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Goodbye, EdgeHTML

blog.mozilla.org

281–290 of 679 posts

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#281
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is awful on the scale of being a 2nd tier browser like IE. It's the browser people use because they don't know any better, or because they don't have any choice. Safari isn't a competitor with Chrome, Firefox, or Edge

Safari got a reputation of being "the new IE" a few years ago because it was lagging in standards support. However there's been a lot more progress recently - coinciding with when they started releasing Safari Tech Preview builds. edit: As an example, Safari is 2nd after Chrome in this ES7 support comparison: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/

I guess it's fair to say the latest Safari's are much better, but over the last few years our web team definitely cursed Safari for issues more often than we've cursed IE.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#282

Honestly I want to move to firefox but there is still so many things wrong. It's a lot better but after trying to migrate for 30min I already find 2 basic missing features from chrome. The first one is the tab research feature. It available for many years in chrome I don't understand why it's still missing in firefox. I can't type "yo [hit tab] my video" to find a video on youtube. And the second feature missing is t…

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Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I don’t understand why there are always complaints of Firefox over using CPU when chrome has same issues.

I haven’t had a single perf problem with Chrome. It seems to be related to the platform - I’m on a Mac

Chrome massacres my 2012 MBA, the fan spins up within 30 seconds of launch. Firefox runs smooth as butter, mucho tabs and no fan. It seems people have widely different experiences, very weird. I wonder if it's a graphics card thing.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So at work we have a jenkins instance, which uses github (on prem) OAuth to sign in, and it logs you out after a very short period of inactivity. Except that jenkins or the way we have it configured or the way we have the reverse proxy in front of it configured is buggy, so sometimes when you try to log back in, you are just redirected to the front page, and you're still not logged in. To workaround this, I had to cl…

disclaimer: I have no idea what jenkins is.

If you're okay with using chrome: create another profile and only use it for jenkins, in fact, set up a shortcut that opens it in app/kiosk mode and maybe see if there's a commandline flag to clear all history every time you open it, that way all you need to do is click the shortcut and everything else happens in the background and it doesn't affect the rest of your browsing exp.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#285
I'm honestly confused at the negative attention this is getting, I can't see this as being anything other than all positive. This is nothing like when IE won in the late 90s, there is very little extra "control" this will give Google over the web, quite the opposite if you ask me.

Think of it this way: do you think it helps or hurts Google to have every version of Windows come pre-installed with what is essentially already Chrome, except, of course, it will probably have Bing as its default search engine. Do you think the odds of people just using Edge to download Chrome and nothing else go up or down with this move? Do you think it helps or hurts Google to have most tech people not bother telling their parents to download Chrome anymore? There is significantly less control from "owning" an engine than owning an actual browser. I don't think I would have had much of an issue with the dominance of IE 20 years ago if I knew I could compile and modify (and release!) IE myself.

This is more akin to most browsers now having a common starting point. The problem with browsers is that if you truly want to make a new one you need to somehow replicate the decades of work put into the existing ones. What that means is that before you can exercise any of your noble privacy/security/UI/whatever goals, you must first make sure you pass Acid 1 and replicate quirks mode float behavior and etc. etc. etc. This is a non-starter. But now, Microsoft can launch from Chromium's current position and have a browser that can actually compete with Chrome. It's as if they've taken "engine correctness" off the table, and can compete on cool features or "we won't track you" or anything else. Websites will work in Edge by default, so if you like that one new feature in Edge, you can feel OK switching to it without compromising devtools/rendering/speed/etc.

Now I know that the initial response to this is "but Google will call the shots!". Not if the way this has gone down every other time has anything to do with it. Google's Chromium started as KHTML. When Apple based WebKit off of KHTML, the KHTML team had very little say in anything and they eventually forked of course. Then Google based Chromium off of Apple's WebKit, and once again, there was very little "control" Apple could exercise here. Sure, they remained one monolithic project for a while (despite having different JS engines which just goes to show that even without forking you can still have differentiation), but inevitably, Chromium was also forked from WebKit into Blink.

And there should be no reason to think the same won't happen here, and it's a good thing! Microsoft in the past couple of years has demonstrated amazing OS culture. I can't wait to see what the same company that gave us VSCode is able to build on top of Blink, and eventually separate from Blink. Ironically enough, the worst thing that could have happened to Google's search dominance is have Blink win the "browser engine wars": we all agree Blink is the way to go now, so we can all start shipping browsers that at minimum are just as good, and won't auto-log you in, or have their engine set to default, or etc. etc. etc.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#286
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm sorry you feel that way. I've written Firefox extensions as well. Also, I've written software using GTK2, Python 2.4, Django 0.9, a bazillion JS libraries that no longer exist. I've written code for games that have shut down. I've written code that I backed up on CD roms that are no longer readable. Hell I've written plenty of code that never even worked in the first place. I don't feel like any of this time went…

I would not have minded at all if the replacement was equivalent but it is not. I believe Firefox with XUL was a completely different product (closer to Emacs in terms of viewing extensibility as a goal), Firefox with the new extensions is just much lesser ambitious.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I don’t understand why there are always complaints of Firefox over using CPU when chrome has same issues.

I haven’t had a single perf problem with Chrome. It seems to be related to the platform - I’m on a Mac

I'm on a Mac, a 2015 MacBook Air and a late-2012 Mac Mini, and don't have any perf problems with Firefox, using the standard, public builds (so not the dev ones). This is with an around 10-15 tabs open, with sync, and 10 add-ons of various stripes.

Then again, I don't do heavy web development or have a tab open with e-mail all day (e-mail is in Thunderbird) so maybe that makes a difference?

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#288
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...

It is a weird flip isn't it? It feels more like a 'pick your battles' thing though. Microsoft has been assailed on the browser front for a long time. An alternative would have been to open source it (like the Chromium code base) so that "anyone" could build browsers based on their code base.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people won't switch because either Firefox is slow on their platform (MacOS) or stuff they use are slow on Firefox (Google ecosystem, many other webapps optimized for Chrome)

I use Firefox on MacOS. It is easily as fast as Chrome for me (and I have tons of tabs open in multiple windows). And I use Google Docs/Sheets/etc. all day long with zero slowdowns.

On Mac usually Firefox is compared also with Safari, if not only.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#290
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Kobo eReader with Pocket integration and I actually use it quite often.

Well, on that tune I am sure there are users who’d love Fb and Tw integrations; and deep ones at that.

Mozilla doesn't own Facebook or Twitter, and can't control what they do with user data.
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