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Goodbye, EdgeHTML

blog.mozilla.org

21–30 of 679 posts

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#22
I'm wondering how, logistically, this make sense.

Does Microsoft adopt Chromium/Blink for embedding in UWP apps and Electron? That will reduce memory and storage requirements for the latter, but greatly increases the attack surface of the former.

Microsoft is also taking on an _enormous_ maintenance burden in integrating it with their own sandboxing and protection mechanisms. I'm in disbelief that the ongoing cost of maintaining this fork and tying themselves to Chromium will be worth it.

And the incentive for Google to now embed more and more ChromeOS/mobile device management into Chromium. For example: Google intends to ship an alternative credential provider for Windows 10 through Chrome. Microsoft will have to painstakingly isolate every feature like that which Google adds, and adopt an aggressive posture of doing code reviews of Chromium.

I'm not sure how, given that they are such strong competitors/adversaries, this can work out.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#23
post #4

It makes me wonder if at any point in the process Microsoft approached Firefox over integrating their rendering engine vs. Chromium and if so, what the factors were in making their final decision. I also wonder if instead of "ceding" control to Google, Microsoft intends to start being a major contributor to Chromium, so much so that it almost becomes a joint effort vs. Google dominance.

Everyone seems to be missing that this is Microsoft’s tacit recognition that Electron is the future of apps. Electron has abysmal performance and doesn’t work on ARM. This is them fixing fundamental chromium issues, to improve Electron performance and give themselves a further wedge beyond TypeScript

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#24
post #8

If anyone told me a decade ago that a day will come when I will feel sorry for Microsoft browser technology going away...

10 years ago it was forseeable that MS would lose the browser wars.

BTW, this is not the first time MS has considered Chromium. Back before the fork of Edge, they considered using Webkit.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#26
When I first got a Windows 10 machine I used edge long enough to download Chrome anyway.

The real question in my mind is: how will Mozilla differentiate in such a way that it even makes sense for users to support a different browser platform?

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#28
post #12

Well, I'm kind of saddened that even more control is going to Google, but realistically Edge was never really competitive in terms of support for standards[1]. EDIT: typo: Microsoft -> Google. Not sure what happened there :). [1] Yes, this is a very vague concept these days. Google has, what 80%+ market share? They have a lot of people who can influence standards, and the cognitive biases of those people could mean t…

What do you mean “even more control” what part of tech does Microsoft realistically control now, given the prevalence of cross platform apps and the web being the dominant platform.

This seems like some late 90’s derived sentiment

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#29
post #23
post #4

It makes me wonder if at any point in the process Microsoft approached Firefox over integrating their rendering engine vs. Chromium and if so, what the factors were in making their final decision. I also wonder if instead of "ceding" control to Google, Microsoft intends to start being a major contributor to Chromium, so much so that it almost becomes a joint effort vs. Google dominance.

Everyone seems to be missing that this is Microsoft’s tacit recognition that Electron is the future of apps. Electron has abysmal performance and doesn’t work on ARM. This is them fixing fundamental chromium issues, to improve Electron performance and give themselves a further wedge beyond TypeScript

Look at VS Code: Electron doesn't have abysmal performance. It's just what people do with it that causes problems.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#30
post #17
post #13

I still see zero benefit to me, today , to use Firefox.

This is the exact attitude that is going to doom the open web.

I state it in the spirit of helpfulness — openness itself is clearly not a compelling feature to the masses, and the masses are who needs to be compelled. So if this is your battle, perhaps a different strategy is in order?
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