Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#171

Post by wvenable » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

dlojudice wrote: post #76

wvenable wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This decision is perfectly in line with Microsoft's shift in focus -- Windows is no longer the hill they want to die on. Microsoft is all about services.

Also I suspect Microsoft will have far more actual influence by driving development of Chromium than with their own rendering engine. It's pretty hard to drive new standards when you are barely achieving the current ones. Microsoft's focus on Electron for cross-platform development kind of informs this move as well.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#172

Post by kopite » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

I would rather not install Chrome at all on my windows machine. I use Brave (a chromium based browser) and with right extensions, I can see myself using the new Chromium based Edge. I bet that will be the thought process for a lot of general people using browsers. Chrome will loose its market share to Edge for sure.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#173

Post by VikingCoder » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

robertAngst wrote: post #67

VikingCoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge fan of Chrome, but this is a huge loss. Competition is good. Monoculture is bad. That said, supporting all of the standards in a way that makes everyone happy is completely impossible. And if you're not in first place, it's just Cost, Cost, Cost for you. I don't blame them for doing this, but I'm sad about it.

This is one of those things that as a Dev, fantastic. As a customer, meh, less competition. That said, there seems to be tons of competition on various formats, web competes with podcasts, mobile apps, and I would even say websites like Medium/youtube.

Ad a Dev, you want things to just work.

It's a tragedy that companies and standards committees can't give you APIs / SDKs / Standards that just work.

When a company gives up, that's not good.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#174

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

holtalanm wrote: post #83

mcgannon2007 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then any pull request introducing something into Chromium essentially becomes the web standard. For example, Google has a ton of influence on the project. If they want to, they can introduce something that benefits their services but eschews the web standard.

but if Microsoft is moving to Blink, wouldn't they, as well, have (as you say) influence on the project? What, really, is a downside to having an open-source web engine that all browsers use? I'm failing to see one. The web would become less fragmented; the web standard would be (only slightly) irrelevant, and we would move forward without having to deal with browsers interpreting the spec/standard differently, which…

How do I convince Chromium to adopt parallel engine components written in Rust, in this world?

They won't do it, because the entire team at Google is staffed by C++ folks. How is that a better outcome?

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#175

Post by kopite » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #79

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 se…

This is true to the level that most people are not comfortable accepting.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#176

Post by dxf » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #81

dxf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says the MSFT will be a significant contributor to Chromium. If anything, this means that Google will have _less_ control, as a second major internet player will be involved.

Who is the current Chromium project lead? What's the decision making process? How can MS employees participate? How can MS employees in the future go against the wishes of Google with regards to Chromium? Will we see revert wars?

I'd worry about those problems (e.g. "revert wars") if and when you ever see them happen. They will be easy enough to spot.

MSFT is already contributing to Chrome, e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460

From my position sitting at the crossroads of Clang/LLVM and Chrome (the team I work on developed clang-cl), all the interactions I've seen with MSFT are positive.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#177

Post by vezycash » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

When Microsoft released Edge, they claimed bugs plagued IE because they couldn't update IE without OS updates. Edge as a "store app" would receive frequent updates, independent of Windows OS updates. They ended up tying Edge to Windows. And kept promising but never delivered. Instead of small frequent browser updates, we got large frequent OS updates. Maybe now that Edge's dead, they'll slow down the frequency of Windows update a bit.

In the beginning, IE was speedier than Edge. Had more features too. Edge was fragile and froze often. Updates fixed some of the speed issues. I froze my windows update so, I don't know how it stacks up right now.

To increase Windows store usage, MS also decided to tie Edge extension to the Windows store. This wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, I like the idea of getting all my stuff in one place. However, MS decided to create the annoying store app. I'm on a desktop, a real computer. Why on earth can't I open the store on a browser and have the installer do its work in the background? This is where I drew the line with Edge.

I'm not surprised that Edge's marketshare declined with increased Windows 10 marketshare. Edge is Microsoft's second Windows 8. They are both PC software designed to please mobile users and infuriate PC or touch-less users. And both hide settings - make it a chore to change minor settings.

I believe throwing Windows Phone under the bus has come back to bite Microsoft in the ass and Edge is just a trailer.

Microsoft is still gutting Windows 10 - turning it into a phone OS for desktop users, replacing working software with incomplete toys.

As far as I'm concerned, Google didn't beat MS in the browser game. MS simply frustrated IE users over to Chrome by forcing Edge on them.

Windows is the next software MS will abandon for Google's alternative. All Google has to do is not mess up android.

If you remember Nokia/MS's failed fork of Android you'll feel the chill. Microsoft now sells android smartphones in both its online and retail stores.

I predict MS is not done with Edge. At the end, they'll abandon that too for Chrome. And all they'll do is change the default search engine to Bing.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#178

Post by tedunangst » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:10 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…

Is quantum that much closer to chromium than edge?

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#179

Post by devwastaken » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:13 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…

Firefox's internal code is a dumpster fire. I say that in the nicest way possible. Look at their 'jsapi' mailing list, they just break compatibility at will and don't properly version things. It doesn't have the same features v8 has with regards to isolation.

I'm not sure if quantum is actually all that different from pre-57 minus servo, however servo isn't magic, and only a small portion of that is really rust.

Overall firefox's codebases aren't meant to be used by anyone else. Chromium and v8 are.

Re: Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

#180

Post by hexmiles » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:14 PM UTC

I'm a bit sad by the announcement. I quite like edge, and now the browser ecosystem is getting narrower.

What should Mozilla do now? Should they just give up? Now that everywhere except ios/macos is blink (and v8 i think, i'm not sure after reading the announcement) why should anyone care for firefox?

Should also Mozilla start using chromium as a base? Mozilla will still be able to add quite the value in term of functionality, and with a bigger focus on privacy than google. I'm honestly not sure anymore.

Maintaining a browser is a hard work and it's getting harder, so it's (i think) unlikely a new player will ever enter the game, and having one engine where to test thing will make the job of creating websites and webapps simpler, on the other hand a monopoly can be a very bad thing for the web.

I like firefox a lot, and it's my daily driver, but if tomorrow they change the engine, i probably won't even notice, and not having to maintain the entire stack may allow them to better focus on other area, like decentralization, privacy, addons and services (firefox send is amazing), and may even allow a easier experimentation with new webapi.

I'm really not sure how to feel about this...

On a side note: I really do hope they make chromium and especialy CEF more modular. it's amazing to embed a web browser inside a app, but it's very hard to override some of his behavior, for example: while it's easy to have a custom cookie management system, there are no api to override localstorage or the chronology, only some workaround.

In a past work project we needed to build a thin client for a intranet and one of the requirement was, basically, an encrypted browser profile, custom CA management, client certificate and some other things, doing that using cef was very hard and it used a lot of hacks.

edit: correct some grammar