I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it:
stick it to Google [0]
I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum) or WebKit (https://webkit.org), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have sufficed as an Electron replacement that they could drive forward, but I suppose they own Electron now with Github acquired)
For its not Apple anymore and certainly not Mozilla that is the prime competitor nowadays to Microsoft, its Google (With Chromebooks in the schools, and their small business and cloud offerings) and Amazon's Web Services division that are their main competitors now.
While I don't know how all the business logic went into this and ultimately came up with this being the best calculation at hand, I think this would have played better in the media too (especially if they leaned on Mozilla)
[0] I know Chromium != Google, but its pretty hard not to see that most of Chromium's development is downstream from Google and Google employs and/or otherwise has had some direct influence over the core team
Google does an insane amount of very deep work all the ways down to the compiler level getting Chromium compiling on Windows and compiling on different architectures. These teams are very well staffed.
It makes strategic sense to go with Chromium if they're aiming for ARM64 support if they can get a huge amount of work for free directly (as opposed to incidentally) from Google to support clang on Windows – which is a much bigger undertaking than it seems at first glance.
Firefox's internal code is a dumpster fire. I say that in the nicest way possible. Look at their 'jsapi' mailing list, they just break compatibility at will and don't properly version things. It doesn't have the same features v8 has with regards to isolation.
I'm not sure if quantum is actually all that different from pre-57 minus servo, however servo isn't magic, and only a small portion of that is really rust.
Overall firefox's codebases aren't meant to be used by anyone else. Chromium and v8 are.
With a strong Microsoft voice on the Chromium project, it will probably act as a counter to the Google voice. And Quantum and WebKit are nowhere close to Chromium, they're picky to a fault about HTML and CSS, it's just annoying to develop for them.
Nobody is competing on browser market share any more, that's a lost cause. With so much traffic going to mobile and apps now, it just doesn't make sense to be re-inventing the wheel when they could be investing in features that actually matter.
One thing that’s worse than Microsoft not adopting a technology is Microsoft adopting a technology.
Historically, they’ve used the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy quite often, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. But maybe I’m being overly skeptical/borderline cynical...
I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible.
It's still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we're going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).
> I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible.
This is already the norm. I use Safari and find many sites have issues. Before that I used Firefox and many sites had issues.
Typically the JS works, but styling often looks different (and worse) on Safari and Firefox.
> instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible
The browser vendors taking the lead over standards committees is how we got this far into HTML5, especially including Apple's/Safari's decision to ditch flash, and the WHATWG actually moving us forward vs the W3C.
Unless Blink has a history or an expectation of deprecating serious functionality in the future, is it really so bad if websites follow what's Chrome-compatible instead of 'a web standard'?
This is not even close to comparable. I’ve said in other threads the issue with IE and really IE6 - was for multiple years Microsoft did zero development. The browser didn’t patch zero day exploits for months or even a whole year. Fundamentally IE6 was an extension of Windows via ActiveX controls. The layout bugs were permanent. Remember zoom:1, hack to fix a layout issue or just float:right etc...
Blink is open source- you want to encourage innovation in the usability and utility of the browser and let people compete on market share of their browser product not how people’s web apps that run on that platform work or don’t work - The key is it’s open we’ll never have another IE6. Anyone can compile Blink. Look Microsoft is focusing on getting it to work on arm- cool. This is the opposite of locked to windoze only.
* There is a number of implementations of the same platform.
* Those implementations are competing and the market encourages them to be in-compatible with each other.
You can avoid that bad state by having an explicit standard and applying pressure on all implementations to meet that standard. It usually comes at the expense of slower innovation.
But another viable way to avoid that bad state is to simply not have competing implementations. A single canonical implementation also solves the problem of ensuring all users get a compatible experience. It can come at the expense of evolving in a way that doesn't meet user needs because there isn't a competitive incentive to win users.
I don't think there are perfect solutions, but I also don't think it's the end of the world if this becomes a monoculture. There are tons of "platforms" that are effectively mono-cultures and seem to be OK. Every rechargeable tool company has its own battery pack form factor. Up until recently, each laptop company had a different port for the AC adapter.
