Microsoft's Three Browsers
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Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft & Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla/Netscape - one of the biggest battles in technology history, which Microsoft won following a savage no-holds-barred battle. There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox - such a move would have been truly ironic.
[1] Arguably a success case in some viewpoints; it's sometimes why people promote open source.
As for actual risks, remember, this is MS, not some random shop: at any point if they’re dissatisfied with Chromium in any way, they have enough firepower to fork Blink, just like Google forked WebKit from Apple, and like Apple forked WebKit from KHTML, and do whatever they want.
Who? Shareholders? Open source advocates?
By the way, it occurs to me that Microsoft is now doing better what Google was doing with the Chrome Frame for IE extension a few years ago.
13 years ago, I asked myself, why Microsoft doesn't just embed WebKit instead of keeping using their annoying web engine. It turns out they are now doing a variant of that now, something that seemed impossible back then, and (amazingly) I am not too happy with this... I guess I did not predict the collapse of my favorite browser's market share at the time, and the dominance of Chrome, which did not exist. Google seemed good anyway.
Google building a web browser was strange to me back then: why would Google do that when we already have Firefox, an excellent browser? But now, it is obvious. And Microsoft does not care that much apparently. They don't care about having an edge over this area anymore.
As far as I understand it, the Chromium codebase is deeply intertwined with the Google ecosystem in a way that makes it hard to guarantee privacy the way Firefox does.
It would, but at the same time while there's been long-term work at making Gecko embeddable (though primarily on mobile, in the form of GeckoView), it's still the case that it's much easier to embed Chromium or WebKit into a larger product today.
Arguably, one of Mozilla's biggest mistakes was never really caring about making Gecko embeddable. (Okay, GeckoView is now a thing.)
Microsoft can easily act as Google's counter balance. Microsoft is one of the few companies that have the resources capable of maintaining a hostile fork of chromium (at a loss) and have it competitive enough that users will switch. Google has lost it's one advantage in the web-space too as now they can't exactly hamper the experience of edge without hampering chrome too.
Chromium needed this counter-balance.
If Microsoft chose a Gecko forked browser, they would dominate and take over. Like what Apple did with KHTML. This step is better.
It’s all trade offs....
Also, even though you can run Android apps and Linux containers these days, Chrome OS is still built around using the browser in a way Android is not. Your phone has to balance the needs of the browser against other demands and apps.
Potential problems could be mitigated pretty easily by warning about or throttling extensions that use too much CPU/memory on mobile.
Not allowing extensions on Chrome for Android might have been an acceptable excuse in the early days of Android, with very weak single core CPUs. But not for years.
This is a myth. Apple always had massive amounts of cash even at their low point when people considered them worth barely more than their cash.
That move alone (plus Bill Gates' appearance at an Apple event) might have saved the platform, not only by making it more attractive to users, but also by giving the platform more credibility with larger enterprises.
What “saved” Apple was the iMac in 1998, not Microsoft.
Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock in Apple as a show of good faith. Apple made Internet Explorer the default browser for the Mac and Microsoft committed to Office for the Mac. At the time, Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac was the best browser on any platform.
After the 5 year period, Microsoft sold those shares, making a huge profit.
At the end of the 5-year agreement, Apple shipped Safari 1.0, based on the KHTML codebase and the rest, as they say, is history.
Ironically, Microsoft's browser is now based on a fork of the engine of the browser that replaced IE on the Mac back in the day.
Well there was the legal battle going on between the two as well. So you could think of IE, Office, 150M stock was part of the package.
Teams, their flagship Office app, is electron.
Think about it—Nokia, Google, Blackberry, Samsung could have picked Gecko back in the day but they all chose WebKit instead. That should tell you something.
Google forked WebKit to make Blink in 2013 and since then, Opera, Vivaldi and now Microsoft are using Blink. Not even the creator of Firefox and former head of Mozilla Brendan Eich, ended up using Firefox--Brave also is using Chromium/Blink.
Gecko was absolutely originally designed to be embedded—it just never did a particularly stellar job of fulfilling those goals.
Brendan also didn't create Firefox.
Brendan Eich was a co-founder of Mozilla (although not of Netscape).
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1210621157201727489?s...
You're implicitly reading my comment as some sort attempt to diminish your involvement, and explicitly claiming that I'm the one twisting words. You're wrong about both.
"Part of the creation of Firefox" is the second iteration of the wording in play here, which means it's you and jannes who are twisting words here. I know that moving the goalposts is one of HN's favorite pastimes, but it's a stupid one.
The point where I joined this conversation was to correct someone who referred to you as "the creator of Firefox". I was right to do so. (More than that, it's something you should have been glad to see...) If you want to see this as an insult despite it not being one and then move in to attack me over it with ironic accusations of strawmanning, you can go piss up a flagpole.
http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX...
