Goodbye, EdgeHTML • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#131

Post by belltaco » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #50

_wmd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand things, the Mozilla codebase is a much older, vastly more complex and significantly less embedding-friendly environment than WebKit and derivatives. At least from here, it is easy to see why the choice may have in part been technically driven. (I'm a diehard Firefox user but not gonna lie, side-by-side, I'd prefer surfing through WebKit's repos by a long shot!)

Which is odd when you realize that WebKit is older than the firefox engine. (WebKit is a direct descendant of khtml, Firefox was busing re-writing their Gecko engine when WebKit forked)

How much of a rewrite was it? IIRC they fixed a lot of bloat issues and called it a rewrite, but it wasn't a full rewrite.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#132

Post by iscrewyou » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

I moved to Chrome when Firefox was bloating up and slowing down (2008?). Now I’ve started using Firefox again because Chrome (and Google) seems to be serving itself but not the customer. Firefox now does what I intend it to do.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#133

Post by Angostura » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

I await the response from the Safari team with interest

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#134

Post by DoreenMichele » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

gronne wrote: post #105

DoreenMichele wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that vision is all upside. Microsoft de facto provided some industry standardization. I am always reminded of when fire departments couldn't help other cities because their equipment wasn't compatible. This was so disastrous that we introduced standardization for sizes of hoses, connectors, etc. I am not aware of anyone protesting such standardization the way we routinely think it's a terrible thing in o…

MS is infamous for ignoring and/or breaking standards. Using your market powers to lock users in to your own proprietary (modified copies of open) standars are NOT beneficial to anyone but MS.

I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

My understanding is MS basically brought the world the personal computer. You and I probably couldn't have this argument had they never set out to get filthy rich and yadda. The world would likely be a very different place and I personally think that alternate timeline wouldn't be all upside. I don't think it would be some eutopia that we stupidly missed out on by failing to tell Bill Gates "kill it before it grows."

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#135

Post by dman » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #83

dman wrote: post #65

Firefox lost me with the whole XUL fiasco. Breaking peoples workflows before they had a credible alternative lined up was highly unprofessional. I was an enthusiastic Firefox user until the XUL retirement.

Dropping XUL was necessary and if anything, should have been done earlier. I disagree they didn't "have a credible alternative lined up". Are you upset over extensions breaking? There was a long , extremely long deprecation period and afaik Mozilla helped addon authors move over. They had to make the cut at some point, tbh.

I wrote some extensions myself over the years, all my time writing those extensions went down the drain.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#136

Post by severino » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

babuskov wrote: 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...

Well, I think it's actually two different things: I don't feel bad at all seeing IE/Edge coming to an end. It was a closed, non free, single-platform browser, who gave a lot of people a lot of headaches during the last 20 years. On the other hand, I'm worried by the fact that Google browser market share continues to grow.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#137

Post by mr_toad » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

djmashko2 wrote: post #52

If I'm using Safari as my default browser, does it make sense to switch to Firefox just to support them? Interesting that Safari is not coming up in any of these articles as a third competitor, but maybe the fact that it's limited to Mac means it has very small market share.

The articles are all written by journalists using desktops. They tend to forget about mobile.

Safari has about ~5% percent market share on desktops, but 15-25% on mobile, including tablets.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#138

Post by asavadatti » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #76

davidp wrote: post #19

Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) and haven't missed a thing. [0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161

The best thing about Firefox is Mozilla's Multi-Account Container tabs[0]. Essentially it allows you to put different tabs into different light-weight profiles, with their own session, cookies, and state. That means if you want to log into Facebook but don't want Facebook following you online, just give Facebook its own container. Mozilla has anti-tracking already baked in, but Multi-Account Containers are a whole ot…

Chrome has this too. I doubt its effectiveness as there are ways to fingerprint your browser without using cookies/sessions

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#139

Post by Splatter » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #76

davidp wrote: post #19

Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) and haven't missed a thing. [0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161

The best thing about Firefox is Mozilla's Multi-Account Container tabs[0]. Essentially it allows you to put different tabs into different light-weight profiles, with their own session, cookies, and state. That means if you want to log into Facebook but don't want Facebook following you online, just give Facebook its own container. Mozilla has anti-tracking already baked in, but Multi-Account Containers are a whole ot…

Totally share the love regarding container tabs.

I don't, however, like how the UI/UX is implemented. In particular, the management of containers -- why do I have to dig so deeply to add new containers? Also, as a color-blind person, the slightly colored thin bar above the tab is not a sufficient identifier. It just seems all sort of after-thoughty and jumbled to me.

Having said that, I converted to FF being my primary browser from being a long-time Chrome user and am happy about the change.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#140

Post by kevmo » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

oxymoron wrote: post #121

kevmo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm already on board for Bernie Sanders 2020. I don't think any other contender out there is going to stand up to these giant companies, which is what our economy desperately needs.

”This is why I’m already on board for Barack Obama 2008.” But the tech industry is a key contributor for any democratic contender, so I don’t expect much progress here. Might still be the right choice though, but I don’t think this is the issue where you should turn your hopes on the democrats.

Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat.