Microsoft Edge preview builds for macOS

[saagarjha]

Discussed a bit yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963291

[userbinator]

It's just their Chromium shell, and not using their own rendering engine. (In case anyone was wondering if this was about EdgeHTML being ported.)

[onion2k]

EdgeHTML isn't getting ported. It's dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML

[simonh]

This was just a matter of time coming. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Linux port soon, if fact I'd be surprised not to.

The motivation seems to be to establish a solid consistent foundation layer for Microsoft to deliver cross platform Electron apps, like Teams and VS Code. EdgeHTML is no good for that, so it got ditched for Chromium.

[pavlov]

EdgeHTML is being killed on Windows as well. Chromium with Microsoft chrome is their new default browser.

[gshdg]

I’m really interested to find out how they’re approaching privacy. If they take a strong stance, this might be a good alternative to chrome for those sites that support nothing else.

[uptown]

From a practical standpoint exactly what does Google collect from one’s browsing activity when they use Chrome? Not sure I’ve ever seen the technical analysis of what kinds of exposure users have.

[princekolt]

Why not Safari? It's fast, power-efficient, and native.

[sureaboutthis]

Windows itself is not a bastion of privacy.

[toastal]

Why not just use Brave then?

[kgraves]

> a good alternative to chrome for those sites that support nothing else.

Edge is literally Chrome with Microsoft slapped on top of it.

[adgasf]

Question about MS strategy: why would someone use this over Chromium or Firefox?

[night815]

I think MS is making money elsewhere so they don't need browser market share but they do need to provide a browser.

[jpalomaki]

On Windows (and corporate environment) one reason is that it is easier to manage. Comes with Windows, updates via Windows update and Microsoft provides support (for those with agreements).

[nailer]

It's much faster. Microsoft ripped out about 30 different Google-specific components, I think @ericlaw tweeted the list a little while ago.

Additionally Microsoft pay attention to developers. Chrome Devtools has has a Headers tab, with response headers and then request headers. There's a seperate tab called 'Response' which only contains the response body. I fed this back to Google (suggesting a request and response tab with headers and body) and (per Google) the response was from an engineer saying they personally liked it so therefore there was no reason to change it. Microsoft's feedback was they're actually looking at more logical layouts.

[nicoburns]

Well if it comes pre-installed with windows then that's one big reason. As a power user, I'd probably install another browser. But given that this is basically Chrome, there's not a lot of reason for an average user to switch.

[DHPersonal]

If Microsoft integrates all the functionality of the original Edge into Chromium Edge, then it will be a great browser to use on their Surface line of tablet computers. Without those features, it’s a non-Google Chrome with a large company backing its feature updates and contributing to the codebase’s continued improvement, along with syncing features and potential better integration with Windows. Firefox has a lot of good features still, but its small usage amount has made some development budgets ignore it or drop support of it on some sites I have visited.

[sorrowfulgeek]

This is Chromium. Maybe you mean Chrome. Someone would use this over Chrome if someone doesn’t want to be surveilled by Google. Of course now you’ll be surveilled by MS. It is better when your surveillance dossier is split among multiple entities.

[SentientNo4]

I assume they bet on people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff and corporate people who use macs but work with MS infrastructure (like Exchange and Sharepoint).

[aardshark]

Well speaking for me personally, Firefox runs terribly on my Macbook and it would be nice to have an alternative to Chrome.

[chapium]

Firefox runs rather poorly on Mac.

[jaabe]

I think you can ask yourself that question with a lot of Microsoft products these days, and we use (and like) a lot of them at my place if business.

I mean Microsoft has the upper hand compared to Google or AWS because they are better at GDPR and privacy shield stuff. Microsoft is also miles better in terms of enterprise support, but it’s those reasons and not their solutions that sell.

[fnordsensei]

How come that every single Microsoft application for MacOS requires an installation? It makes me suspicious that they're gunking things up unnecessarily.

[eddyg]

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19967190

[rsweeney21]

Let's say Microsoft finds a way to gain a large market share with Edge. Couldn't they cause significant damage to Google if they enabled ad blocking by default? 90% of Google revenue is still ad revenue. Say they got 50% market share. If all of the sudden 50% of internet users started blocking ads, wouldn't that be a pretty bad thing for Google? Like put them out of business overnight kind of bad? While not hurting Microsoft at all?

I wonder if Google saw this vulnerability years ago and so they decided to build Chrome to protect themselves.

[tcper]

Finally, IE come back to Mac, since IE5 in Mac OS 9.

[pavlov]

IE was the default browser in original Mac OS X as well. Safari didn't ship until 10.2 I think.

[Angostura]

IE 5.2 was damn good.

[justacomment__]

A delightful browser on a delightful UI. Truly we are blessed.

[usermac]

I installed it an noticed they have their own App Store.

[notjustanymike]

As someone who develops a web app with medical content, this can't come out soon enough. We'll finally be able to get our windows 7 loving clients off of IE11.

[jamesgeck0]

You can drop support for Windows 7 in January, same as Microsoft. Unfortunately, IE11 is a component of Windows 8.1, which will be supported until 2023.

[5trokerac3]

Why do I get the feeling this will be used by developers to say they tested Edge when they really didn't?

[bovermyer]

A mix of cynicism and experience, I would say.