I must say, I'm a little bit impressed.
it's fast and has a lot of settings that are simple to understand and still looks to favor privacy.
it can run Extensions from Microsoft and you can install additional extension stores (like google) with just a click. (of course not all extensions will work, like 1password+app didn't but 1password x, did)
Guess I don't see any reason for a 4th (and even more if you consider Chrome variants) browser to exist.
It takes a lot to make me get off of Safari. About the only time I do is when I must have Flash for streaming services and then I use Chrome's integrated flash support.
I guess if MS adds all of the proprietary features of Edge on Windows so that macOS users can run locked in Windows web apps that might be a highly attractive reason but it seems they're not going to be doing that.
I'm wondering if they're using integrated Keychain support? I guess if it's build on Chromium perhaps not. Frankly for me that's a non starter.
They don't support keychain for the individual sites (though it does use the keychain password like chrome to encrypt site logon credentials) but it does use it for application passwords. Like logging into Edge itself for the user data syncing.
Except Edge isn't a Mac-looking application. It starts with Chromium which isn't a standard Mac UI and gloms on plenty of stuff that's not Mac-like either.
What's gonna be the advantage of using Edge over Chrome from a developer standpoint?
Anyone know why you need to run an installer (with admin access)? Chrome is a plain-old .app which you can drag from a disk image... Is Edge installing shared frameworks or something?
Quick edit: extracting the contents of the installer, it looks like maybe it wants to install the Office auto updater at the same time...
Well, now they have telemetry of me launching the installer, realizing that they don't give any context about what is being installed, and closing it...
I'm having trouble digging it up now but at one point there was a domain associated with promoting Exchange 2003 that Microsoft let go of. It was still linked from all their docs but the new owner had it redirected to a Youtube with a fly fishing tutorial. Strangest hijack I've ever seen.
What is an idea of Edge on Mac? Is there any incentive to provide a browser that is available on other OS-es than Windows? Vivaldi and Opera went similar way, trying to cut some piece of browser market cake using a Blink engine and similar ecosystem as Chrome. Except Edge-only (i.e. Skype, Office365, Stadia-like platform) business game I don't see why it should cut in a market, especially in non-Windows operating systems.
Well, it helps web developers who want to test their sites in Edge but have a Macbook or something. That's not a huge audience, but it's a potentially valuable one, especially if Edge somehow finds an audience with Windows users.
> helps web developers who want to test their sites in Edge
I am a bit biased after your comment. Microsoft Edge is going to have Blink as an underlying rendering engine, the same as in Chromium, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi etc. etc. You have pointed out that it might "help web developers", then could you explain me how there might be some difference (even negligible) in rendering between those browsers since they all run on the same technology? It's not Trident nor EdgeHTML anymore, there won't be any star-slash-backslash, -ms prefixes, filter() nor other hacks [0] that we had to use for IE. It does not look like Microsoft is going to fork Blink anytime soon, because it will be quite the same thing as they would stay and continue development on EdgeHTML engine.
I don't see any advantage of having Edge on macOS, FreeBSD, Linux, etc. for web developers. However, in case of end-users the cross-platform browser have more sense, especially when they got used to specific features and ecosystem. Lack of macOS browser might lead to churn or a problem with adoption to it.
Aha, thanks for clarification! It makes sense now, but I am looking forward to see what versions of Trident they are going to provide. It looks like they might completely strip possibility to download Windows VMs with IE [0], if they are going to roll out all currently available engines (IE8 to IE11).
Not that I'm saying your assertion is wrong, but the end result of this move by Microsoft means that Chrome could be used as nearly a drop-in replacement.
I figured Chrome-in-Edge-on-Windows was meant as a stopgap to fix a browser that was already included with the OS. With OSX, they could simply stop offering the browser and it would have the same net effect.
Microsoft has shown interest in supporting PWAs on macOS ahead of Safari. Better PWA support on macOS may mean fewer Electron applications, at least.
Microsoft has also shown a lot of interesting in being a synchronizer of a user's bookmarks/tabs/etc across devices (and services). The Microsoft Graph and especially the Timeline is a big cross-platform push for Microsoft. The Browser is the biggest "event surface" for the Timeline (both in displaying past activities and centering present ones).
Common management platform with Windows Edge for enterprises maybe? Things like per-domain security policies, accepted certificates, plugins/addons, ...