What I think this is really showing is that the market size of the web is shrinking relative to the size of the browser standards. Mobile apps have eaten up so much user share and HTML+CSS+JS+etc. has gotten so big and complex that the desktop web market can't effectively support multiple independent browser implementations any more. It's just too much work for too little return.
There's maybe an interesting lesson here in not letting your platform get too complex. New features are always nice, but they have a cost. If you pile on too many of them, you may undermine your platform's ability to support multiple independent implementations.
I mean, I don't know that I'm afraid of it, in the sense that it's clearly already been here for a few years now. Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies on Earth and decided they didn't have the resources to compete with the web's Chromium monoculture.
Don't people follow standards-compliant HTML/CSS/JS and compile to the browser of their choice? How often does a standards-compliant site work on Chrome but not on Firefox, assuming that all the targeted features you want are there?
If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it? I mean there was this "startup growth hacking" kind of craziness from a corporation and sudden admittance of defeat... It's very confusing.
Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don't we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It's not like they stopped the aggressive marketing for a few years and now saying that they can no longer keep up. They probably are doing it now still and implying that Edge is better. Is the marketing really so uninformed about such big decisions?
Microsoft is trying to drive traffic to Bing (and their other services). The rendering engine doesn't actually matter. Microsoft could just bundle Chrome with Windows but instead they are specifically taking the Chromium engine and putting it in an Edge shell. The only reason for that is to maintain control over the user to drive them to Microsoft properties.
Users don't care what's inside. Brand awareness is important. Edge will live on, even if it's just a Chromium skin.
And if Google abandons/closes Blink, MS will be forced to spend a bit on browser development again. (Or they'll just fork Firefox.)
Currently it's a win-win for them. They need the web to deliver their services (outlook, office365, azure), now they can develop those cheaper, as they don't have to spend that much on testing as Edge and Chrome will be likely very close.
Maintaining an independent browser has been of no benefit to Microsoft for very very long time. It has actually been an extremely costly effort with almost no result. That's my opinion.
The CEO Nadella however has no interest in this kind of thing carrying on, hence the Axe.
Pay attention:
With hindsight, perhaps the recent "crazy" efforts of the Edge team to increase usage and prove some kind of value were in-fact a last-ditch effort by sections of Microsoft to maintain a high-level of browser investment.
Big companies have lots of stakeholders. The person whose job it is to grow Edge's user numbers isn't the person whose job it is to make the call on the rendering engine. I don't know if their interests really conflict in this case, but in general it wouldn't be surprising if those two people/orgs sent mixed messages sometimes.
> f Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it?
Because it's not inferior in all ways? Edge has far better support for anything touch (Firefox and Chrome as still awful in this respect) and the battery life using Edge is far better than any of the other browsers.
I'm always forced to use Edge at times because of how much better those aspects are, even though other things are worse.
I also wonder if this is why they're going with Chromium; they can work on getting better touch and battery life on Windows built into the thing.
I don't think this is an admission that Edge's engine was inferior, just that it might be easier to convince people to use Edge if it used the same engine as Chrome. Using Chromium is just one less reason to not use Edge.
I mean if Microsoft can somehow shed the "Windows 10 spies on me" sentiment echoed so much around these parts then they might be able to capture some market share from Google who is more and more being perceived as big brother spying on you.
I doubt this move will help them but it will definitely make the justification for Enterprise adoption of Chrome a little harder.
Isn't that kind of exactly how a "nimble startup" would want to operate? Push push push, and then when it doesn't work "pivot". At least that's what a startup would say in a very grandiose blog post about "strengthening our core and starting a new exciting chapter." It seems to me like the Microsoft Edge team is trying to operate as nimbly as they can inside the giant and were given latitude to do so. I say good on them for regcognizing the situation and having the fortitude to make the decision that is probably best for MS's customers.
Because it is not about edge being worse or too expensive, is in good part about having electron apps run better and with more battery efficiency. so the choice is to either implement the whole v8 API on their engine or use v8.
> If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it?
Because the quality of the product has nothing to do with Microsoft wanting to maintain dominance at all costs. But don't worry, they will continue to try this with the Chromium-based browser, too.
Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux/POSIX as well.
