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Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#131

Post by latkin »

megaman22 wrote: post #123
pjc50 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge isn't great if you use tabs; it tends to lose them on crash/restart and doesn't make it easy to have lots of them. It also seems to suffer from the same weird font rendering as a lot of Metro apps.

Edge isn't great period. There are too many janky UI and design choices - probably because it is part of that whole benighted Metro ecosystem. The thing that really drove me nuts was how the address bar jumps around when you're trying to select part of a URL, which makes it so much harder than it ought to be when you are trying to click and drag with a mouse, let alone a touch interface.

Agree completely. I'm a heavy Windows/Office/.NET/F#/Powershell user, overall a fan of MS ecosystem, but Edge is still just plain painful to actually use day to day. Chrome remains far ahead. I'd say "1000 papercuts" but maybe 5-10k is closer.

Jumping address bar? Ohhhh yeah hate that one: https://twitter.com/LincolnAtkinson/status/88703561300998963...

Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#133

Post by Sujan »

stiGGG wrote: post #107
Sujan wrote: post #91

Can Edge for iOS be selected as "default browser" in iOS so it is by default used in all the places Safari normally handles? The "send to PC" thing _is_ nice, but only if available everywhere and consistently.

No, App developers are able to find out if Edge (or Chrome or Firefox) is installed on your device to give you an option to open links inside it, but most apps don't do that and you still can not change the default browser.

Shame.

Then maybe Microsoft could create a share extension that uses this new Windows feature to "collect" URLs from an iPhone?

Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#134

Post by jedberg »

israrkhan wrote: post #132

Why would a user use Edge on iOS/Android when they are using platform native rendering engines (webkit/blink). what is the value add here (Working with a windows 10 PC?)

I assume synchronization with your Windows PC (bookmarks, passwords, etc).

Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#135

Post by burkaman »

israrkhan wrote: post #132

Why would a user use Edge on iOS/Android when they are using platform native rendering engines (webkit/blink). what is the value add here (Working with a windows 10 PC?)

> Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android brings familiar features like your Favorites, Reading List, New Tab Page and Reading View across your PC and phone, so, no matter the device, your browsing goes with you. But what makes Microsoft Edge really stand out is the ability to continue on your PC, which enables you to immediately open the page you’re looking at right on your PC—or save it to work on later.

This is for people who use Edge on their PC and want everything to sync with their phone.

Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#136

Post by niftich »

Back in the days of the Acid tests and when vendor prefixes for experimental features were the norm, and a visit to caniuse.com was often met with disappointment, discretionary users cared as much about a browser's layout engine as the application's surrounding chrome and features.

But as web engines have been moving closer to feature parity (as well as Chrome and Firefox's combined dominance of marketshare), the bonus features of the application are rising in importance. (Some) people want their bookmarks, their synced passwords, their addons, their (sometimes-captive) integrations; this is the space that Edge competes in now.

The same applies on iOS, for slightly different reasons. On iOS everything is slightly different, you get the same rendering engine every which way. There, the only way to differentiate yourself is by extra features.

Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#137

Post by glhaynes »

sebazzz wrote: post #94
mtycholaz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it's because of an Apple policy. They don't allow other rendering engines.

It is not that they do not allow other render engines. It is that APIs to dynamically execute native code are locked down on platforms such as Windows Mobile and iOS. If you cannot dynamically execute code you cannot build a JIT JS engine which makes your webbrowser too slow compared to the competition.

This is true, though they do also explicitly restrict using other engines for web browsing:

2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#138

Post by yesimahuman »

mixedbit wrote: post #59

Edge is a good browser, people seem to default to criticizing it because of its infamous predecessor. We should root for Edge, it is in the open Web best interest to have several browsers sharing the market.

I agree that it's good to have multiple browser _products_, but why is it better that MSFT has its own engine instead of investing in OSS ones like webkit/blink? This is the same question I have for Firefox. They can still achieve their privacy goals without having to invest in and maintain a separate engine. Is having a unique engine really all that beneficial in the long run?

Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#139

Post by stephengillie »

jmkni wrote: post #118
KirinDave wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a policy who's primary goal is to ban other browser engines. They make exceptions for lots of other app types like games.

I guess in theory you could build a browser on top of a game engine, or is that just insane?

Tribes 2 had a full web browser in the game. It was a continuation of having a full IRC client in the first game, Starsiege: Tribes.

(Tribes 2 also had the IRC client. The IRC client initially drove players into chat channels to help them find ongoing games, and dropped a link when someone left IRC to join a game. It was decent matchmaking in 1998, and helped build the community as well.)

The browser itself wasn't as insane as writing the entire game menu in OpenGL, which at the time was uncommon. Game devs cited this choice (instead of using a simpler menu) as causing a 6-month delay in the project, leading to much less testing and a game that crashed frequently for the first few months after release. The ubiquitous "Unhanded Exception" pop-up became a meme for years after.

Re: Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

#140

Post by Kuraj »

planetjones wrote: post #36

I struggle to get too excited about Edge on iOS because it's not really Edge is it. It will just be like Firefox which uses the built-in iOS WebKit-based rendering. So it's effectively Safari doing the rendering with some wrappers around it like syncing Windows favourites and sharing open windows with your Windows PC? Maybe some corporations which have Windows on the desktop, but where most employees use iOS devices…

I don't really understand how Edge having its own rendering engine would make me any more excited for it.
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