I see it as a version of Blink (the fastest and most secure rendering engine there is) which is not controlled by Google. To me, it is something to consider.
Blink is still controlled by Google. Microsoft doesn't control anything.
They obviously don't control Google's Blink. They could fork it, but in that case they'd have to maintain a browser engine again. If Microsoft could/wanted to do that, they could have just stayed with the old IE Edge.
Since it's in their interests to have a browser installed on Windows by default, if Google did something wrong, they will definitely fork Blink. What alternative do they have?
They have no alternative. Like everyone else, they're at the mercy of Google.
It doesn't matter if it's in Microsoft interests to fork Blink, as that would require maintaining their fork. Which they can't. If Microsoft were able to maintain a browser engine, they would not be switching to Blink in the first place.
The history of "Blink" has been Company X using it, then eventually forking, and winning:
Apple decides to use KHTML instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows a very small team to focus on user experience, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Safari. Eventually Apple forks KHTML into WebKit.
Google decides to use WebKit instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows Google to focus on unique features like process isolation and the new V8 javascript engine, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Chrome. Eventually Google forks WebKit into Blink.
Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows Microsoft to focus on privacy-related features, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Edge Chrome. [What will happen next?]
The HTML spec is HUGE, and getting to a point where a new engine can successfully render all the quirks of HTML, CSS, and JS (and WebAssembly, and...) is a harder and harder task every year. Look how long its taking Firefox to get their Rust rewrite going. If you want to focus on end-user features, it makes no sense to start by arbitrarily making a new browser engine that's goal is to... successfully replicate the behavior of existing competing engines (since that's the real standard). If your competitor is open source, then just use that, and focus on what you want to provide.
It is my opinion that people have severely misinterpreted the power dynamic here. Every Windows machine will soon ship with a browser that, as is evident in this very thread, is "basically Chrome"... minus all the Google ID stuff. This is a nightmare for Google, what do they have to offer? "Download Chrome so we can track you!". That's the way its going to sound if Edge Chrome correctly puts its privacy features front and center. Meanwhile, they're getting support for CSS grid or whatever-js-feature for free from Google's hundreds of workers on Chrome.
And the best way to fight this is with a browser that ships with the OS that takes you to Bing instead of Google.
Either way, this seems orthogonal to the question at hand. Google will push Chrome in all those places regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. Having complete parity with Chrome rendering seems at worst neutral, and at best competitive as Google now needs to rely entirely on marketing (or on features present exclusively in Chrome and not Chromium). I'm not saying Google doesn't have many cards left to play here, but this move is absolutely a net positive for Microsoft in this fight.
I fear that Microsoft has given up the fight, and is content to enjoy the seigniorage from defaulting the home page on Windows, while allowing Google to completely dominate the evolution of the web. Time will tell.
> Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of the browser engine they already had.
The stated goal of the EdgeHTML rewrite was to "be fully compatible with the WebKit layout engine used by Safari, Chrome and other browsers. Microsoft has stated that "any Edge–WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing."" [1] It seems the hardest way of doing this is black-boxing WebKit and making a parallel implementation.
What's going on here is that browser rendering is being commoditized. Just like OpenSSL, or Clang, it doesn't necessarily make sense to implement these on your own anymore, there's no clear business reason. There is little to be gained from having a better flex-box implementation, but lots to be lost by having a worse one than the dominant browser. Using Chrome's source disarms this problem.
> "Download Chrome because it's a better and faster browser!" It doesn't have to be true, people believe it anyway.
I mean, maybe... that's not what's won every previous iteration of the browser wars. Its been either through exploiting an existing monopoly (IE, Safari on iOS) or merit (FireFox). Sure, doesn't have to go that way now, but I don't know why we assume that people are going to be moved by "Chrome is faster!" advertising on something that most people prefer not to care about probably.
> "Download Chrome because Edge doesn't support Youtube!" They totally didn't intentionally break Edge.
They can do this regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. If anything, using Chrome makes it more blatant that they're purposely doing it since there's no plausible deniability that its a weird rendering bug in Edge's code. So this seems neither here nor there, if any Edge with any engine got popular then they could choose to go this route and then maybe we'd have an antitrust case on our hands. Unless the argument is "Microsoft should stop making browsers altogether", not sure what the point of this is (maybe that is the thing that is being proposed?).