I'm a bit sad by the announcement. I quite like edge, and now the browser ecosystem is getting narrower.
What should Mozilla do now? Should they just give up? Now that everywhere except ios/macos is blink (and v8 i think, i'm not sure after reading the announcement) why should anyone care for firefox?
Should also Mozilla start using chromium as a base? Mozilla will still be able to add quite the value in term of functionality, and with a bigger focus on privacy than google. I'm honestly not sure anymore.
Maintaining a browser is a hard work and it's getting harder, so it's (i think) unlikely a new player will ever enter the game, and having one engine where to test thing will make the job of creating websites and webapps simpler, on the other hand a monopoly can be a very bad thing for the web.
I like firefox a lot, and it's my daily driver, but if tomorrow they change the engine, i probably won't even notice, and not having to maintain the entire stack may allow them to better focus on other area, like decentralization, privacy, addons and services (firefox send is amazing), and may even allow a easier experimentation with new webapi.
I'm really not sure how to feel about this...
On a side note: I really do hope they make chromium and especialy CEF more modular. it's amazing to embed a web browser inside a app, but it's very hard to override some of his behavior, for example: while it's easy to have a custom cookie management system, there are no api to override localstorage or the chronology, only some workaround.
In a past work project we needed to build a thin client for a intranet and one of the requirement was, basically, an encrypted browser profile, custom CA management, client certificate and some other things, doing that using cef was very hard and it used a lot of hacks.
What I'm hoping happens here is that this means more focus on Chromium and potentially more work on Electron + Carlo.
Electron is amazing but it's pretty bloated per app. If it's made lighter weight and something like Carlo can just use the OS installed browser in an isolated process you'll have the best of both worlds.
You can use web standards to build your apps and at the same time dock into native OS features without the massive bloat.
Right now Polar is about 100MB to download and uses about 200MB of RAM. Not the end of the world but also not super fun.
There's the issue of one central monoculture but there's still the opportunity to fork if chrome/edge gain too much market share.
I feel like I should be happy as a web dev to hear that I no longer have to support a browser engine made by Microsoft (which has been a huge pain and despite this will be a huge pain for a while due to people still using old browsers) but this feels bittersweet. It feels like we're taking the engineering out of everything because companies can make more money by not innovating.
The readme goes into more detail than the blog post announcement, including emphasis on Windows on ARM, information about WebRTC for UWP, and explicit confirmation that they plan to bring Edge to Windows 7 and 8 as well as macOS.
Will Microsoft use V8 as the javascript engine then as well or continue to use Chakra?
If they won’t continue to use Chakra, what happens to that project then? It is open sourced and there’s work to make Node.js use it: https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore
All the more important to support Servo and Gecko – we can’t have all browsers be of WebKit origin – we rather need more initiatives like Servo, that reinvents the engine from scratch, optimized for modern environments.
When Microsoft released Edge, they claimed bugs plagued IE because they couldn't update IE without OS updates. Edge as a "store app" would receive frequent updates, independent of Windows OS updates. They ended up tying Edge to Windows. And kept promising but never delivered. Instead of small frequent browser updates, we got large frequent OS updates. Maybe now that Edge's dead, they'll slow down the frequency of Windows update a bit.
In the beginning, IE was speedier than Edge. Had more features too. Edge was fragile and froze often. Updates fixed some of the speed issues. I froze my windows update so, I don't know how it stacks up right now.
To increase Windows store usage, MS also decided to tie Edge extension to the Windows store. This wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, I like the idea of getting all my stuff in one place. However, MS decided to create the annoying store app. I'm on a desktop, a real computer. Why on earth can't I open the store on a browser and have the installer do its work in the background? This is where I drew the line with Edge.
I'm not surprised that Edge's marketshare declined with increased Windows 10 marketshare. Edge is Microsoft's second Windows 8. They are both PC software designed to please mobile users and infuriate PC or touch-less users. And both hide settings - make it a chore to change minor settings.
I believe throwing Windows Phone under the bus has come back to bite Microsoft in the ass and Edge is just a trailer.
Microsoft is still gutting Windows 10 - turning it into a phone OS for desktop users, replacing working software with incomplete toys.
