Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#71

Post by nickpsecurity » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

craftyguy wrote: post #48

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #5

Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux/POSIX as well.

This is step 2: Extend.

It's step 1: embracing the open standard. They'll extend it next. Another commenter already pointed out that could be as easy as just using Bing to send revenue to them using Google's tech. They'll come up with other ideas.

Far as open-sourcing their stuff, I think they're holding off on that to preserve their profitable lock-in in legacy market. Harder to clone their key dependencies if the code isn't open. Even opening the data formats like for Office wasn't enough to make a copy that renders all existing documents perfectly. That was by design, too.

I think it makes more financial sense for them to keep existing stuff closed followed by Embrace with Microsoft-oriented Extend on open stuff. I doubt they'll Extinguish since they don't have enough clout to do that in this market. Probably in most markets now.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#72

Post by VoxPelli » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #37

Honest question: what is the population of committers (not contributors) on Chromium? Is there any significant number outside of Google? Is Chromium de-facto controlled by Google, or more community driven?

Considering that Samsung Internet, Brave, Opera, Electron etc is based on Chromium and at least Samsung Internet adding new features of their own to it, there are at least many other people working on the code base.

I would guess that Microsoft would keep using Chorus rather than adopting V8, but if they aren’t, then V8 has contributions from eg. Node.js

And as states in the article: Edge on Android and on ARM seems to already be Chromium based

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#73

Post by ucaetano » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

This is actually great for the web. Having two competitors like Google and MS contributing to a single rendering engine, and competing on the actual browsers means less fragmentation without the single-entity-control problem.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#74

Post by johnm1019 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

egeozcan wrote: post #13

If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it? I mean there was this "startup growth hacking" kind of craziness from a corporation and sudden admittance of defeat... It's very confusing. Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don't we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It's not like they stopped the aggr…

Isn't that kind of exactly how a "nimble startup" would want to operate? Push push push, and then when it doesn't work "pivot". At least that's what a startup would say in a very grandiose blog post about "strengthening our core and starting a new exciting chapter." It seems to me like the Microsoft Edge team is trying to operate as nimbly as they can inside the giant and were given latitude to do so. I say good on them for regcognizing the situation and having the fortitude to make the decision that is probably best for MS's customers.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#75

Post by ocfx » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #22

I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible. It's still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we're going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).

Chrome will define the web standard instead of a slow moving and ancient committee.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#76

Post by dlojudice » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #29

egeozcan wrote: post #13

If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it? I mean there was this "startup growth hacking" kind of craziness from a corporation and sudden admittance of defeat... It's very confusing. Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don't we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It's not like they stopped the aggr…

Microsoft is trying to drive traffic to Bing (and their other services). The rendering engine doesn't actually matter. Microsoft could just bundle Chrome with Windows but instead they are specifically taking the Chromium engine and putting it in an Edge shell. The only reason for that is to maintain control over the user to drive them to Microsoft properties.

> The rendering engine doesn't actually matter.

It does matter. From the comment above "browser vendors taking the lead over standards committees" means influence on where the technology is heading, specially for rendering engines. Remember how long it took IE to implement canvas? This was a way to avoid a new "OS" over a OS (Windows)

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#77

Post by burtonator » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #30

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #5

Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux/POSIX as well.

There's still time to open source it. I'm confused why they don't, at this point. Well, not that confused, I guess it ties in to Windows quite a bit and it's probably not worth it for them. Still I hope they do it.

"There's still time to open source it. I'm confused why they don't, at this point."

can't... it's really difficult to retroactively open source something.

Only a few developers grok the code and they work for your company and are about to move on to another project.

Tooling is usually proprietary and tied into some 3rd party infra....

Look at OpenJDK... Sun and Oracle dragged their feet FOREVER on this and the project still has problems because of it...

Should have been OSSd in 2005 but Sun was insanely naive.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#78

Post by Adutude » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

The name.... reminds me of Annoying Text

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#79

Post by Klathmon » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #5

Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux/POSIX as well.

This is probably going to get a bit "rant-ey", it's not directed at you, but at the ecosystem at large (and kind of at myself).

Everyone keeps saying this, but nobody is actually doing anything about it. People (myself included) talk about how a monoculture is bad, but we still don't use Edge. We talk about how more competition in the browser space is a good thing, but we still complain when the latest features or security benefits are missing from a browser. And then when the feature lands, nobody cares.

We complain about how bloated and slow browsers are getting, but completely ignore those which are/were slimming that down. And we talk about how Chrome and V8 are taking over the world, but we won't use tech like node-chakracore[1] despite it being a very positive experience when I last used it.

I'm assuming that Microsoft is spending a shitload of time and money on their browser engine, and it was still getting very little usage. They have great performance, some really cool security features, lots of great user-oriented features, and it very rarely gave me issues as a developer, but still nobody (again, myself included) used it. Can you blame them for not wanting to continue?

I feel the same as you, this sucks. But I can't blame anyone but myself, because I don't use Edge (despite using Windows as my daily-driver), and I most likely won't switch to it, and it has very little to do with its capabilities as a browser, and more to do with network effects (i'm used to chrome, my information is in chrome, I'm used to the dev tools in chrome, and I personally and selfishly have no reason to switch to Edge, even if it's technically better)

You can't blame the company for not wanting to continue pouring money into something which is getting very little usage or return on investment at all. At least by working with Chromium more people are going to get the benefits of their work.

[1] https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#80

Post by azinman2 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #46

tombert wrote: post #22

I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible. It's still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we're going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).

> I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible. This is already the norm. I use Safari and find many sites have issues. Before that I used Firefox and many sites had issues. Typically the JS works, but styling often looks different (and worse) on Safari and Firefox.

Do you have examples? I use Safari and don’t find this to be true. Given Safari is what people use in iOS, id expect this to be rarely the case (most sites will test on an iPhone).