me, the biggest annoyance is feature inconsistency between browsers. Only yesterday, I was cursing under my breath, because webkit-based browsers allow scrollbar styling, but firefox doesn't. In our org, we have embraced CSS grid, but by doing so, made a conscious decision to finally ignore IE11 (rather than to use @supports and write fallback CSS for browsers that are left behind). Even considering the wildly improbable scenario that browser monopoly would lead to feature stagnation - at least you will have a single target with a known set of features to develop against. How can this be worse than what we have now?
Just focussing on the browser itself:
* Today's developers enjoy a large and rich platform of (relatively) bug free functionality and APIs on which to build. The hellscape had very limited APIs and were riddled with bugs. For a long time IE and the other browsers didn't even agree on how to compute the width/height of an element w.r.t. padding and borders. (CSS box-models did not match!). We spent a lot of time just working around bugs and keeping up to date on the latest work-arounds for all the problems.
* Today's browsers have high performance JS JITs with very few user visible bugs. The hellscape had slow buggy JS implementations. I remember having to unregister event handlers on page unload otherwise the browser would leak memory.
* Today's browsers have excellent debugging tools built in. In the hellscape, if you had a trailing comma in a JS list on IE, it would give an error message (pop up) with either no file and line number or a bogus one. Yes, that bad.
Even when supporting just one browser, development was often a miserable experience. MS had won the browser war and was trying to kill the idea of apps on the web by neglect. It wasn't until Firefox got going that things improved.
I completely agree, but the points that you then make simply show how modern browsers are vastly better than the old ones. I love developing for a modern browser, such as Chrome. I just fail to see how the claim that having competing browser engines that do not have complete feature parity can be in any way considered desirable by web developers. I can understand this argument from end users' perspective (and even then not quite, because remember the days when sites would say that they were "best viewed in Netscape Navigator", or when you could watch Apple keynote presentation on Apple's site only in Safari?), but not from web developer's perspective. Wouldn't a single healthily evolving browser engine be better from web developer's point of view than multiple engines, each with its quirks?
The primary reason why the hellscape was bad, and remained bad for so long, was because we had a single "winner" of the browser wars. Microsoft won and they immediately tried to strangle the web for years. There were no alternative browsers for a long time to provide some kind of competition which might improve the matter. Sure, we could just test on IE and only support IE, but it was still an awful browser and MS wanted it that way.
The point is that the bad "technical" level situation was sustained by the browser political mono-culture. I'm somewhat positive now about the current situation with MS getting more involved because it will add more diversity to our current political browser situation. This should translate into better results for everyone on all levels, technical, user, privacy (I hope), etc.
So maybe from a pure browser engine point of view there is the same or less diversity, but this situation is very different from the early 2000s one.
More importantly, during extension submissions and reviews I did not feel abused as a developer, something which I cannot say about the Chrome Web Store [2][3].
So I am happy that Microsoft has not only renewed their effort in this space, but they're also offering a decent alternative for developers who would rather not deal with Google.
[1] https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/category/Edge-Ext...
Microsoft: developers, developers, developers, developers!
Google: advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers!
* not all operations, but enough for it to become a cliche
Also, happy to report that 1password has an extension for Edge as well - that's awesome.
Only thing I'm missing is a dark mode extension. I don't trust the somewhat sketchy ones that I see so far on the store.
I chose focused. It's a nice option.
Too bad it doesn't respect your search engine preferences, because any searches you do with it seem to always go to Bing, regardless of what address-bar search engine you have selected.
I've had some issues during Firefox extension reviews too, and Mozilla employees have usually changed their opinion after feedback. When they've made a mistake, sometimes they said they were sorry, which was a decent thing to do and it felt right. They talked and acted like human beings whom are capable of compassion and reasoning.
Google has never been about the developer experience, and is quite hostile to developers even when they need them. (See, e.g., Stadia.)
The only reason people went there usually was for the money and once they got enough to follow their passion, they left because none of them were passionate about Microsoft.
Microsoft's C++ IDE and debugger are the gold standard for productivity and ease of use - everyone who writes native applications for Windows uses Visual Studio. You can try it out for free and the price per developer is very reasonable if you want to publish a paid product.