The entire reason they adopted blink was YouTube putting invisible divs over the video and breaking edge’s hardware acceleration for video.
They rewarded googles shitty behaviour by becoming dependent on them for a rendering engine, and any chance of forking is pointless because they’ll be back where they started: using something different than google, and thus ripe for shit code on google properties.
A browser that can't hardware-accelerate <video> if there's an invisible <div> above it is broken. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do and any other browser can handle that.
I agree that they should have just fixed the issue but my point was that there’s zero chance they’re going to fork blink because their reason for adopting it was google properties doing weird things in their own engine - after enough time google properties will do weird things in their forked engine too.
> how long its taking Firefox to get their Rust rewrite going
Nobody is rewriting Firefox into Rust. Servo is a new research engine not intended to replace Gecko, and some Servo components are being reused back in Gecko (Stylo and WebRender). These are fairly self-contained. The bulk of Gecko is still that C++ codebase and it's here to stay.
"Look how long Servo, one of the few examples of a mostly-from scratch browser engine that we can look to and thus compare (although technically some components of Servo are borrowed from Gecko so even it is not fully a from-scratch effort), is taking to write."
The point was to find any comparable effort to demonstrate what an undertaking this is. Servo was started 7 years ago by one of the few companies with engine expertise. Although, granted, I agree that perhaps framing it as a rewrite might lead you to believe more effort is being placed there than actually is (although I don't think it's totally unfair to look at it that way given their original embedding goals).
MS are able to maintain a browser engine, it just isn't worth them to do it when IE compatibility is an afterthought for a great many sites. Maintaining a fork of Blink would be a lot more worthwhile.
There's a big difference between writing their own engine from scratch and forking Blink. For starters, even if they fork, they can still keep cherry-picking fixes and new features from Google's Blink. After all Webkit is under the GPL so they can't just close the source.
They were able to maintain and extend it. But they were starting from way behind while Google was rapidly adding new features.
Microsoft had to choose between adding their own enhancements and standards (the reason for having an engine into the first place) and playing catch up to Google. With Blink they can have both.
Does this mean that they will start allowing add-ons in the Android app? If I can get a web browser for my Android that uses Chrome's engine and allows extensions I'll switch to it in a heartbeat.
(And before someone replies with Kiwi, I personally am not comfortable using a (practically) closed source fork of mobile Chrome mantained by a single, unknown individual)
It's OK, but it's been kind of glitchy and it sucks my battery up more than Chrome does by default. An ad blocker helps a lot and makes it better than Chrome, but I think something based off of Blink that allows uBlock Origin would be best.
Plus Firefox on Android has been EOLed until Mozilla finishes their new Android browser rewrite.
IE11 Mode hasn't even yet made into Windows Insider builds yet. Also, the assumption is that it would have to be Windows only because IE11 itself is (and likely always will be) Windows only.
The fragmentation between Edge on Mac sans IE11 vs Edge on Windows w/ IE11 mode will be very confusing.
How do you even market this? The whole point of IE11 is to ensure legacy IE compatible apps don't break. But then you can't advertise this with thought the huge caveat that it's a benefit on Edge Windows only.
If I get all the benefits of Chrome without weird Google ID stuff (and without having to download and/or build my own Chromium), then I'd use it. Might forget to switch the search engine to Google from Bing. Now they're making ad money.
Regardless, if you want to take the browser market seriously, you need to be cross-platform. Especially if all the hard work of cross-platformness has already been done for you (as is probably the case with Chrome).
For me Safari, Messages, Facetime and Photos all share a fatal flaw. They only work with the Apple ecosystem and/or when the person you want to communicate with are in the Apple ecosystem. But I suspect most here are ok with that. It is one of those things which Apple for some reason generally gets a pass for on HN but others such as Google do not. Whenever a Google application doesn't function, functions suboptimally or Google introduces a proprietary solution HN tends to work itself into a frenzy but Apple restricting it apps and services only to Apple products barely raises an eyebrow.
Safari also suffers from slow adoption of new standards and a dearth of extensions compared to either Chrome or Firefox.
The ecosystem argument I understand when talking about iMessage and FaceTime. How the argument pertains to Photos or Safari is unclear to me.
I uses Photos as a personal photos archive, and it works.
