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Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

gizmodo.com.au

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Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#71

Post by MagnumOpus »

tw04 wrote: post #43
schlipity wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good bit ludicrous that they are providing Edge for IOS / Android but not for previous versions of Windows. My life as a programmer would be better if I didn't have to support IE11 / Windows 7, but instead of doing that, they spent some time getting it running where no one wants it.

Mainstream support for Windows 7 ended in 2015. Do you also want them to support edge on Android 4.3? Or are you a little more pragmatic in expecting users to update more than once every 7 years?

If you refuse to make your app installable on your own OS that half of the world's desktop computers are running, you don't need to wonder that it is not gaining market share.

Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#73

Post by Sylos »

dman wrote: post #26

Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a competetive browser? As someone who has no background doing web development, would also like to hear from web devs on what proportion of a project is spent building features vs handling edge cases in browsers (like the one that was hit here in the article).

> Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a competetive browser?

I doubt you're gonna get numbers, but I can give you two rough reference points:

1) All popular modern browsers use browser engines that started out their lives in the last millennium:

- Edge uses EdgeHTML, which was forked from IE's Trident, which was first released in 1997.

- Firefox uses Gecko, which started development in 1997.

- Chrome/Opera/Vivaldi use Blink, which was forked from WebKit (which Safari uses), which in turn was forked from KHTML, which started development somewhen around 1998.

So, all of these had their architecture laid out before multi-core CPUs were a thing in desktop PCs and before the web became more than just text with the occasional image thrown in.

As a result, all of them lack severely in parallelism and use of the GPU, and writing a browser engine from scratch would allow you to get these things right and give you ridiculously better performance than all other browser. But no one's done it yet, because of this insanely high cost to redevelop everything.

Which brings us to reference point 2), Mozilla has actually started work on writing a browser engine from scratch in 2013. The project is called Servo and they even find it worthwhile to basically develop their own programming language, Rust, for writing Servo in it.

And well, Servo shows off quite nicely the aforementioned potential in writing a browser engine from scratch, but it also still explodes spectacularly, trying to render out ACID3, which was released in 2008 to try to represent what a good browser should have been capable of back then.

Now, Mozilla is not working on this full-pelt, but it is a big organisation with lots of browser-making know-how. They're also sort of bootstrapping Servo by including production-ready Servo components into Gecko, resulting in the maintenance work being shared.

So, basically I wouldn't expect any new player to enter the market in at least the next ten years.

Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#74

Post by Sylos »

diego_moita wrote: post #5

He was presenting Azure and the browser was enable to parse a XmlHttpRequest. It could be an error on the browser or on the server side application. Because he is on the server side team he blamed the browser. Rule #1 of pointing fingers: it's always someone else's fault.

Well, he did swap out the client-side and it worked, so that's rather indicative of it not being a server-side problem.

Not entirely given, it could be that Chrome happens to implement erronous or non-standards-compliant behaviour which just so happens to match up with the erronous or non-standards-compliant behaviour of the server, but that's starting to get a little far-fetched.

Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#75

Post by jsgo »

WorldMaker wrote: post #61
rk06 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my workplace, most users are on Windows 7, and few on Win 10, and fewer (if any) are on windows 8.1 Migration to windows 10 is not going to happen until it is absolutely necessary.

Would you expect Linux users at your workplace to still be running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)? Or to be a bit more generous, Windows 7 SP1 is closer to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). Neither of which have been supported for at least half a decade. Even Windows 8.1's equivalent Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) fell out of support two years ago. Though arguably that's intentionally unfair because Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)…

While I agree with your main point, I find it odd that you'd even factor in the non-LTS/bleeding edge releases of Ubuntu vs Windows (10). The closest I can think of in the Windows world would be Windows Insider builds but those are a bit more akin to nightly releases (though that characterization is a bit unfair to Windows Insider). Yes, you qualify that with the "intentionally unfair" but I fail to see what it adds to this to compare apples to oranges.

Point being, even.04 Ubuntu releases vs Windows seem to be the better metric if we're talking about support. Anything outside of those (non-even.04 Ubuntu or Windows Insider releases) you get the benefit of being on the bleeding edge, but you're going to be poked more than usual.

Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#76

Post by itomato »

dman wrote: post #26

Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a competetive browser? As someone who has no background doing web development, would also like to hear from web devs on what proportion of a project is spent building features vs handling edge cases in browsers (like the one that was hit here in the article).

Read up on the history of Konqueror and WebKit to get an idea of what it takes on the render engine side.

Marketing, extensibility, feature-parity are in another realm, and remain a moving target.

Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#77

Post by vetinari »

WorldMaker wrote: post #61
rk06 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my workplace, most users are on Windows 7, and few on Win 10, and fewer (if any) are on windows 8.1 Migration to windows 10 is not going to happen until it is absolutely necessary.

Would you expect Linux users at your workplace to still be running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)? Or to be a bit more generous, Windows 7 SP1 is closer to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). Neither of which have been supported for at least half a decade. Even Windows 8.1's equivalent Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) fell out of support two years ago. Though arguably that's intentionally unfair because Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)…

So maybe people would be more willing to migrate, if the new version respected their privacy?

Unless there is no option to keep the chattiness of the system only to user-initiated connections (and keep that option on the same value after updates!), many people simply won't migrate.

Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#78

Post by steveklabnik »

Sylos wrote: post #73
dman wrote: post #26

Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a competetive browser? As someone who has no background doing web development, would also like to hear from web devs on what proportion of a project is spent building features vs handling edge cases in browsers (like the one that was hit here in the article).

> Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a competetive browser? I doubt you're gonna get numbers, but I can give you two rough reference points: 1) All popular modern browsers use browser engines that started out their lives in the last millennium: - Edge uses EdgeHTML, which was forked from IE's Trident, which was first released in 1997. - Firefox uses Gecko, which started development in…

In my understanding, the Servo team has never focused on ACID 3, instead prioritizing features that are actually used by the top X websites.

Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#79

Post by dman »

Gaelan wrote: post #27
dman wrote: post #26

Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a competetive browser? As someone who has no background doing web development, would also like to hear from web devs on what proportion of a project is spent building features vs handling edge cases in browsers (like the one that was hit here in the article).

Blink wrapper or new engine? If you want chrome clones, they’re a dime a dozen.

New engine.

Re: Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome

#80

Post by dman »

Sylos wrote: post #73
dman wrote: post #26

Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a competetive browser? As someone who has no background doing web development, would also like to hear from web devs on what proportion of a project is spent building features vs handling edge cases in browsers (like the one that was hit here in the article).

> Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a competetive browser? I doubt you're gonna get numbers, but I can give you two rough reference points: 1) All popular modern browsers use browser engines that started out their lives in the last millennium: - Edge uses EdgeHTML, which was forked from IE's Trident, which was first released in 1997. - Firefox uses Gecko, which started development in…

Thanks for a detailed response!
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