As far as I'm concerned, Google didn't beat MS in the browser game. MS simply frustrated IE users over to Chrome by forcing Edge on them.
Windows is the next software MS will abandon for Google's alternative. All Google has to do is not mess up android.
If you remember Nokia/MS's failed fork of Android you'll feel the chill. Microsoft now sells android smartphones in both its online and retail stores.
I predict MS is not done with Edge. At the end, they'll abandon that too for Chrome. And all they'll do is change the default search engine to Bing.
Funny that minor side project of KDE is now responsible for the vast majority of today's Internet traffic. Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work?
EdgeHTML is also used for embedding HTML into UWP, and controls have been released for WPF and Win32. I wonder what will be the story of that. Will that be transparently changed to Chrome, can it be changed to Chrome or will EdgeHTML be used only for that?
What I find a bit curious is that's a fully Chromium based browser, it's not simply based on the Blink rendering engine. So, it will be much closer (probably) to Chromium/Chrome than other blink-based browsers like Brave or Opera.
I'd really like to understand the rationale behind this choice. What they'd like to leverage from Chromium that Blink alone wouldn't have?
It's crazy! This is not the Microsoft from ~5 years ago. They have really changed! Opening up to linux, cross-platform apps, open sourcing tech, open sourcing their patents(!), and now using open source chromium for MS Edge? Dam. I never thought I'd see the day...
Excellent news. Google mostly does not have their own desktop OS to "protect", so they are probably incentivised to make the browser and the apps running in it feel as "native" as possible, with proper access to important local resources when relevant. Considering how Apple is dragging their feet with service worker and offline support on Safari (where they have a monopoly on iOS), this is probably a good thing overall. Fingers crossed!
[+] [-] no_wizard|7 years ago|reply
stick it to Google [0]
I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum) or WebKit (https://webkit.org), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have sufficed as an Electron replacement that they could drive forward, but I suppose they own Electron now with Github acquired)
For its not Apple anymore and certainly not Mozilla that is the prime competitor nowadays to Microsoft, its Google (With Chromebooks in the schools, and their small business and cloud offerings) and Amazon's Web Services division that are their main competitors now.
While I don't know how all the business logic went into this and ultimately came up with this being the best calculation at hand, I think this would have played better in the media too (especially if they leaned on Mozilla)
[0] I know Chromium != Google, but its pretty hard not to see that most of Chromium's development is downstream from Google and Google employs and/or otherwise has had some direct influence over the core team
[+] [-] ynx|7 years ago|reply
It makes strategic sense to go with Chromium if they're aiming for ARM64 support if they can get a huge amount of work for free directly (as opposed to incidentally) from Google to support clang on Windows – which is a much bigger undertaking than it seems at first glance.
[+] [-] devwastaken|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if quantum is actually all that different from pre-57 minus servo, however servo isn't magic, and only a small portion of that is really rust.
Overall firefox's codebases aren't meant to be used by anyone else. Chromium and v8 are.
[+] [-] jbob2000|7 years ago|reply
Nobody is competing on browser market share any more, that's a lost cause. With so much traffic going to mobile and apps now, it just doesn't make sense to be re-inventing the wheel when they could be investing in features that actually matter.
[+] [-] cududa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tedunangst|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirkules|7 years ago|reply
Historically, they’ve used the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy quite often, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. But maybe I’m being overly skeptical/borderline cynical...
[+] [-] tombert|7 years ago|reply
It's still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we're going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).
[+] [-] danpalmer|7 years ago|reply
This is already the norm. I use Safari and find many sites have issues. Before that I used Firefox and many sites had issues.
Typically the JS works, but styling often looks different (and worse) on Safari and Firefox.
[+] [-] simonsarris|7 years ago|reply
The browser vendors taking the lead over standards committees is how we got this far into HTML5, especially including Apple's/Safari's decision to ditch flash, and the WHATWG actually moving us forward vs the W3C.
Unless Blink has a history or an expectation of deprecating serious functionality in the future, is it really so bad if websites follow what's Chrome-compatible instead of 'a web standard'?
