It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine Microsoft on Thursday said it intends to use the open-source Chromium browser engine in the desktop version of its Edge browser, promising the two per cent of global internet users who favor Edge an improved web experience. Joe Belfiore, corporate veep of Windows, announced the plan, which was reported earlier this week. " …
They'll no doubt be hoping this will help promote locked-down desktop ecosystems like Windows 10S, with monetisation being a spin-off (if not primary) benefit. With the shift towards so much being browser-based these days, that will suit most non-power users, but relying on their buggy and inconsistent (speaking as a suffering developer) proprietary engine was a major hindrance for take-up and demanded the one-off convert-to-Pro backstop offered to customers unwitting enough to fall for 10S thus far. They'll be able to push it much more confidently now, for better or worse.
... was not any perceived deficiency in its rendering engine (it seemed adequate the brief times I've used it) but because its developers had, in the name of "minimalism", pared back its user interface to the point of outright hostility. Pulling stunts like taking the "back" and "forward" items off the context menu where they've been in every browser since Mosaic & where over 2 decades of muscle memory tells me they are-- ooh, how Edge-y! I'm sure there's an extension in the Windows Store to put them back but, frankly, why bother? Might as well just download another browser that isn't cargo-culting its user experience to this extent-- yes, they all do it, but this is taking the Michael to whole new levels.
Now, they're moving to the Blink rendering engine but promising to keep the same hostile UI?! Talk about comically missing the point.
The browser is the new operating system.
Developers still have to test on all supported (versions of) browsers. Some large organisations are on a fixed version of a browser for several years. Browsers have regressions and inconsistent support for 'standards'.
Chrome is now the dominant browser ie same as Windows on the desktop.
We are really no better off.
Last time I dipped my toe in web-dev, code was full of browser-specific checks even for the most standards-compliant ones... because they use un-ratified standards and additional features. I can't remember if these were chromium or webkit but it was a mess and that was without IE kludges.
One possible downside of a monoculture is that Chromium becomes the de facto standard and they just implement what they want. Not unlike MS in the IE6 era.
I hate sites that insist on checking your browser then moaning about how its not a "supported" browser. As a user of Pale Moon, I get that a lot unless I spoof a Chrome/Firefox user agent. Then guess what? The site renders fine. If web developers could try detecting what features a browser supports instead of a blanket probe of "If its not a recent version of a major browser then moan", there'd be more instinct for smaller browsers/forks to flourish. As it is, too many big sites try to punish everyone who isn't using one of the top few browsers and its bloody annoying!
Its easy to get a site to work in all browsers ... You just need to not have over the top JS and (to a lesser extent CSS) usage.
KISS philosophy works well on websites, problem is sites that pull in hundreds of K of JS cruft to give bells & whistles that marketing want but serve little key functional purpose (just make things slower & less likely to work on all browsers!)
I think the only way the Windows 10 trainwreck can be averted at this stage is if Microsoft does similar for the entire OS. Replace traditional Windows with a Linux based OS and legacy compatibility layer.
Microsoft has the internal knowledge to develop a proprietary wrapper with higher compatibility than Wine (or provide a set of stripped down Windows 10, XP, 98 cores in a sandbox) to give business customers the best compatibility with older software ever, and this active catastrophe we have right now can be buried for good. Would not even be too difficult to port over things like the Windows Store for said distribution as the 'Modern' applications are already a new layer on top of Windows that could run in their own sandbox.
That would even fulfil the promise of Windows 10 being the last real Windows. I say this as a Windows user from the days of 3.11, the current product has fallen off the rails and is becoming offensive to use. Starting afresh upon reliable technology would be both a cost saver (a lot of the work is being done by the community) and improve the user experience (better update systems are already in place) there must be some people are Microsoft who recognize this as a valid choice, or we wouldn't see what we're seeing here with Edge / Chromium.
"Microsoft has the internal knowledge to develop a proprietary wrapper with higher compatibility than Wine"
Are you sure ? Didn't they admit Samba was more maintainable than the windows code ?
Maybe they'd build a compatibility layer around Wine, rather than instead of it.
I don't much like Satnad's slurpy habits but he seems to be more pragmatic and less religious than his predecessors.
I think you will find that a surprisingly high number of Win32 apps have some underlying dependence on the kernel being Windowsy rather than Linuxy. There are *many* services in Windows that are used explicitly by apps, and there are IOCTLs that are used for rare but essential functions, and there is the whole issue of legal filenames and cases sensitivity.
Now you could create some sort of sandbox, with a limited view of the underlying OS, but the end-user experience might be no better than running Windows in a VM.
This puzzles me too. I avoided it initially just because I hated the tab layout (firefox's was nicer .. until they copied chrome) but I found lots of experimental stuff that used it because it had the latest bells and whistles, like webgl.
Unfortunately, devs started using it for real work instead of playtime, and google tried hard to make most of the alternatives work badly with gmail etc. And so it got used more commonly.
1. When it first came out, it was faster than anything else. It long ago lost that edge, but that got its foot in the door.