And Safari is just a web browser, and the best one at that IMHO. It's fast and sleek, with the smallest browser chrome of them all. And I'm curious which standards it (you must mean WebKit) has been slow to adopt. I doubt there's enough of them, compared to Chromium, to call the whole browser slow to adopt.
I use Safari even for Web development purposes, as I personally don't need anything else besides the stock Inspector/Console. Hence extensions don't matter to me as much.
The ecosystem argument pertains to Safari because Apple doesn't produce versions of Safari for other platforms which means bookmarks and extensions can be shared across platforms as they can with Chrome and Firefox.
For Photos the argument pertains because it doesn't tie in with any other photo storage services except their own. For instance macOS has my Google account information and the ability to use it for Mail, Contacts, Calendars and Notes but Photos won't use Google Photos to store web albums.
Safari is an app using WebKit which means if WebKit is slow to adopt than Safari which uses it is also. Some of the technologies I care about that Safari/WebKit has been slow to deploy include WebRTC, a variety of standards around progressive web apps such as service workers and the Push API and support of open audio and video codecs.
My main issue has been rules failing to trigger rather consistently, maybe that's been fixed (as I just threw my hands up and went with Thunderbird years ago and it's filtering --not the greatest, but consistent which is where the value for me is)?
I must say, I'm a little bit impressed. it's fast and has a lot of settings that are simple to understand and still looks to favor privacy.
it can run Extensions from Microsoft and you can install additional extension stores (like google) with just a click. (of course not all extensions will work, like 1password+app didn't but 1password x, did)
Guess I don't see any reason for a 4th (and even more if you consider Chrome variants) browser to exist.
It takes a lot to make me get off of Safari. About the only time I do is when I must have Flash for streaming services and then I use Chrome's integrated flash support.
I guess if MS adds all of the proprietary features of Edge on Windows so that macOS users can run locked in Windows web apps that might be a highly attractive reason but it seems they're not going to be doing that.
I'm wondering if they're using integrated Keychain support? I guess if it's build on Chromium perhaps not. Frankly for me that's a non starter.
> I'm wondering if they're using integrated Keychain support?
ah sorry can't answer that, the first thing I did was checking out 1password. I mostly replace 1password as the password manager for my browsers.
They don't support keychain for the individual sites (though it does use the keychain password like chrome to encrypt site logon credentials) but it does use it for application passwords. Like logging into Edge itself for the user data syncing.
AFAIK keychain access is only allowed for apps distributed through the Mac AppStore since a while. This is why Chrome removed the feature.
There's nothing in the developer section
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security
that specifies this restriction. Maybe I couldn't find the reference.
I'm pretty sure the Chrome folks removed it because they didn't think the Keychain was secure (at least from the readings I've done).
That's not true at all.
All macOS apps have full access to the Security framework in macOS including Keychain and keychain element management.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security
the best reason for Edge/Mac to exist is simple: developers, developers, developers.
Except Edge isn't a Mac-looking application. It starts with Chromium which isn't a standard Mac UI and gloms on plenty of stuff that's not Mac-like either.
What's gonna be the advantage of using Edge over Chrome from a developer standpoint?
Anyone know why you need to run an installer (with admin access)? Chrome is a plain-old .app which you can drag from a disk image... Is Edge installing shared frameworks or something?
Quick edit: extracting the contents of the installer, it looks like maybe it wants to install the Office auto updater at the same time...
It runs a bunch of pre and postinstall scripts, which seem to mainly be sending install telemetry to Microsoft: https://imgur.com/LbCd89v
There's a `send_event` binary in the package which appears to post data to https://self.events.data.microsoft.com/OneCollector/1.0/
Well, now they have telemetry of me launching the installer, realizing that they don't give any context about what is being installed, and closing it...
Microsoft demoed the ability to install PWAs from Edge on macOS at BUILD, so maybe the installer is partly to prepare to support that?
I get that Dropbox needs an installer (it integrates with Finder etc).
For a web browser, it seems a bit gratuitous. I'm holding off for now.
That domain name looks like a phishing attack waiting to happen.
Microsoft seems to have a history of picking very poor domain names.
Google does the same. withgoogle.com?
Right? If you asked me, I'd say that domain "microsoftedgeinsider.com" belongs to some Indian scamming call centre.
For what reason have they purchased that domain instead of hosting it under microsoft.com ?
Buying a domain was easier than dealing with the MS department of subdomains of microsoft.com?