Google's C++ IDE and debugger are nonexistent. Whatever they've built is kept inside the Googleplex never to see the light of day. From time to time we see the occasional free software reimplementation of some facet of the beast (e.g. Kythe) but I haven't seen something catch on.
In fact, the biggest contributors to developer productivity on Linux have been Microsoft (with Visual Studio Code and the lsp protocol) and Apple (investing in clang led to the development of advanced C++ indexers which were impossible to write using gcc due to Stallman making a conscious decision to not allow it)
Of course there is a good reason for this - Microsoft and Apple make platforms. The easier they make software development, the more developers they get, which leads to more software being written, which leads to more users, which results in profit. Google on the other hand doesn't win by making development easy for others. They're themselves a third party and other developers are competition rather than partners. For Microsoft, the existence of developers outside the company using Microsoft's development tools to create software for Microsoft's platform is a win. For Google, the best case scenario is there being no developers outside Google.
The navigation is nearly unusable. Don't focus the project navigation on a tree browser if you're not going to integrate it into the rest of the navigation workflow.
NuGet regularly fails silently to restore packages.
It uses a virtual filesystem that usually maps 1:1 to the actual project folder.. except files created outside of VS are completely invisible to it, unless manually added to the project.
The project/solution files are very verbose and aren't designed to be edited by humans.
The migration path from .NET Framework to .NET Core seems to be "create a new project, copy the files over manually, and copy over your old settings one by one".
Some of these have been fixed for new projects, but there is no option to migrate to the new structure. Except, again, starting over with a new one.
You are talking about the biggest architecture change of. Net in 30 years ( going cross platform) and they are still going to support VB 6, WPF,..
Visual studio is actually a very robust IDE. The issue you are mentioning is .net framework project files and if you copy files within or to Visual Studio it will be added. .net framework only wants to add files you want to deploy ( not perfect, but okay).
For migrating to. Net standard 2.0, remove assemblyinfo.cs and change the. Csproj file. You should manually add the Nugget packages again or change it to the new structure. The biggest issue is entity framework though, in a lot of projects. From. Net standard to . Net core is a lot easier.
Seems pretty reasonable to me, updating other things ( eg. Android) have caused more issues than this.
Ps. Navigating is mostly f12 of control+f12
The project/solution files are bog standard xml, and well documented, but in general you shouldn't need to touch them.
The migration from framework to core 3.0 is now very simple thanks to xaml support, but it used to be a huge hassle. You can literally just edit the tags in your csproj/fsproj/etc to enable different target frameworks, or you can use the ui [0], and then you'll need to do a nuget reinstall. One command [1].
As for running into bugs, they built bug/feature requests into the visual studio 2019 ide, or you can access it via the website [2]. They are usually very responsive, typically something within a couple of days.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57334018/visual-studio-2...
[1] open package manager console, type 'update-package -reinstall'.
Project files are "bog standard" XML (except for all the weird magic, like variable resolution and conditionals), but solution files are some unholy VB-like abomination.
But regardless, that doesn't help much when the schema is clearly not designed for human editing (incredibly verbose, UUIDs everywhere for references, etc).
> The migration from framework to core 3.0 is now very simple thanks to xaml support, but it used to be a huge hassle.
No idea how a GUI description language is supposed to help you here.
> You can literally just edit the tags in your csproj/fsproj/etc to enable different target frameworks
Didn't work for me.
> or you can use the ui [0], and then you'll need to do a nuget reinstall. One command [1].
Keep in mind that that command is free to update dependencies as it feels like.
At the very least you could have given an example of an IDE that you consider is better. You were just talking out of your arse.
If you're going to pick a mode of navigation then at least commit to it. It's subjective whether or not any particular choice is good. The quality of the implementation, not so much.
> 2. Downright bullshit. You are starting to whine.
Sorry for wanting a package manager to... manage packages, I guess.
Or maybe it's configured wrong? I guess it's too much to expect two Microsoft tools to work well together..
> 3. Subjective but far from something that makes the IDE a "piece of crap"
Do you never edit your project files from outside the IDE?
> 4. You are starying to sound like you are in the wrong industry.
