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Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

windowscentral.com

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Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#161

Post by dragonwriter »

belltaco wrote: post #160
interesthrow2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony. They had HTA apps (running on IE engine which still work more or less, I replaced most default Win10 apps like the image viewer and the "groove" music player with a version of them built with HTA since they were slow as hell to start up) for 20 years already, they did barely anything with it, they didn't really invest seriously in a good browser engine (Edge isn't) and now all they can do is use Google's?…

>now all they can do is use Google's Wasn't WebKit Apple's first? And before that KDE's KHTML and KJS. Funny how the narrative has changed.

> Wasn't WebKit Apple's first?

Yes, but while Blink forked from WebKit, it isn't WebKit.

> Funny how the narrative has changed.

That's because the facts changed.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#162

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

cjbprime wrote: post #83
tambourine_man wrote: post #57

Interesting theory and thread: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10697763353362923... “This isn’t about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork”

Honestly having trouble making a coherent strategy out of those words, despite knowing what all of them mean. Seems like at the least it is written with way more confidence than could possibly be appropriate.

"drop-in feature-parity with Chromium" == They want to be able to replace Chromium with their own engine, but it must be very compatible.

"duplication is becoming a significant performance drain" == Every electorn app bundles its own browser engine (as opposed to a single browser engine for the whole OS, like a shared library), which increases system RAM usage and hinders performance.

"They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork" == MS wants to support electron apps but they want to use a shared browser instance for performance.

They rightly believe that doing so with their own browser engine is a huge pain in the ass.

Might as well just use the real Chromium for all browser needs throughout the OS including electron apps instead of trying to reimplement it.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#165

Post by grumblepeet »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #99
talawahdotnet wrote: post #28

Interesting, but what I really, really want them to do is EOL IE 11 so that the web can move forward without feeling guilty about the X% of users still on it. IE 11 has unfortunately become the new IE 6. As it is right now I believe the IE 11 EOL is tied to the Windows 10 EOL...which is not happening anytime soon. Many frameworks are dropping support for it anyway so I guess it will end up being defacto desupported.

There is a lot of Enterprise/Corporate stuff tied to IE. For example sharepoint stuff (which my work uses) heavily is tied to IE.

SharePoint Online’s user interface has been rewritten in recent years using an open source stack (node.js, React etc) and certainly works far better using Chrome and not IE. This is true of SharePoint on-prem too, at least the recent versions. Even the tools we use to make web parts now are React, Yeoman, webpack, Yarn, Sass etc. Microsoft are heavily investing in these and most of the training materials they produce for developers are pushing us more and more in that direction.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#166

Post by jcranmer »

013a wrote: post #101
c-smile wrote: post #19

That's just the disaster. And the end of W3C standard development process. AFAIR it should be 3 independent implementations of the feature in order for Draft to reach Recommendation status. So technically all that means that web standards will be written by WebKit team alone. Sic transit Gloria mundi, sigh.

We do still fortunately have three (more or less) independent popular implementations: Google with Blink, Apple (and now Microsoft) with WebKit, and Mozilla with Gecko. These are still three strong and independent voices; Chrome has substantial control on desktops, Apple has a stranglehold on their highly popular platforms, and Mozilla has both the hearts of the tech community as well as wide regard in bleeding edge…

I'd put the count at 2¾: Blink counts for ½ since it's an ex-fork of WebKit. While a lot of the new feature development of the two are independent of each other, they still largely share a lot of the same architecture, which means there's going to be correlation in things like ease of implementation. The extra ¼ comes from Servo, which ends up having the opposite edge of the dichotomy from Gecko; it's effectively a ground-up re-implementation of the layout engine stack, so its internal architecture is quite different from everybody else, but it's goal isn't to drive new feature development in web standards.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#167

Post by jcranmer »

chrisseaton wrote: post #74
c-smile wrote: post #19

That's just the disaster. And the end of W3C standard development process. AFAIR it should be 3 independent implementations of the feature in order for Draft to reach Recommendation status. So technically all that means that web standards will be written by WebKit team alone. Sic transit Gloria mundi, sigh.

Who cares what the W3C think is a draft or a recommendation?

The experience of standards bodies has generally agreed that you can't shake out all the problems with a specification until you have at least two independent implementations.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#168

Post by cozuya »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #136
cjbprime wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly having trouble making a coherent strategy out of those words, despite knowing what all of them mean. Seems like at the least it is written with way more confidence than could possibly be appropriate.

I think it's referring to Microsoft's own Electron-powered apps, like VSCode. There have been rumblings in the past about MS wanting to fork Electron and replace Chromium with EdgeHTML in their fork, but it sounds like the strategy has changed to forking Chromium and using that in their future Electron fork instead. I have no idea if this correctly interprets the SwiftOnSecurity tweet, but that's the best I can make…

Off topic but I'll be that guy: I am continually blown away by just how good VSCode is and how it very much overcame two huge obstacles: being an election app, and its poisonous name.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#169

Post by foepys »

cortesoft wrote: post #135
kibwen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what this is attempting to refute. Your comment is about why monocultures are bad for competition, which I happen to agree with. My comment is about why Chromium being open-source doesn't alleviate any concerns about monoculture.

How is the situation better if there are two browsers with 50% market share? You still can’t add a new feature the other side doesn’t want, because 50% of users won’t be able to use it. Any feature that requires a site owner to do something to support it isn’t going to be added.

Your argument is easily proven false by looking at the various CSS properties prefixed by vendors like -moz-* and -webkit-* that eventually made it into the standard.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#170

Post by jcranmer »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #43
c-smile wrote: post #19

That's just the disaster. And the end of W3C standard development process. AFAIR it should be 3 independent implementations of the feature in order for Draft to reach Recommendation status. So technically all that means that web standards will be written by WebKit team alone. Sic transit Gloria mundi, sigh.

W3C is completely irrelevant when it comes to a bunch of browser stuff. WHATWG is the standards body that matters when it comes to HTML.

Browser stuff is more than HTML. CSS, for example, is still driven by the W3C and not WHATWG.
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