I would have believed that if it were HP. Snark aside, it is unusual behavior coming from Microsoft.
I'm having trouble digging it up now but at one point there was a domain associated with promoting Exchange 2003 that Microsoft let go of. It was still linked from all their docs but the new owner had it redirected to a Youtube with a fly fishing tutorial. Strangest hijack I've ever seen.
Hosting things under microsoft.com is bad for security. One xss attack anywhere on the domain can steal cookies for the whole domain.
As a web developer, I only want to build to the security level my site needs, not the security needed for Microsoft logins.
They must own the .microsoft TLD.
What is an idea of Edge on Mac? Is there any incentive to provide a browser that is available on other OS-es than Windows? Vivaldi and Opera went similar way, trying to cut some piece of browser market cake using a Blink engine and similar ecosystem as Chrome. Except Edge-only (i.e. Skype, Office365, Stadia-like platform) business game I don't see why it should cut in a market, especially in non-Windows operating systems.
Well, it helps web developers who want to test their sites in Edge but have a Macbook or something. That's not a huge audience, but it's a potentially valuable one, especially if Edge somehow finds an audience with Windows users.
> helps web developers who want to test their sites in Edge
I am a bit biased after your comment. Microsoft Edge is going to have Blink as an underlying rendering engine, the same as in Chromium, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi etc. etc. You have pointed out that it might "help web developers", then could you explain me how there might be some difference (even negligible) in rendering between those browsers since they all run on the same technology? It's not Trident nor EdgeHTML anymore, there won't be any star-slash-backslash, -ms prefixes, filter() nor other hacks [0] that we had to use for IE. It does not look like Microsoft is going to fork Blink anytime soon, because it will be quite the same thing as they would stay and continue development on EdgeHTML engine.
I don't see any advantage of having Edge on macOS, FreeBSD, Linux, etc. for web developers. However, in case of end-users the cross-platform browser have more sense, especially when they got used to specific features and ecosystem. Lack of macOS browser might lead to churn or a problem with adoption to it.
[0]: http://browserhacks.com/
Edge is getting an IE mode, right? That should help test/view sites on that were meant to run on IE.
I realize this is an edge-case (pun not intended) but just pointing it out.
Aha, thanks for clarification! It makes sense now, but I am looking forward to see what versions of Trident they are going to provide. It looks like they might completely strip possibility to download Windows VMs with IE [0], if they are going to roll out all currently available engines (IE8 to IE11).
[0]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
> test their sites in Edge but have a Macbook
Not that I'm saying your assertion is wrong, but the end result of this move by Microsoft means that Chrome could be used as nearly a drop-in replacement.
I figured Chrome-in-Edge-on-Windows was meant as a stopgap to fix a browser that was already included with the OS. With OSX, they could simply stop offering the browser and it would have the same net effect.
Cross-platform bookmark and extension synchronization is a cool feature that this would allow me to do.
Microsoft has shown interest in supporting PWAs on macOS ahead of Safari. Better PWA support on macOS may mean fewer Electron applications, at least.
Microsoft has also shown a lot of interesting in being a synchronizer of a user's bookmarks/tabs/etc across devices (and services). The Microsoft Graph and especially the Timeline is a big cross-platform push for Microsoft. The Browser is the biggest "event surface" for the Timeline (both in displaying past activities and centering present ones).
Common management platform with Windows Edge for enterprises maybe? Things like per-domain security policies, accepted certificates, plugins/addons, ...
Another angle is sync and same experience cross-platform.
They seem sincere about wanting you to be able to use their products anywhere. Edge has been on iOS for a while.
I’d guess you answered your own question - Edge-only apps. There are a lot of Microsoft-only IT environments now having to deal with Macs.
> Edge-only apps
Still the Microsoft we know and love.
Does hangouts finally work on Firefox?
I don't know, and if it does not, it still does not behave justify Microsoft's behaviour.
A less cross-platform version of Chrome. Just what the world was waiting for.
I see it as a version of Blink (the fastest and most secure rendering engine there is) which is not controlled by Google. To me, it is something to consider.
Blink is still controlled by Google. Microsoft doesn't control anything.
They obviously don't control Google's Blink. They could fork it, but in that case they'd have to maintain a browser engine again. If Microsoft could/wanted to do that, they could have just stayed with the old IE Edge.