Compare a typical SBT build definition[0] or Cargo.toml[1] to a typical VS solution[2] or project[3]. Which would you feel the most confident about when modifying by hand?
(Hint: For me, it's definitely not the one that is full of autogenerated cartesian products.)
> 5. No. Change the .csproj and drop the AssemblyInfo.cs usually work for something that can actually be migrated.
So why couldn't Microsoft include a tool for that migration? That seems like table stakes for such a migration project. We're not exactly talking about 2to3[4] or rustfix[5] here...
> If you expect any project that targeted Windows to just migrate to cross platform using a NNF you are an idiot.
Amazing how Microsoft are completely unable to even get close to what the Wine and Mono people did years ago.
> At the very least you could have given an example of an IDE that you consider is better. You were just talking out of your arse.
Throw a dart and you'll find something. If you want the out-of-the-box live-in-your-IDE experience then JetBrains' stuff is miles better than VS. Personally I moved on to Spacemacs[6] after a few years each of VS and IntelliJ.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/teozkr/what-should-i-sing/blob/master/bui...
[1]: https://gitlab.com/teozkr/scankiosk/blob/master/scankiosk-ui...
[2]: https://github.com/getsentry/raven-csharp/blob/develop/src/S...
[3]: https://github.com/getsentry/raven-csharp/blob/develop/src/a...
[4]: https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/2to3.html
I suspect that would change if Edge gained significant market share. I think what happens is that as these platforms grow, they get targetted by spammers, malware, and scammers and consequently their processes harden and tolerances go down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
https://superanimo.s3.amazonaws.com/porting-firefox-extensio...
The "old" Edge store was utterly mismanaged [0]. I'm glad they've improved if this one is different, but they definitely left a sour taste in my mouth.
[0] I required Native App Messaging and needed to include a 32 bit binary to read an SQLite database. The extension was rejected and was only told to wait while they worked on this feature (which was already in a tutorial I was following). Nobody ever contacted me back for over a year until the news broke that they were moving to Chromium.
In my opinion, this does more to keep Google in check than had they gone with Firefox's engine, or stuck with their own. (I know not everyone agrees)
People use Chrome because they consider it a better overall experience than other alternatives, and I happen to agree. (again, I get that not everyone here agrees with that) For whatever reason, Google has the resources and talent to make a browser that is preferred to the alternatives, by most regular users.
Chromium based Edge allows users to get the best of Chrome without the worst of Google. Google knows that if they get too aggressive with decisions that are biased toward Google's bottom line (such as how they handle ad blocking and various privacy features), Microsoft can easily push back by changing these decisions in Edge. This is a very good thing.
True, there is also pressure on Google from Firefox (people can abandon Chrome for Firefox if Google is too aggressive), and there is also Brave (and others) if you want the benefits of Chrome/Chromium without the worst stuff. But moving to Firefox is simply too big a move for most users and many don't like the downsides [1]. And Brave has their own revenue model to protect, and they don't have the deep pockets Microsoft has to resist the temptation to make decisions that benefit their bottom line in the short term.
[1] In my case, I do a lot with MIDI in the browser, i.e. connecting a digital piano and using it within web sites that support it. Firefox doesn't support this yet, after years and years of talking about it. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58 There are a ton of other things, but that one is a deal breaker for me. Works beautifully in the new Edge.
This would put more pressure on Google than privacy fines from EU. Competition works best. I'm not an MS fan (using Linux at home, with vscode), but I'll happily switch.
I wondered why MS didn't do this or partnered with Ubuntu instead of closing their Windows Phone business, fully giving up the mobile market.
Right... I mean, a certain very strategic kind of competition. Co-opetition? Direct competition would be simply offering a competing fully in-house browser or competing fully in-house mobile OS. This is kind of sneaky in that it lets Google do a lot of the heavy lifting, while still being able to yank the things (or add the things) that Microsoft wants.
With regard to Edge adopting Chromium, I have to wonder whether Google sees this as a victory, or if they feel like Microsoft pulled one over on them.
I am done with that after all the crap that previous software with admin rights installed. I cleaned it up and swore I would not install anything that required admin rights again - for my own security and peace of mind. What does it need admin rights for?
Why do I need to give Adobe admin rights to install Photoshop? Why do I need to give Microsoft the same to install Word? And now for a web browser?