“ Here is final copy of the memo we sent to BillG for think week about what we should do to get to 30% browser share. Pls do not distribute broadly.”
“ Clone and Supernet Netscape. PSD needs to get serious about cloning Netscape. We must have a plan to clone all the features they have today, plus new ones they will add between now and our next release”
“We will bind the shell to the Internet Explorer so that running any other browser is a jolting experience. Shell/Browser user model becomes the same.”
MS supports linux now. They don't care about past rivalries, they just do what makes business sense to them.
The lack of diversity might be bad for the web at large though.
So they could do that, but I guess Chrome VM has won.
In a couple of years job boards will ask for Chrome developers instead of Web developers.
So, all that cakes was for nothing?
The top-level comment is disappointing. Blink (not WebKit) was chosen because it was the better technical decision. That's all.
I personally use Safari. Because I’m on MacOS, I find Safari to certainly be the most immediately responsive, UI/UX-wise, and that’s pretty much what matters to be, since it’s all WebKit under the hood.
I don’t see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box.
You hit the nail on the head, and it's great, having a good default.
That's a huge benefit, considering > 75% of the world still uses Windows.
* No Google tracking.
* Blocks 3rd party trackers.
* Zoom/Scroll is smoother.
* Better optimized for touch screens.
* Longer battery life.
* Seems to use less RAM.
* All my Chrome extensions are compatible.
* I can watch Netflix in 4K. Can't do that on Chrome or on a Mac.
I was going to start using Edge but 1password wasn't working and that was a deal breaker for me.
But that's false, Chrome forked away from webkit years ago (using Blink now [1]), and they are very different [2]
[1] https://www.chromium.org/blink [2] https://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+72,chrome+79,safari+13
I can't tell you where the magic ROI line is for you. Maybe you have to make the hard choices like "If we go this route [only evergreen browsers], we lose ~16% of our customers immediately, but we add X% feature/stability/maintenance improvements to our remaining ~84% customers, and hopefully one day we'll see at least some of those 16% come back to us the next time they get a chance to upgrade, likely in Y years." It's a business decision, and you don't always have to meet customers where "they are", you can make the tough calls and ask your customers to meet you in the middle. How angry that might make them, and how much business you might lose, is always going to be something you have to determine with your market in mind.
Like I said, it's always going to be a calculated risk, and I mentioned that losing customers is certainly a risk involved. Sometimes a small loss of customers is an acceptable risk.
There are mitigations for such risks such as making sure that "fewer features" alternative is your own (at the right maintenance costs), but also including taking things to standards/regulatory boards. Using out-of-date software is a HIPAA risk and an ethics risk. There are ways to convince HIPAA enforcement auditors and/or groups like the AMA that it is too much of a risk, or too unethical a risk and that some sort of upgrade horizon should be spread across the industry. That's not easy either, but it's not impossible, and it's probably a good idea in general in the long run (the regularity with which Day-0 vulnerabilities are disclosed would give a lot of weight to the risks of falling behind on software upgrades, for instance).
Our product supported IE7 at the time and let me tell you kids... that is trouble you've not known.
I got so fed up I just said I wasn't going to look at IE7 bugs anymore and wasn't going to invest any time in it. My decision snowballed and eventually that snowball led to dropping IE7 support across the whole organization. It turns out everyone hated it.
Sometimes you've just got to push for it and tell customers that's what you are doing whether they like it or not. We just told our Fortune 500 customer base IE7 support was dead, get over it. And they did.
The year following the year of the Linux desktop!
Because businesses that are stuck with IE have made the equivalent of bad life choices.
It would definitely be nice to not specifically need the extra tools, but for a big enough project it seems silly to not use them.
The upside is that it should be easier to test with tools such as Selenium, so the lower cost of testing it may be a factor
Just testing for Firefox and chrome/edge will be nice.
Thanks! Most thinks just work on Firefox but I also see a number of things not working because certain people just can't be bothered to:
a) learn to not use Chrome-specific hacks instead of the normal way
b) just test their sites with the second most used browser engine
As an example, https://www.just-eat.no
Chrome treats the numeric box as text and accepts a postcode starting with 0. Firefox correctly implements the numeric type, which unfortunately makes the site unusable for all Firefox users in Oslo.
They get none of my business because I'm not willing to switch to Chrome just to order from them.
(I didn't expect size adjustment on desktop Windows 10. But my 32-bit box is a Win10 x86 tablet. Doesn't seem to be a question of "Tablet Mode".)
“Works on my machine”, said the developer, just before they took down the production environment.
If we're including unmaintained Microsoft browsers there's also the old Tasman-based IE for Mac. The Expression Web product also had an independent HTML rendering engine.
The browser was about garnering mind-share™, making sure you see ‘Microsoft Internet Explorer’ when you boot up the computer. That why some people used talk about getting on to the ‘Microsoft Internet’ presumably using the Microsoft TCP/IP © :]