Browsers

It may do, but there's still a long way to go. Multi-touch gestures that use system animations (or at least approximate them), certain aspects of UI design made to fit the macOS aesthetic and workflow better, and other things. My personal hope is that once the newest UI implementation settles down, there'll be some more love added to it.

Stuff that Chrome got pretty damned fast, I hasten to add. Whether people like Safari or not, it does set the standard for browsers on macOS because, unlike IE or Edge, it's actually a very good and __very__ well-loved browser.

The biggest danger to the web in terms of control right now is browser monopoly, not engine monopoly. And this move is probably the most effective way at combatting that. I think this is the right move at this time not just for Microsoft, but for the web.

Borrowing from a previous comment I made, 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.

If you care about the state of search monopoly, out of control ads, and identity on the web, then you should be happy with this move. 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.

Meh. I don't buy it.

First of all, individual boycotts will never, ever overcome a collective action problem, so a fundamentally futile solution is being proposed here.

Plus, this is only bad if Google act destructively evil and no one steps in to change it. If the endgame is control of Chromium being passed from Google to a neutral foundation -- which I suspect it will be -- then everyone wins.

It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out. This is the way of all web technologies. Should we go back to competing variants of (proto-)JavaScript to prevent web monoculture, too?

Nerd evangelism might not get something to 100%, but it can make something large enough to matter. Linux on the desktop matters, for example, because nerds like it and talk about it. The fact that some single-digit percentage of people use it means that the duopoly doesn't have absolute power.

Firefox, even in single-digit percentages, affects the ecosystem in the same way. If there weren't a choice, the browser would gradually turn into a cable TV interface.

> Microsoft has hardly offered much as far as competition and diversity goes since IE6, basically the only web "innovations" they're responsible for is a bunch of IE-specific APIs that didn't work in any other browser.

I don't have much love for MS, but this is just wrong.

XMLHttpRequest, the precursor to fetch, pretty much allowed "web 2.0" to exist. Now we use fetch, but they introduced it first.

box-sizing: border-box, a much better way to reason about the CSS box model, is almost always introduced as "the way Internet Explorer had always done things in older versions and quirks mode." Surely its existence in IE (and the experience people had w/ CSS there, preferring its box model) had some historical weight in this property coming about?

Lastly, and something still not standardized: setImmediate. Lots of libraries currently have to polyfill this with MessageChannel, postMessage, and other hacks. Clearly there's high demand for it.