Since it's in their interests to have a browser installed on Windows by default, if Google did something wrong, they will definitely fork Blink. What alternative do they have?
They have no alternative. Like everyone else, they're at the mercy of Google.
It doesn't matter if it's in Microsoft interests to fork Blink, as that would require maintaining their fork. Which they can't. If Microsoft were able to maintain a browser engine, they would not be switching to Blink in the first place.
The history of "Blink" has been Company X using it, then eventually forking, and winning:
Apple decides to use KHTML instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows a very small team to focus on user experience, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Safari. Eventually Apple forks KHTML into WebKit.
Google decides to use WebKit instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows Google to focus on unique features like process isolation and the new V8 javascript engine, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Chrome. Eventually Google forks WebKit into Blink.
Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows Microsoft to focus on privacy-related features, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Edge Chrome. [What will happen next?]
The HTML spec is HUGE, and getting to a point where a new engine can successfully render all the quirks of HTML, CSS, and JS (and WebAssembly, and...) is a harder and harder task every year. Look how long its taking Firefox to get their Rust rewrite going. If you want to focus on end-user features, it makes no sense to start by arbitrarily making a new browser engine that's goal is to... successfully replicate the behavior of existing competing engines (since that's the real standard). If your competitor is open source, then just use that, and focus on what you want to provide.
It is my opinion that people have severely misinterpreted the power dynamic here. Every Windows machine will soon ship with a browser that, as is evident in this very thread, is "basically Chrome"... minus all the Google ID stuff. This is a nightmare for Google, what do they have to offer? "Download Chrome so we can track you!". That's the way its going to sound if Edge Chrome correctly puts its privacy features front and center. Meanwhile, they're getting support for CSS grid or whatever-js-feature for free from Google's hundreds of workers on Chrome.
The power dynamic is more marketing than technical. Google is willing to push Chrome in their most valuable web real estate:
- Chrome ads on the google.com landing page
- Pop-overs when you log into gmail
- Inside the security alerts when you log in with a new device
And probably lots more than I haven't found. Is there any other product that they push so hard?
> Chrome ads on the google.com landing page
And the best way to fight this is with a browser that ships with the OS that takes you to Bing instead of Google.
Either way, this seems orthogonal to the question at hand. Google will push Chrome in all those places regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. Having complete parity with Chrome rendering seems at worst neutral, and at best competitive as Google now needs to rely entirely on marketing (or on features present exclusively in Chrome and not Chromium). I'm not saying Google doesn't have many cards left to play here, but this move is absolutely a net positive for Microsoft in this fight.
I fear that Microsoft has given up the fight, and is content to enjoy the seigniorage from defaulting the home page on Windows, while allowing Google to completely dominate the evolution of the web. Time will tell.
> Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch.
Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of the browser engine they already had.
> This is a nightmare for Google, what do they have to offer? "Download Chrome so we can track you!".
The same things they offer now.
"Download Chrome because it's a better and faster browser!" It doesn't have to be true, people believe it anyway.
"Download Chrome because Edge doesn't support Youtube!" They totally didn't intentionally break Edge.
> Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of the browser engine they already had.
The stated goal of the EdgeHTML rewrite was to "be fully compatible with the WebKit layout engine used by Safari, Chrome and other browsers. Microsoft has stated that "any Edge–WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing."" [1] It seems the hardest way of doing this is black-boxing WebKit and making a parallel implementation.
What's going on here is that browser rendering is being commoditized. Just like OpenSSL, or Clang, it doesn't necessarily make sense to implement these on your own anymore, there's no clear business reason. There is little to be gained from having a better flex-box implementation, but lots to be lost by having a worse one than the dominant browser. Using Chrome's source disarms this problem.
> "Download Chrome because it's a better and faster browser!" It doesn't have to be true, people believe it anyway.
I mean, maybe... that's not what's won every previous iteration of the browser wars. Its been either through exploiting an existing monopoly (IE, Safari on iOS) or merit (FireFox). Sure, doesn't have to go that way now, but I don't know why we assume that people are going to be moved by "Chrome is faster!" advertising on something that most people prefer not to care about probably.
> "Download Chrome because Edge doesn't support Youtube!" They totally didn't intentionally break Edge.