[+] [-] taf2|7 years ago|reply
Blink is open source- you want to encourage innovation in the usability and utility of the browser and let people compete on market share of their browser product not how people’s web apps that run on that platform work or don’t work - The key is it’s open we’ll never have another IE6. Anyone can compile Blink. Look Microsoft is focusing on getting it to work on arm- cool. This is the opposite of locked to windoze only.
[+] [-] munificent|7 years ago|reply
* There is a number of implementations of the same platform.
* Those implementations are competing and the market encourages them to be in-compatible with each other.
You can avoid that bad state by having an explicit standard and applying pressure on all implementations to meet that standard. It usually comes at the expense of slower innovation.
But another viable way to avoid that bad state is to simply not have competing implementations. A single canonical implementation also solves the problem of ensuring all users get a compatible experience. It can come at the expense of evolving in a way that doesn't meet user needs because there isn't a competitive incentive to win users.
I don't think there are perfect solutions, but I also don't think it's the end of the world if this becomes a monoculture. There are tons of "platforms" that are effectively mono-cultures and seem to be OK. Every rechargeable tool company has its own battery pack form factor. Up until recently, each laptop company had a different port for the AC adapter.
What I think this is really showing is that the market size of the web is shrinking relative to the size of the browser standards. Mobile apps have eaten up so much user share and HTML+CSS+JS+etc. has gotten so big and complex that the desktop web market can't effectively support multiple independent browser implementations any more. It's just too much work for too little return.
There's maybe an interesting lesson here in not letting your platform get too complex. New features are always nice, but they have a cost. If you pile on too many of them, you may undermine your platform's ability to support multiple independent implementations.
[+] [-] cwyers|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ocfx|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] egeozcan|7 years ago|reply
Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don't we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It's not like they stopped the aggressive marketing for a few years and now saying that they can no longer keep up. They probably are doing it now still and implying that Edge is better. Is the marketing really so uninformed about such big decisions?
[+] [-] wvenable|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pas|7 years ago|reply
And if Google abandons/closes Blink, MS will be forced to spend a bit on browser development again. (Or they'll just fork Firefox.)
Currently it's a win-win for them. They need the web to deliver their services (outlook, office365, azure), now they can develop those cheaper, as they don't have to spend that much on testing as Edge and Chrome will be likely very close.
[+] [-] dagaci|7 years ago|reply
The CEO Nadella however has no interest in this kind of thing carrying on, hence the Axe.
Pay attention:
With hindsight, perhaps the recent "crazy" efforts of the Edge team to increase usage and prove some kind of value were in-fact a last-ditch effort by sections of Microsoft to maintain a high-level of browser investment.
[+] [-] oconnor663|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|7 years ago|reply
Because it's not inferior in all ways? Edge has far better support for anything touch (Firefox and Chrome as still awful in this respect) and the battery life using Edge is far better than any of the other browsers.
I'm always forced to use Edge at times because of how much better those aspects are, even though other things are worse.
I also wonder if this is why they're going with Chromium; they can work on getting better touch and battery life on Windows built into the thing.
[+] [-] cptskippy|7 years ago|reply
I mean if Microsoft can somehow shed the "Windows 10 spies on me" sentiment echoed so much around these parts then they might be able to capture some market share from Google who is more and more being perceived as big brother spying on you.
I doubt this move will help them but it will definitely make the justification for Enterprise adoption of Chrome a little harder.
[+] [-] sebazzz|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
[+] [-] johnm1019|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ucaetano|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kiriakasis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pkasting|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|7 years ago|reply
Because the quality of the product has nothing to do with Microsoft wanting to maintain dominance at all costs. But don't worry, they will continue to try this with the Chromium-based browser, too.
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hexmiles|7 years ago|reply
What should Mozilla do now? Should they just give up? Now that everywhere except ios/macos is blink (and v8 i think, i'm not sure after reading the announcement) why should anyone care for firefox?
Should also Mozilla start using chromium as a base? Mozilla will still be able to add quite the value in term of functionality, and with a bigger focus on privacy than google. I'm honestly not sure anymore.
Maintaining a browser is a hard work and it's getting harder, so it's (i think) unlikely a new player will ever enter the game, and having one engine where to test thing will make the job of creating websites and webapps simpler, on the other hand a monopoly can be a very bad thing for the web.
