Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#151

Post by dagaci » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:33 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…

Maintaining an independent browser has been of no benefit to Microsoft for very very long time. It has actually been an extremely costly effort with almost no result. That's my opinion.

The CEO Nadella however has no interest in this kind of thing carrying on, hence the Axe.

Pay attention:

With hindsight, perhaps the recent "crazy" efforts of the Edge team to increase usage and prove some kind of value were in-fact a last-ditch effort by sections of Microsoft to maintain a high-level of browser investment.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#152

Post by drenvuk » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:35 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.

I can say wholeheartedly that it's Safari that's the problem, not Firefox or Chrome. I develop for Firefox first and have no issues with Chrome but Safari is requires some special tricks repeatedly.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#153

Post by mrpippy » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

sebazzz wrote: post #8

EdgeHTML is also used for embedding HTML into UWP, and controls have been released for WPF and Win32. I wonder what will be the story of that. Will that be transparently changed to Chrome, can it be changed to Chrome or will EdgeHTML be used only for that?

Tweet from journalist Simon Le Gros Bisson:

EdgeHTML and Chakra will still be maintained; I was told that the transition to Chromium for web views in UWP and the like is a longer term plan.

https://twitter.com/sbisson/status/1070726583445409792

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#154

Post by bad_user » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

ash_gti wrote: post #143

VoxPelli wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Obscure Chromium forks” – like Samsung Internet and Edge? Remember: Chromium itself is an “obscure fork” of WebKit...

Don't forget Opera is a re-skinned Chrome.

Right, at which point Opera too became completely irrelevant.

First they switched their engine to Blink, then predictably after 3 years sold out to an obscure Chinese private equity fund.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#155

Post by mirkules » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:38 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.

I get that Microsoft is trying to reinvent itself, but at the core they are (were?) a software development company. It kind of looks bad when you throw your hands up and say “this is just too complicated, we’ll replace it with an OSS component”. Don’t get me wrong, there is no love lost for IE or Edge from me, I’m just baffled at this move.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#156

Post by laughingpine » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:38 PM UTC

breatheoften wrote: post #85

Are they gonna put chakra into chromium or use v8?

yeah - I am also curious about this considering there are projects like ChakraCore and node-ChakraCore out there.

Would seem like a shame to lose the work done on that project.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#157

Post by ynx » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #118

I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it: stick it to Google [0] I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum ) or WebKit ( https://webkit.org ), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have suffice…

Google does an insane amount of very deep work all the ways down to the compiler level getting Chromium compiling on Windows and compiling on different architectures. These teams are very well staffed.

It makes strategic sense to go with Chromium if they're aiming for ARM64 support if they can get a huge amount of work for free directly (as opposed to incidentally) from Google to support clang on Windows – which is a much bigger undertaking than it seems at first glance.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#158

Post by justcool393 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #147

no_wizard wrote: post #118

I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it: stick it to Google [0] I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum ) or WebKit ( https://webkit.org ), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have suffice…

One thing that’s worse than Microsoft not adopting a technology is Microsoft adopting a technology. Historically, they’ve used the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy quite often, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. But maybe I’m being overly skeptical/borderline cynical...

This would be the situation where EEE would be a good thing for the community. Now if you were talking about Firefox, then I'd agree that that would be bad.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#159

Post by mrpippy » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

mrpippy wrote: post #53

negativegate wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see any mention of Windows 7 or that it won't be a UWP on Windows, are there more details somewhere?

Agreed. I see zero chance that Edge will suddenly be ported back to Windows 7. And it would be almost as big of a shock if the Chromium-based Edge is not UWP.

I stand corrected--this is exactly what they're going to do. Take Win32 Chromium, rename it Edge, and build it for Win7, 8, and 10. What a huge blow to everyone at MS who believes in UWP.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128648/microsoft-edge-c...

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#160

Post by ziftface » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #147

no_wizard wrote: post #118

I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it: stick it to Google [0] I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum ) or WebKit ( https://webkit.org ), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have suffice…

One thing that’s worse than Microsoft not adopting a technology is Microsoft adopting a technology. Historically, they’ve used the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy quite often, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. But maybe I’m being overly skeptical/borderline cynical...

The opposite is happening. They have such a small market share that developers didn't have enough incentive to actually support/test on their browser so all their work was just trying to get edge to be chrome-compatible. Turns out making your browser a chrome clone is an easier way to do that.