They can do this regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. If anything, using Chrome makes it more blatant that they're purposely doing it since there's no plausible deniability that its a weird rendering bug in Edge's code. So this seems neither here nor there, if any Edge with any engine got popular then they could choose to go this route and then maybe we'd have an antitrust case on our hands. Unless the argument is "Microsoft should stop making browsers altogether", not sure what the point of this is (maybe that is the thing that is being proposed?).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge#EdgeHTML
> Unless the argument is "Microsoft should stop making browsers altogether"
Of course MS should keep making browsers. That gives them control over the UX, just not over the rendering engine.
My point is that assuming that Blink Edge means that there is now a variant of Blink not controlled by Google is optimistic.
> Its been either through exploiting an existing monopoly (IE, Safari on iOS) or merit (FireFox).
Yes, but which way is Chrome winning? I don't think it's merit, at least not solely.
The entire reason they adopted blink was YouTube putting invisible divs over the video and breaking edge’s hardware acceleration for video.
They rewarded googles shitty behaviour by becoming dependent on them for a rendering engine, and any chance of forking is pointless because they’ll be back where they started: using something different than google, and thus ripe for shit code on google properties.
A browser that can't hardware-accelerate <video> if there's an invisible <div> above it is broken. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do and any other browser can handle that.
I agree that they should have just fixed the issue but my point was that there’s zero chance they’re going to fork blink because their reason for adopting it was google properties doing weird things in their own engine - after enough time google properties will do weird things in their forked engine too.
That doesn't excuse Google intentionally exploiting that bug to attack Microsoft.
Why do you think they were intentionally exploiting it? It's a perfectly reasonable thing for YouTube to do for several of its features.
> how long its taking Firefox to get their Rust rewrite going
Nobody is rewriting Firefox into Rust. Servo is a new research engine not intended to replace Gecko, and some Servo components are being reused back in Gecko (Stylo and WebRender). These are fairly self-contained. The bulk of Gecko is still that C++ codebase and it's here to stay.
Allow me to restate:
"Look how long Servo, one of the few examples of a mostly-from scratch browser engine that we can look to and thus compare (although technically some components of Servo are borrowed from Gecko so even it is not fully a from-scratch effort), is taking to write."
The point was to find any comparable effort to demonstrate what an undertaking this is. Servo was started 7 years ago by one of the few companies with engine expertise. Although, granted, I agree that perhaps framing it as a rewrite might lead you to believe more effort is being placed there than actually is (although I don't think it's totally unfair to look at it that way given their original embedding goals).
MS are able to maintain a browser engine, it just isn't worth them to do it when IE compatibility is an afterthought for a great many sites. Maintaining a fork of Blink would be a lot more worthwhile.
There's a big difference between writing their own engine from scratch and forking Blink. For starters, even if they fork, they can still keep cherry-picking fixes and new features from Google's Blink. After all Webkit is under the GPL so they can't just close the source.
> There's a big difference between writing their own engine from scratch
That's a strawman. Microsoft already had a browser engine, no one's talking about writing one from scratch. They are unable to maintain one.
> For starters, even if they fork, they can still keep cherry-picking fixes and new features from Google's Blink.
Yes. All of them. Because otherwise they aren't compatible with the Google-controlled web anymore. That kind of "fork" is pointless.
They were able to maintain and extend it. But they were starting from way behind while Google was rapidly adding new features.
Microsoft had to choose between adding their own enhancements and standards (the reason for having an engine into the first place) and playing catch up to Google. With Blink they can have both.
Blink is mostly developed by Google and generally Google calls the shots for the project.
Does this mean that they will start allowing add-ons in the Android app? If I can get a web browser for my Android that uses Chrome's engine and allows extensions I'll switch to it in a heartbeat.
(And before someone replies with Kiwi, I personally am not comfortable using a (practically) closed source fork of mobile Chrome mantained by a single, unknown individual)
Wondering why Firefox on Android isn't sufficient? I realise it's Gecko not Blink but for the most part it works well, for me at least.
It's OK, but it's been kind of glitchy and it sucks my battery up more than Chrome does by default. An ad blocker helps a lot and makes it better than Chrome, but I think something based off of Blink that allows uBlock Origin would be best. Plus Firefox on Android has been EOLed until Mozilla finishes their new Android browser rewrite.
Also, Firefox hasn't ever worked very well on my MacBook Pro, and I would really like to replace it with something else.