If I'm installing something low-level like a window manager or a keyboard shortcut tool, I get it. But for a normal mainstream flagship consumer application, what on earth do they need admin privileges for?!
I hate the fact I have to hand over the keys to my computer just to run basic industry standard software and I have no choice because it's industry standard and I have requirements to use it.
On the other hand, for most people this admin vs regular user separation is almost meaningless and provides little extra security. Sure, if I install malware as admin it will be harder to get rid of it, but except for that, it can hurt me just as much, since all of the files I really care about (documents, photos, game saves etc) are already accessible with my user, and any program running as my user can already connect to the internet and send information about what my user is doing (not to mention bother me with ads). Some of the really damaging ransomware that recently made the rounds didn't even require admin privileges, it simply encrypted data in some common user-owned folders, if I'm not mistaken (it probably did need some privilege escalation to spread, though, which is a big problem on office networks).
On Windows at least, UWP apps are deduplicated across all users on the same system so when user #2 installs the same app already installed by user #1, it will just point to the same existing shared instance of the app's files. I don't know much about MacOS but I'd guess there's a similar packaging system. These systems also incorporate sandboxes which address the other problems you mentioned in your last paragraph.
The problem is just when the OS teams can't convince other developers (even ones inside the same company in Microsoft's case) to actually use their packaging and sandbox systems.
So all they should require is to be dragged into the /Applications folder (or /System/Applications in Catalina). That's it.
That's how a macOS app should be installed. That should be the end of the process unless it needs to install kernel extensions (and even then, from Catalina onwards, such extensions should become userland extensions).
Applications also don't need to be (and third party apps on most single-user systems arguably shouldn't be) in /Applications. Users can put apps wherever the heck they like (I keep mine in ~/Applications which even gets the same icon automatically if you create it).
Apple could really streamline this because all apps that can be drag-drop installed really belong in one's own home directory, where they'll be seamlessly migrated when you move to a new computer, or brought with you if you have a roaming profile. As it is right now, I just keep both Applications folders in my Finder Sidebar and remember that the bottom one is "mine."
In an ideal scenario, users could still drag apps to the "one" Applications folder and if they are not an Admin the app itself would actually be stored in a default-invisible ~/Applications. Then when you opened "/Applications" the system would show you the superset of both locations.
This is of course nearly exactly how the Windows Start Menu works except that it always had "installers" do the work of putting those program shortcuts in the respective directories, and only well-behaved apps ever asked which place you wanted apps installed.
The question of how a regular user could be allowed to install something for all users in this fashion, placing the app bundle in the /Applications folder, is no different than when using an installer: ask for an administrator password.
It wouldn't be wasteful if I didn't want to install it for the other users, which I might not.
In this case, it's installing Edge and the universal Microsoft AutoUpdater app. Given the range of stuff that thing has to support (including all the Office apps) and the privs it will need to run at to do so, I think the admin requirement is not entirely unreasonable.
Yeah, I realize there’s probably nothing left if the old KHTML but it still does give me a chuckle.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-edge-confirmed-comi...
What a world we live in.
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/79.0.3945.117 Safari/537.36 Edg/79.0.309.65
My lord, this ridiculous header is f'ed (and I don't mean this string, just this entire ridiculous slow-motion trainwreck that requires every browser to pretend to be every browser that ever came before).
\* presuming that spelling means 'please don't lock me out like Edge' -- modern Chromium Opera identifies as OPR, similarly
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/
Although, all copyrights are Apple's on that particular file. I wonder if everything's been done by the book.
I just still wish they would have at least OSS'd EdgeHTML instead of just shoving it in a closet somewhere.
Edit: Chromium connects to Google servers to update extensions and for captive portal detection. Firefox does pretty much the same.
(note that I think there's nothing wrong with this at all, just pointing out that this isn't chromium-specific)
Both chromium and Firefox can be customized and vendor branded (see the countless privacy oriented browsers built on top of Firefox).
That's pretty misleading. When you want to sync state across Chromium installs, you use a Google account, and that's really just scratching the surface.
Chromium comes with quite a bit of Google baked-in.
Iridium was developed specifically to degoogle all attempts at phoning home.
