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The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

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Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#181

Post by mtgx »

robbrown451 wrote: post #138

This is very good news. In my opinion, this does more to keep Google in check than had they gone with Firefox's engine, or stuck with their own. (I know not everyone agrees) People use Chrome because they consider it a better overall experience than other alternatives, and I happen to agree. (again, I get that not everyone here agrees with that) For whatever reason, Google has the resources and talent to make a brows…

> In my opinion, this does more to keep Google in check than had they gone with Firefox's engine, or stuck with their own

We'll see. Microsoft gave up developing its own browser because it found it too hard to keep pace. So the question is what happens when Google goes in a direction Microsoft doesn't like with Chromium?

Do they just adopt the changes as they are because they don't want to bother developing their very own browser once again, or will they create a hard fork of Chromium that they are willing to maintain independent of Google?

I'm pretty skeptical it will be the latter, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#182

Post by WorldMaker »

tomerico wrote: post #43
pacala wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meaningless. There are people claiming with a straight face that targeted ads make user experience better. Wholesale collection and aggregation of personal user data will continue unabated.

Curious, why would targeted ads make the user experience worse? (putting privacy aside)

In addition to other answers in this thread: It's a form of cultural bubble.

A lot of 20th Century pop culture was driven by or at least responded to advertising. When advertising has to hit the broadest demographics and speak to the largest audiences it has more pressure to be creative and interesting, so that people talk or think about it.

It also lead to interesting moments of discovery when ads found audiences outside of what they expected.

Targeted ads are more often preaching to an already sold choir, so they can just be lazier in almost every way. They break expectations of novelty in ads. They lose the ability to drive the discovery models that were the original driving force behind why ads even exist in the first place. They add yet another unnecessary border wall/bubble effect where we struggle to find shared cultural events/jokes/touchstones between groups of people, because just about no two people (even inside the same demographic group) are seeing the same ads these days.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#183

Post by withinboredom »

dubcanada wrote: post #77
mactunes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, what makes Chromium better in your opinion? I have probably just touched the surface of the dev tools on both and haven‘t used any features that I would be missing on either.

It's a blank browser, has barely any "Google" specific stuff in it ready to go. It is easy to develop for, doesn't require cross language compiling (rust/c++), builds fast, easy to understand how the different parts work (at least for a browser developer it should be), has documentation, is meant to be used to develop your own browser.

Are you sure Chromium builds fast? lol, it takes my laptop with 12 cores and 64gb of ram over an hour to compile from scratch, not counting the ~20gb of git history to download (I maintain an internal build at work).

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#184

Post by sime2009 »

Regarding the topic of browser mono-cultures, I was web developer in the post browser war era in the early 2000s where we had a dominant IE6 and a stagnant browser landscape.

It was bad.

Real bad.

But I'm actually fairly positive about MS getting into the chromium landscape and back into the game. Let's face it MS had lost all of its influence in the browser world before dropping IE and making this move. It is a Google/Chrome dominated world at the moment. But by adopting Chromium, MS can "catch up" on a technical level and also wield significant power inside the Chromium project itself. They have money and they have an experienced browser engine engineering team. They will be able to provide some balance to Google in this ecosystem. If push came to shove, forking chromium wouldn't be an idle threat from MS. They will have some power.

On a technical level it looks like a move towards a mono-culture, but politically it looks like a chance at more balance and diversity to me.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#185

Post by blowski »

dessant wrote: post #147
jpadkins wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or put another way: when they become a target for bad actors to abuse extensions, expect the review process to be more difficult.

I don't think becoming a target for malicious actors is the reason for Chrome Web Store reviews being awful, see the threads I've linked to above and explore the rest of the links. Chrome Web Store reviewers are simply not properly trained and qualified to do this job, and the review process dictated by Google does not leave much room for improvement. Reviewers make an awful lot of mistakes and they usually do not li…

Exactly. Developers are going to submit apps to Google regardless of how bad the process is, so there’s no real incentive to improve the experience.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#187

Post by swebs »

wayneftw wrote: post #169
swebs wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you add Microsoft tracking which is even worse. Why not just use Chromium and have no tracking?

Why is Microsoft tracking "even worse" than Google tracking? I'm pretty sure Google has infected more of the Internet than Microsoft.

Because Microsoft is also collecting data from the OS level as well if you're using Windows. It's easy to keep sensitive data out of Gmail. It's hard to keep it of your computer entirely.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#188

Post by p1necone »

c-smile wrote: post #76

What happened with font rendering? Fonts are rendered with thinner lines in new Edge (on the left): http://terrainformatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IE-fo... Such rendering does not match rest of Windows... New Edge is definitely less readable, and Google Chrome exhibits the same problem.

The one on the left looks much better on the whole to me. It does seem to be making the font a little thinner though.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#189

Post by p1necone »

mehrdadn wrote: post #165
raphlinus wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are many forms of distortion. When it comes to spacing in particular, yes, there are many people who are quite sensitive to it, others less so. You can Google "keming" for more information on that.

I can notice bad kerning, that's not what I thought we're talking about. We're just talking about the distortion difference between these renderers we have, not arbitrarily terrible distortion. And awful kerning is not the kind of distortion a renderer like Chrome's has.

Are they really not noticeable to you? The one on the right has clear jagged edges to me.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#190

Post by mmanfrin »

swebs wrote: post #142
dessant wrote: post #99

I have published some of my extensions for the new Edge browser on their store [1], the submission experience was straightforward and pleasant, and the extensions were published in a couple of days after manual review. Updates were also reviewed and published in a timely manner. More importantly, during extension submissions and reviews I did not feel abused as a developer, something which I cannot say about the Chro…

Phrasing it as a dichotomy like that is pretty dishonest, especially how Firefox is twice as popular than Edge [1] and is free open source software that doesn't spy on you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...

OP didn't mention Safari or Brave either, don't be so hair-trigger looking for offense.
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