Direct link to announcement this report is based on: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/05/20/microsoft-edg...
Good for Microsoft for continuing to support multiple platforms.
That said, unless they support Firefox style privacy containers, Edge is a no go for me.
I will still use Safari on iOS, but for macOS and Linux I am all in for Firefox unless another browser supports container privacy isolation.
Blogspam. Original URL: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/download
dang it would be good to get the title updated.
Downloaded this to see if my startup's Chrome extension is compatible. Looks like it is, which is good.
But it is dog-slow compared to Brave. I cannot imagine switching to a browser that is anywhere near this sluggish.
I wonder if the preview build is un-optimised (ie built for debugging/testing) which makes it slower?
Does this include the IE11 mode or is that seperate and Windows only?
IE11 Mode hasn't even yet made into Windows Insider builds yet. Also, the assumption is that it would have to be Windows only because IE11 itself is (and likely always will be) Windows only.
The fragmentation between Edge on Mac sans IE11 vs Edge on Windows w/ IE11 mode will be very confusing.
How do you even market this? The whole point of IE11 is to ensure legacy IE compatible apps don't break. But then you can't advertise this with thought the huge caveat that it's a benefit on Edge Windows only.
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If I get all the benefits of Chrome without weird Google ID stuff (and without having to download and/or build my own Chromium), then I'd use it. Might forget to switch the search engine to Google from Bing. Now they're making ad money.
Regardless, if you want to take the browser market seriously, you need to be cross-platform. Especially if all the hard work of cross-platformness has already been done for you (as is probably the case with Chrome).
> If I get all the benefits of Chrome without weird Google ID stuff
You get weird Microsoft ID stuff instead.
Traffic, ad views, analytics and $$$.
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Their default home screen has news by default if you choose their "informational" style. Which includes advertisements as part of Microsoft News.
Microsoft is making macOS cool again with some innovative software. Apple is still emoji king, though.
What Apple macOS apps would you consider to be lacking?
Mail, Maps, Safari, Messages, FaceTime, Photos
I find all those apps to be outstanding. Except you can't beat Google Maps.
For me Safari, Messages, Facetime and Photos all share a fatal flaw. They only work with the Apple ecosystem and/or when the person you want to communicate with are in the Apple ecosystem. But I suspect most here are ok with that. It is one of those things which Apple for some reason generally gets a pass for on HN but others such as Google do not. Whenever a Google application doesn't function, functions suboptimally or Google introduces a proprietary solution HN tends to work itself into a frenzy but Apple restricting it apps and services only to Apple products barely raises an eyebrow.
Safari also suffers from slow adoption of new standards and a dearth of extensions compared to either Chrome or Firefox.
The ecosystem argument I understand when talking about iMessage and FaceTime. How the argument pertains to Photos or Safari is unclear to me.
I uses Photos as a personal photos archive, and it works.
And Safari is just a web browser, and the best one at that IMHO. It's fast and sleek, with the smallest browser chrome of them all. And I'm curious which standards it (you must mean WebKit) has been slow to adopt. I doubt there's enough of them, compared to Chromium, to call the whole browser slow to adopt.
I use Safari even for Web development purposes, as I personally don't need anything else besides the stock Inspector/Console. Hence extensions don't matter to me as much.
The ecosystem argument pertains to Safari because Apple doesn't produce versions of Safari for other platforms which means bookmarks and extensions can be shared across platforms as they can with Chrome and Firefox.
For Photos the argument pertains because it doesn't tie in with any other photo storage services except their own. For instance macOS has my Google account information and the ability to use it for Mail, Contacts, Calendars and Notes but Photos won't use Google Photos to store web albums.
Safari is an app using WebKit which means if WebKit is slow to adopt than Safari which uses it is also. Some of the technologies I care about that Safari/WebKit has been slow to deploy include WebRTC, a variety of standards around progressive web apps such as service workers and the Push API and support of open audio and video codecs.
Mail.app, personally.
I love Mail.app and the fact that I can extend it with plugins. This is not true of most other main clients :(
My main issue has been rules failing to trigger rather consistently, maybe that's been fixed (as I just threw my hands up and went with Thunderbird years ago and it's filtering --not the greatest, but consistent which is where the value for me is)?
I recommend checking out Airmail. It's a huge improvement over Mail.app.
What's innovative about what they're doing?