There is a reason why Electron, QT etc use Chromium.
Firefox is comparable in that department.
What magic are you using to be able to build Chromium?
I get the Electron reason...it just sucks.
Even their docs for XUL shows it all as archived:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
Maybe they're better at API backwards compatibility now? Not sure; I'm unlikely to try again given previous experience. Which is a shame; I still use Firefox since it was called Phoenix…
If anybody has more recent experience working on their stack, I'd be happy to be correctly though. Preferably with examples of projects that _haven't_ been burned.
Fonts are rendered with thinner lines in new Edge (on the left): http://terrainformatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IE-fo...
Such rendering does not match rest of Windows...
New Edge is definitely less readable, and Google Chrome exhibits the same problem.
Proposal to Democrats: to unite with Republicans in one party as Republicans have "better development tools".
I am sympathetic to this, as I've spent a lot of time at the low levels of this stuff. Unfortunately, one problem is that there is no one "right answer," and not really a lot of authoritative guidance on what's preferred. Some people prefer higher contrast, others prefer minimal distortion of the shapes and spacing. It's always a tradeoff.
The left render has less contrast but, to my eyes, is clearer. Look, for example, at the upvote and downvote buttons.
The right image's buttons are faint and blurred (jaggy), while the left image's buttons are sharp.
This is something they actually got right; it's one thing that was terrible about IE and the old Edge, and that I'd bet was subconsciously turning many people off (in my case, consciously making me want to tear my eyes out). If you can't see the difference, open dev console on the screenshot and run:
document.body.style.zoom = 1 / window.devicePixelRatio
Edit: Maybe also worth mentioning, Firefox's bold font rendering is one thing keeping me away from it. Lack of the above zoom mechanism is another. Not sure if I'm alone in these.
By "post-Vista" you mean Windows 8 and later? Vista and 7 (its refinement) were the peak of subpixel-antialiased ClearType with the Segoe font. It was with Metro and its animated, rotation-enabled, mobile-first design language that antialiasing was downgraded to greyscale.
You are not alone. Firefox font rendering actually upsets me. Comparing to Chrome rendering, it's just a non-starter.
I have brought this up many times, but I get blasted for it. Apparently it's all based on opinion alone and you and I have a very minority opinion in these tech communities. I suspect that the silent majority is with us though.
Chromium’s Windows font rendering is better than it was a few years ago (when it was really pretty awful), but as you say, it’s still not right. Firefox’s font rendering is much truer to the platform conventions.
I hope that this is still on their radar as something to improve.
Sadly, it doesn’t appear that ie11 will have an end of life date as it’ll be supported as long as Windows 10 is and Windows 10 appears evergreen.
Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point.
For IE versions the support windows have always been "X years since release (or perhaps X years since the next version), or until all Windows variant released with it are EOL". If Win10 is indeed evergreen, then that second part will never expire. Perhaps they'll count the biannual Windows feature updates instead of Win10 as a whole, and so count it from when they stop releasing install media with IE11 on them, but as that hasn't happened yet, we'll still be some years away for IE11 stopping. Even then '11 will still be around in some environments for a while after EOL.
We only recently got rid of IE8 support for some of our clients as they stopped using it. That was mainly because of the then upcoming EOL of IE8 in sync with the EOL of Win7/Win2008 (the last versions released with IE8). I hear some are not so lucky... I expect IE11 to be a problem (though an increasingly small one, thankfully) for some time to come.
In any case, can you link (or screenshot if it doesn't cooperate with deep linking) to an official page listing 2025? I'm not seeing that.
not according to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17454/lifecycle-faq....
>Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and the most current version will continue to follow the specific lifecycle policy for the operating system for which it is installed. To find the lifecycle dates for all operating systems, search the Microsoft Lifecycle Database here.
It's unknown how long MSFT will continue to include IE in Windows, but at the very least it will be supported until January 2029, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history.
Isn't is already for fresh Win10 installs? Or are you meaning "new Edge"?
> If you’re an IT administrator, you will need to download an offline deployment package to pilot within your corporate environment—the new Microsoft Edge will not automatically deploy for commercial customers. Additionally, none of the Microsoft Edge preview channels will update to the new Microsoft Edge, as they can be used side-by-side for testing and validation.