2. It came out at a time when Firefox had only just emerged from the ashes of Netscape, and Opera was beginning to feel pretty creaky. It shook up the field.
3. It went to a multi-process architecture early, which made it more stable than competing browsers. The idea that you could use a browser all day and not have it crash out was revolutionary.
3. It offered really good dev tools. Firefox's have caught up, but for a while nothing had anything quite like Chrome.
The data slurping became a concern later. Keep in mind some of what gets filed as "slurping" is optional stuff people actually like, like bookmark sync between systems (which Firefox has added too, now.)
Since Chrome is such a memory hog.
I switch off Firefox when it became slow and flaky, then switched from Chrome to Edge because Chrome had become bloated. And now Edge will be just as bloated as Chrome, consuming much more memory and spawning endless processes.
Maybe Opera next.
If Microturd really wanted to make peoples lives a little less stressed, they could stop defaulting their web browsers homepage to the over bloated msn.com page.
If Microturd are to learn anything useful from Google, it is this, minimalism
As someone who has to interact with fresh Windows builds daily, this small act of kindness will make mine and millions of others lives a little easier.
If Microturd would like to contact me for more sound advice in software design, I am willing to offer my services for free, because nobody should have to suffer Microturds brainfarts any longer
That and not having the cretinous, and cretinously annoying, cortana "assistant" rubbish shout at you on every clean install. It's not necessary, it's never necessary and most of all has no part in being in the clean install process. Every time it involves trying to hit the mute on the keyboard as quick as possible...
I'm serious.
The only good reason for Edge was that it levers the rendering engine built into Windows. It's not perfect, but it does an OK job.
Without Edge, no reason for Flash to come so heavily pre-installed that removing it causes Windows Update to have a hissy fit.
And let's face it, if they're using the Chrome rendering engine under the hood then... what's the point of Edge even existing at all? If it's just a wrapper round Chrome, why not just pre-install Chrome and be done with it?
Does anyone else have he problem where Edge keeps resetting Adblock Plus settings? I have this on several computers. It's been going on for awhile now and is very annoying. I'm wondering if it's just me. I'm wondering if something got corrupted in my profile. However, as I mentioned, it's a problem on several computers. My suspicion has been that Microsoft is intentionally trying to make it not work.
I thought it was pathetically lame that Edge changed how Favorites are stored and basically obfuscated and hid them so that you can't back them up. I liked IE better where they were just files in the file system. Apparently something so simple is no longer fashionable.
People seem to be confused by who wrote what code, what it does, and how it is licensed.
Chromium is an open source web browser developed by Google. Chrome is just a version with some Google proprietary code added.
Chromium itself is MIT licensed, but it uses the Blink rendering engine.
Blink is a fork of Apple's Webkit which is itself a fork of KDE's KHTML. As KHTML is LGPL licensed, its forks are also LGPL licensed.
So this means that MS is incorporating LGPL code (which according to previous MS CEOs is "cancer" and "un-American" ) originally written for Linux and Unix desktops into Windows.
Joe Belfiore, corporate veep of Windows, announced the plan, "Ultimately, we want to make the web experience better for many different audiences," he said.One of those audiences may be macOS users, who despite not clamoring for Edge should have access to Microsoft's browser at some point: Belfiore said the company expects to bring Edge to other platforms like macOS.
Translation - our browser is shit, but we have plans to push it onto other platforms anyhow.
So, how about you fix your own platform before you try and screw up other ones ?
For clarity, I mean the whole platform, not just the browser, look objectively at the browser, Skype and Windows 10 to name but 3
Don’t forget that all OS’s already have a choice of good and reliable browsers, it’s just that none of them have Microosoft logos on them. Do you really expect that people will want to pollute their already working platform with a runt of the litter browser from Microsoft.
Then I see the author name at MS and realise that they have been spouting crap for years.
From: Satya Nadella
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:29 AM
To: Microsoft – All Employees; All MS Store Employees FTE
Subject: Embracing our future: Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge
Team,
Today, I’m announcing the formation of two new engineering teams to accelerate our innovation and better serve the needs of our customers and partners long into the future.
Over the past year, we have shared our vision for how the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge will shape the next phase of innovation. First, computing is more powerful and ubiquitous from the cloud to the edge. Second, AI capabilities are rapidly advancing across perception and cognition fueled by data and knowledge of the world. Third, physical and virtual worlds are coming together to create richer experiences that understand the context surrounding people, the things they use, the places they go, and their activities and relationships.
Clearly didnt run the Chrome spelling check, fueled is spelled with two L's (Fuelled).
I'm confused why Microsoft would develop their own browser yet again anyhow? I am sure that google would pay Microsoft money to put their version of the browser on every PC by default instead of IE/Edge and Microsoft could still insist the default search engine be bing....
they would then make money without expending any money and still keep their own search engine alive...
Vivaldi and Chrome, both chromium based, have some bad micro suttering when playing DAZN streams. I wonder how am I gonna watch my football once Edge joins the suttering crowed. The one good thing about Edge is that it's optimized for Windows. Now they want to take that away to make it multiplatform. Not such a good idea. I ought to try DAZN on IE.
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