Microsoft's New Edge Web Browser – How to Create Edge Extensions? | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's New Edge Web Browser – How to Create Edge Extensions?

imacros.net

31 pointsr3m630 comments

I think bringing a sane extension model to Edge is a bigger deal than any of the other improvements that Edge is making over IE11.

For a couple years now, I would have instantly switched to IE on my touch enabled Windows machines if there were equivalent versions of my Chrome extensions available for IE. Overall performance, especially during touch scrolling and zooming, and memory footprint has long been dramatically better in IE than any other Windows browser (though Chrome seems to be trying to close that gap a bit lately).

If converting a complex extension like RES was really "easy to convert" with "only a few changes", that's going to be a very interesting development.

> There are “no plans” to make the browser (or its core engine) open source but Edge proudly incorporates open-source code

I'm tired of this trend. In my opinion saying you're using some piece of open-source library for XPath does not exonerate you from releasing a browser that isn't open-source in a market that has Firefox and Chromium. I'll bet they aren't going to release Edge for Linux either.

Microsoft has been copying Apple lately but Apple is the wrong model for Microsoft to copy.

> I'll bet they aren't going to release Edge for Linux either.

I think they might, seeing the recent trends.

The only trend I'm seeing is that they are open-sourcing stuff they don't care about anymore. E.g. I just tried OneDrive, which has a shitty implementation on OS X and no implementation on Linux. If OneDrive doesn't have a Linux client (or good OS X support), what chances do you think Edge has?

And forget about Linux - if extensions are going to get distributed through the Windows Store, as this article claims, you can say goodbye to OS X support as well.

As far as I perceive it, they're open sourcing dev-facing stuff, allowing you to create stuff for Windows without using Windows yourself. Which is a refreshing change.

Along those lines, you might expect them to make a Linux version of the Edge browser, except that it won't be the exact browser the majority of users will be running - I suspect they'd point you to the VM images they already have at modern.ie instead.

I'm pretty sure they care about .NET and the CLR...

I wouldn't be so sure. Microsoft has lots of technologies that they dropped, including VB6, COM+, DCOM, DAO, ADO, ActiveX, Silverlight, WPF, WinForms, XNA, IronRuby, IronPython and the list is probably much bigger. I couldn't help but mention the Iron languages. Microsoft halted development right after open-sourcing them. And now they are effectively dead. Well no, open-source never really dies and those projects are just waiting to be adopted - which is the great advantage of open-source. But we are talking about Microsoft and their interests here.

Is it that much of a stretch to say that Microsoft is obsoleting .NET? Given the moves in "modern Windows" and WinRT, with their focus on HTML5 and the revived interest in C++, plus killing Silverlight / WPF which was the hot new thing only 6 years ago, well, it doesn't look good.

Then you're not following Microsoft enough. They are gradually making all the development tools cross-platform, just to bank on the dev knowledge of the users of Windows, Linux and Mac. Browser add-ons is another area they can get benefitted from by the help of other platform developers.

What development tools?

They have made .Net & CoreCLR open source (including the compiler, runtime and libraries), enabled Visual Studio to do more than developing just Windows applications (they now allow developing Android/iOS apps as well) and are trying to make developing for other platforms even easier with VS 2015.

Not only that, they just released a cross platform Code Editor which works on Windows, Linux and Mac, called 'Visual Studio Code'. That and more was announced in the Build Conference held recently.

Visual Studio Code is just a re-branded Atom editor [1] bundled with atom plugins, such as OmniSharp [2]. And while Atom is impressive, that's not Microsoft's doing, plus they took an open-source project and released something which isn't open-source and named that in a way to make people believe that Visual Studio is now all of a sudden cross-platform. Well, I think I'll pass for now.

[1] https://atom.io/

[2] http://www.omnisharp.net/

[3] https://code.visualstudio.com/License

Rebranding or not, doesn't matter (A lot of mainstream projects out there start like that). The point is that they are pushing to be a company that supports a cross platform development, so I'm surprised that you'd even bring that point. Also, CoreCLR and .Net are their own, and no, unlike what you think, they aren't going anywhere so soon.

> I'm tired of this trend. In my opinion saying you're using some piece of open-source library for XPath does not exonerate you from releasing a browser that isn't open-source

They don't need to be exonerated. There's no reason to turn enthusiasm for open-source into a feeling of entitlement that all software must be that way. Some of the best software I use is closed-source. I have enough complaints about Firefox and Chrome that if a better closed-source browser comes along I'm going to use it.

Given Microsoft's history with IExplorer, that personally I haven't forgotten, I won't touch another of their browsers unless it is open-source and portable to other platforms. Because there is such a thing called trust and trust violations, which in the real world often affect relationships between two parties. So they do need to be exonerated from my point of view. You're entitled to your own opinion of course.

I don't understand why they even need their own web browser. Why not just ship Windows with Chrome. They could preset the settings to have bing as your home page. Or maybe that is illegal? What advantage to they gain by having their own browser? If there would be legal difficulties they could try to strike a deal with Firefox or Opera. On the same note I don't understand what Microsoft is trying to do recently. I mean eventually Windows is supposed to be free and everyone can get all the updates. .NET is becoming more open source. Visual Studio is becoming cross platform and this works on the free version. I like all these things, but I don't understand how they benefit Microsoft? The only explanation I have heard is that they are trying to "stay relevant", but what good is that relevance if they are giving Windows, .NET, and Visual Studio away for free? Am I missing something?