So many of us still need to support current Edge until IT decides it is time to move on.
If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch.
If you mean Edgmium (New Edge) over Edge Classic, it already replaces Edge Classic (entirely) when you install it, and there's a slow rollout through Windows Update already happening, with an attempt to converge on everyone having Edgmium sometime this year and Edge Classic dying a final, sad death (RIP, good friend, you served some of us well). They say fresh installs of "Windows 10X" the hyped dual screen build of Windows will only have Edgmium, and that'll likely make its way into other Windows 10 images over time.
We even see a small percentage of XP and IE8 (which we haven’t supported since MS dropped support.) might just be UA spoofing to support some crazy old internal app at a bank.
Makes your money feel safe, eh?
LTSC/LTSB versions of Windows 10 (i.e. the ones that enterprises are supposed to use) don't have Edge and there's no way to install it. The same goes for Windows Server 2016 and 2019.
It's also a very subtle signal for several reasons to release it the day after Extended Support for Windows 7 ended. On the one hand, it supports Windows 7, so there is a possible mixed message there, which is why it is subtle. On the other hand, some of these Enterprises should realize that the last time the browser team at Microsoft did a release like this after/ahead of a Windows EOL they highly revised their browser security support policy. (Back with IE11 adding support for a couple older versions of Windows and Microsoft immediately dropping support for IE <11, despite earlier "bundled with Windows support timeframe" promises.) It can be seen as a very subtle "IE is dead, move on from it, already, you dinosaur customers".
I'm not sure it will be part of 20H1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/01/15/upgrading-new... says:
> If you’d prefer not to install Microsoft Edge manually, you can wait for it to be installed in a future update to Windows 10, following our measured roll-out approach over the next several months. We will start to migrate Windows 10 customers to the new Microsoft Edge in the coming weeks, starting with a subset of Windows Insiders in the Release Preview ring.
I'm guessing 20H1 will be released sooner than several months.
I feel like most people's browser of choice is chosen for reasons specific to their needs. For example: I think that Firefox gives me a bit of additional privacy. I think that Safari gives me that additional privacy as well. Some people may feel like Chrome just works. Some people just use what came with their OS.
When I do front end work, I tend to always test it in Chrome first. Their devtools make that part of my job (quickly finding issues with the frontend) a lot easier. Once it works in Chrome, I'm sure that the code is working, and any problems I encounter will just require browser-specific tweaks.
Anyway, long story short...I think that Microsoft really needs to pick something that Edge is best at if they want people to have a reason to use it (PS loading a highly browser-optimized page some number of milliseconds faster than the competition just doesn't do it for me, personally). Their niche has always just kind of been "well it's what comes with the OS" - and that's a fine way to get a userbase for sure. I'm not faulting them - but if that's their intended userbase, then I feel like they're putting a lot of effort into this whole browser game.
I guess at the end of the day, I don't trust IE or Edge or Chrome for my every day use. Whether that's poorly placed mistrust or not, I'm uncertain. But in either event, that's how I feel.
Safari provides a material improvement in battery life.
"We will honor your choices about browsing data and collect only what is needed to make your experiences better."
When I watched TV during prime time and on the weekends, though, the advertisements were for toys and products that interested me. In the blink of an eye, my entire outlook worsened because I needed those things and didn't have them. The advertisements were also a great distraction from homework and chores.
I guess I can see where she's coming from, as I don't avoid physical stores when I'm not planning to buy things. Window shopping is fun. But still, I think all that tracking has a dark side that's difficult to convey to the generation that grew up taking it for granted. Are we just old and fear the new and unknown?
The one thing I definitely hate is how bloated the web has gotten. Everything works great on my old computers that I switched over to linux, until I need to just google (duckduckgo) some simple piece of information on a forum. And then I find myself fantasizing about upgrading to an i7 so I can read the same basic text that could be read online when 1ghz processors were a pipe dream.
Edit: and this is with ad blockers and anti-trackers turned on. The whole browser experience is just slower, and I think the act of having to scan and block all that cruft must have an impact. Browsers used to function on Windows XP machines back in the day, right?