I like firefox a lot, and it's my daily driver, but if tomorrow they change the engine, i probably won't even notice, and not having to maintain the entire stack may allow them to better focus on other area, like decentralization, privacy, addons and services (firefox send is amazing), and may even allow a easier experimentation with new webapi.
I'm really not sure how to feel about this...
On a side note: I really do hope they make chromium and especialy CEF more modular. it's amazing to embed a web browser inside a app, but it's very hard to override some of his behavior, for example: while it's easy to have a custom cookie management system, there are no api to override localstorage or the chronology, only some workaround.
In a past work project we needed to build a thin client for a intranet and one of the requirement was, basically, an encrypted browser profile, custom CA management, client certificate and some other things, doing that using cef was very hard and it used a lot of hacks.
edit: correct some grammar
[+] [-] ridiculous_fish|7 years ago|reply
Is Chromium de-facto controlled by Google, or more community driven?
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
I'm insanely excited about it!
I've been working on a new reader and documentation manager for PDF and cached web content:
https://getpolarized.io/
It's based on Electron and targets Chromium.
What I'm hoping happens here is that this means more focus on Chromium and potentially more work on Electron + Carlo.
Electron is amazing but it's pretty bloated per app. If it's made lighter weight and something like Carlo can just use the OS installed browser in an isolated process you'll have the best of both worlds.
You can use web standards to build your apps and at the same time dock into native OS features without the massive bloat.
Right now Polar is about 100MB to download and uses about 200MB of RAM. Not the end of the world but also not super fun.
There's the issue of one central monoculture but there's still the opportunity to fork if chrome/edge gain too much market share.
[+] [-] jpangs88|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vatueil|7 years ago|reply
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge
The readme goes into more detail than the blog post announcement, including emphasis on Windows on ARM, information about WebRTC for UWP, and explicit confirmation that they plan to bring Edge to Windows 7 and 8 as well as macOS.
Also, looks like they're using the MIT license.
[+] [-] VoxPelli|7 years ago|reply
If they won’t continue to use Chakra, what happens to that project then? It is open sourced and there’s work to make Node.js use it: https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore
All the more important to support Servo and Gecko – we can’t have all browsers be of WebKit origin – we rather need more initiatives like Servo, that reinvents the engine from scratch, optimized for modern environments.
[+] [-] vezycash|7 years ago|reply
In the beginning, IE was speedier than Edge. Had more features too. Edge was fragile and froze often. Updates fixed some of the speed issues. I froze my windows update so, I don't know how it stacks up right now.
To increase Windows store usage, MS also decided to tie Edge extension to the Windows store. This wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, I like the idea of getting all my stuff in one place. However, MS decided to create the annoying store app. I'm on a desktop, a real computer. Why on earth can't I open the store on a browser and have the installer do its work in the background? This is where I drew the line with Edge.
I'm not surprised that Edge's marketshare declined with increased Windows 10 marketshare. Edge is Microsoft's second Windows 8. They are both PC software designed to please mobile users and infuriate PC or touch-less users. And both hide settings - make it a chore to change minor settings.
I believe throwing Windows Phone under the bus has come back to bite Microsoft in the ass and Edge is just a trailer.
Microsoft is still gutting Windows 10 - turning it into a phone OS for desktop users, replacing working software with incomplete toys.
As far as I'm concerned, Google didn't beat MS in the browser game. MS simply frustrated IE users over to Chrome by forcing Edge on them.
Windows is the next software MS will abandon for Google's alternative. All Google has to do is not mess up android.
If you remember Nokia/MS's failed fork of Android you'll feel the chill. Microsoft now sells android smartphones in both its online and retail stores.
I predict MS is not done with Edge. At the end, they'll abandon that too for Chrome. And all they'll do is change the default search engine to Bing.
[+] [-] sprash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebazzz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retroity|7 years ago|reply
I really wish that instead of doing this Microsoft would just stick with EdgeHTML and maybe open-source it.
[+] [-] alanfranzoni|7 years ago|reply
I'd really like to understand the rationale behind this choice. What they'd like to leverage from Chromium that Blink alone wouldn't have?
[+] [-] garysahota93|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _nickwhite|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kjeldahl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikusR|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|7 years ago|reply