The only thing that makes sense to me is they are using these as a vessel to push people to use Bing and to buy Office, but now you can buy Office on more and more platforms and Bing is OS agnostic. I'm just not seeing a thought out plan here.

Because then everyone would be using Chrome – Chrome already has a far too large market share right now.

If we want to have a free market of browsers, we also need multiple vendors that compete, otherwise the market will stall (see IE6)

I was more asking how Microsoft benefits by pumping their own money and time into their own browser.

By producing their own browser, Microsoft can at least be assured that it works consistently under their own controls and can be used to power other features in the future for Windows. First feature is the Cortana integration in Edge. Good luck getting either Google or Firefox to agree for a deeper integration level.

You cannot integrate Cortana in Chrome like the way they did with Edge. Cortana is being used to collect information and provide better ads over time based on what customers are searching. It is the same market as Google is in and they're not going to do anything to lower their ads revenue and Microsoft is not going to pay them to bundle Chrome onto Windows, that's just not going to happen.

It is generally not a good idea to depend on a third party to provide the best browser (or any other types of tool) on your platform where they can control all of it and can deny whatever you want from them. Especially, when such parties are only doing it to drive business to their own solutions. Office vs Google Docs, Bing vs. Google, Cortana vs. Google Now, and so on.

Also, none of these things are being given away for free, they all have some costs for various groups. Companies who want to use VS professionally will pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for the support and maintenance from Microsoft, sometimes even more. Remember, a big part of MS revenues is from the enterprise market, not the regular consumer market.

Microsoft is not doing anything for free, that makes zero sense and would result into their entire management staff fired immediately. There are revenue models for each free solution from Microsoft, they're not in the market to produce free software, they're in it to make money for their shareholders.

At the very least, Microsoft wants/needs to have a seat at the web standards table, as well as influence at that table. While not a necessary condition, being a browser vendor is almost certainly a sufficient one.

Unlike Chrome, extensions require a browser restart after installation.

That is not good.

Reminds me of Windows NT.

Or, uh, Firefox?

Restart-less add-ons have been common for a few years now for Firefox.

I played with Edge on my dev machine, here are my initial impressions:

> Its slow. I ran some benchmark tools and it is so far behind Chrome and Firefox. (I know its still in preview)

> I dont like the idea of installing extension through Microsoft Store.

> Developer Tools is still behind Chrome or Firebug. Missing JS & CSS editing, viewing cookie etc.

I feel like all of the changes Microsoft is making are not going to matter if they keep trying to build a walled garden. There's just no way that I'm investing any significant amount of time into technology that binds users to a one single app store.

I'm having a hard time parsing this comment in light of Apple and Google, which essentially do the same thing. The article mentions the extensions are similar to Chrome, so it's possible that someone will build a translation layer that will take underlying code and build the application specific bindings.

Thanks to Xamarin, you can build an application for any platform using C#, and even more, .NET is running pretty much everywhere now. So, I'm confused as to what technology you are referring to?

So, because Apple and (to a much lesser extent) Google lock down their platforms, I should be OK when Microsoft tries to do it too?

I don't use iOS for the same reason that I won't use any of Microsoft's newly walled-in tech and I don't use certain Google products for the same reason.

> what technology you are referring to?

I'm referring to Metro/Modern/Windows Store/Universal apps and Edge.

- On Windows if I want to distribute a Metro/Modern app, I have to go through Microsoft's store. At least Android allows non-Google app stores and side-loading with the flick of a switch.

- Metro/Modern apps are not allowed talk to desktop apps. Even Chrome extensions and apps aren't as locked down as Metro.

- It looks like they're considering applying the same restrictions to Edge. Edge apps might only be able to talk to Windows Store apps.

None of this is OK with me. I never wanted Microsoft to do anything like Apple because I honestly don't like the way they do anything.

> .NET is running pretty much everywhere now...

Xamarin isn't Microsoft and this is not relevant to my point but here is what I think about Xamarin.

Not yet. Not really. Relatively nobody is using Xamarin tools because they are too expensive compared to the free or low cost tools that are available for building straight iOS and Android apps (or even cross platform ones with Javascript).

I don't use Xamarin myself, but I don't think it's very accurate to say nobody is using their tools: http://xamarin.com/customers

If you spend any time at all talking with .NET developers (of which there are millions), many are very excited about Xamarin and being able to use their existing knowledge to build native cross-platform apps.

If Apple and Google are doing the same thing, that doesn't mean that it's OK for Microsoft to do it as well. Also, at the very least Android allows one to install software from third-party sources with a simple config change and there are alternative app stores available (e.g. Amazon's app store, F-Droid), whereas it isn't possible to do that on Windows Phone or with these modern Windows apps. And you can install apps from wherever on OS X.

Early 2000 seemed as if we're headed into a world of openness, of standards, but now the pendulum is striking back. I keep telling people that Apple is the worst thing that could have happened to this industry, but nobody listens. This is because Apple succeeded where Microsoft failed - they popularized DRM and Trusted Computing and every fear we've had when the notion of Trusted Computing happened is now coming to life ...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

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