Edit2: and then I see this thread on the HN front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22054715
It's as if a stranger came up to you on the street, knew what brand of toilet paper you used at home, and asked if you wanted to buy more because you're almost out. Naturally you would wonder how this stranger knows these facts about you - do they snoop in your trash? Do they observe you in the bathroom through the window? Do they come in your home while you're away? We would consider such a world where this was normal to be Kafka-esque and dystopic. Anyone who gives an iota of care about personal privacy and dignity could (and arguably should) find implementation of the digital equivalent equally repulsive.
I don't care if things know about me. If there is an actual human being who is directly looking at me, associating it with my face, etc, that is a lot more bothersome than some machine that is doing that.
I understand that many people here don't make that distinction. I do care about privacy in some ways, but when you I "arguably should" find machines invading my privacy to repulsive, I guess I have to thank you for putting the word "arguably" in there, because I would argue that. It just doesn't bother me, and I am happier for not having one more thing to be bothered by.
For instance, sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed by what I purchase at a store. (even if it's just that I'm buying a lot of junky, easy-to-prepare food at the grocery store) I've never once felt that way checking out at Amazon. Not even a teensy tiny bit. And that would remain true even if I suspected (or knew) that some human at Amazon was looking closely at the orders.
I guess I have enough concerns in my life that actually have measurable impacts on me that such things seem pretty trivial.
A lot of 20th Century pop culture was driven by or at least responded to advertising. When advertising has to hit the broadest demographics and speak to the largest audiences it has more pressure to be creative and interesting, so that people talk or think about it.
It also lead to interesting moments of discovery when ads found audiences outside of what they expected.
Targeted ads are more often preaching to an already sold choir, so they can just be lazier in almost every way. They break expectations of novelty in ads. They lose the ability to drive the discovery models that were the original driving force behind why ads even exist in the first place. They add yet another unnecessary border wall/bubble effect where we struggle to find shared cultural events/jokes/touchstones between groups of people, because just about no two people (even inside the same demographic group) are seeing the same ads these days.
Not a deal breaker for me because I don't have a touch screen and use an external PDF reader (sumatraPDF), but if I was using edge for heavy PDFs I would be rather disappointed
Seems fine for PDFs that are a bit less extreme, but nowhere near as smooth as old edge.
Originally it was completely uncroped, and OCRing it seems to have grown it even larger.
Not too familiar with details with PDFs but I suspect it's just a huge DPI render (maybe designed to go towards being printed) that could probably be reduced significantly if it was designed for normal consumption.
All things considered it's amazing it works at all, but old Edge handled it a lot smoother.
I just checked the Microsoft App Store and Reader is available.
https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9WZDNCRFHWG5
Funny because with Windows Ink, I loved Edge's PDF abilities.
Made my life so much easier.
Zathura and Calibre are insanely bloated. FBreader is just no. Emacs works, but has similar functionality to FBreader.
As a matter of fact though, I think I have found a very good epub reader which I don't see mentioned very much called Cover.
It is ridiculously smooth at displaying epubs, maybe even more so than edge. I was reading an epub with tons of images and I could swipe left and right between pages multiple times without waiting a second for reflow, almost felt like swiping a pdf. Whereas on all those other apps the book was blurred and did not scale how I would expect it to, to fill the screen. On cover everything is displayed how I think it should be displayed without changing anything. So yeah, cover A+
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/cover-comic-reader/9wzdncr...
Firefox over this crap all day.
If there was only a handful of primitives to implement, and everything else was built on it, then it would be much easier to stay compatible.
This is the kind of situation that has led to IE6 dominating the web, then motivating Google to create a browser, take the market and then Microsoft finally dropping their web engine and taking up Chromium.
Not implying this is all good.
Whether that makes its way to Google somewhere along the lines or not is a different story.
I'm pretty sure Google has infected more of the Internet than Microsoft.
Without specifics is hard to know what the message you replied to meant but one thing where I find MS tracking worse than anything Google can do on the Internet right now is that MS tracks and reports my local OS use (what applications I install/run, how long I run them, what files I have) while an Internet tracker can only get access to what the browser allows which generally limits sharing the type of information I listed.
EDIT: And pretty much all browsers have an Incognito mode or you can use TorBrowser which goes beyond that but I cannot similarly defend myself against my own local OS privacy invasion.
I’m already using it on my Mac.
Already installed in Windows.
Microsoft supported = huge for corps that live in MS ecosystem.
Best quality for Netflix streaming.
No need to have Google Chrome installed.
Seems like I am not alone in using Yin and Yang metaphor here.
They already did that years ago.
Yes there are problems to everyone using the same software but there are advantages too. One drawback is that potential security issues would affect "everyone" but on the other hand the same fix works for "everyone".
If the common software is open source it serves as de facto standard/reference implementation so you don't have compatibility issues. Standardization processes try to address this without reference software but IMO that is a lot more effort (in terms of engineering hours) to get it right so you can have a fully featured standard that is clear, has no bugs and has multiple perfectly standard compliant independent implementations.
After all software is just a tool to serve a purpose and our decisions in this area should be driven by pragmatic reasons alone. If we can serve the same purpose with much less effort by having everyone build on top of/use the same common base why not.
Similarly I'd rather see everyone just use Linux instead of all the different popular OSes we have.
I like it. Customised the front page with some useful links and turned off the news. Real serene image, non-distracting new page.
I like the interface overall and it has ublock origin, basically the one extension that is a must.
This will be big for corporations too. Users wont need to have Google Chrome deployed anymore to use certain web apps.
Ill use it as a secondary browser to Firefox when I need a Chromium based browser, as this is already installed in Windows 10 soon.
Best browser for Netflix too. I am using the "Add website to app" function for it already, or just browse to it.
Old Edge was also really good for video performance and battery performance in general, hope this has that too.
Google has an option that says "By turning this off, you can sign in to Google sites like Gmail without signing in to Chrome." But it doesn't work, which is a blatant abuse by Google. Adios, Chrome! I will now be using Edge when logging into Gmail.
So, looking into the .pkg file I notice that it's also bundled Office16_all_autoupdate.pkg, which has a 'Microsoft AutoUpdate.app'. Inside the contents of that app is another app called 'Microsoft AU Daemon.app' which contains various M$ Root Certs and a string 'Microsoft Update Assistant launched'...
It's stunts like this which make me not trust Microsoft very much. I want nothing to do with Office, nor a one-stop-shop port of Windows Update. God knows what telemetry MS will try to upload with these products, but I'm not buying it.
Edit: I even like Bing better. What miracle is this that the top links aren't advertisements?
This completely destroys my main use case for my Surface. I need a tablet with a web browser that's designed to be used in portrait mode without the Type Cover attached.
Can anyone here recommend a UWP web browser I can switch to when the real Edge goes away for good? Or if none exists, can someone recommend a cheap 12"+ tablet that runs a mobile OS?
I’m sure much has changed internally but still, who would have imagined that KDE and Apple would be the ones to produce the dominant core browser architecture for the whole world?
Says it is 4k in Netflix now
* 4K Ultra HD exclusivity is limited to PCs running Windows 10. 4K works in both Microsoft Edge and Netflix app. Only 7th Gen Intel® Core™ processor or higher devices can decrypt PlayReady 4K DRM. Netflix Ultra HD plan required.
I will "probably" never use this browser but I just hope that it doesn't open a new set of issues to deal with. I don't think it should
That said, browser debates often come off like the Nintendo versus Sega arguments I remember as a kid. It's funny how people become married to one.
The best long-term outcome for the web would arguably to have been for Microsoft to put more resources into their in-house EdgeHTML browser instead of throwing it out and reskinning Chrome.
Let's say Google says they don't like some privacy feature because it hurts their bottom line in terms of ad revenue. So they decide not to have that in Chrome.
Sure, people could switch to in-house Edge or Firefox. But they don't want to switch, because for whatever reason, Google is better able to make a browser that people like. Attested to by the tiny market share Edge has (and fairly small share Firefox has, notwithstanding its popularity within the HN community).
Switching to Chromium based Edge is a much easier move for users, assuming Microsoft decides to second-guess Google's decision, which they can do easily and have strong incentives to do -- keeping in mind that the number one complaint people have about Chrome is that they don't trust Google.
Just because it's the same codebase doesn't mean they're not competing.