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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

#261

Post by ken »

duxup wrote: post #232
sime2009 wrote: post #184

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 Goog…

I'm a noob web dev working in a small shop that sells a niche SaaS product. We had a customer push us to support Edge. The dev team (3 dudes) just looked at eachother and laid down the "No, Firefox or Chrome...". It's just so much pressure to dance around the "this one does this, that one doesn't" and generally we rarely run into any Firefox and Chrome issues. Edge, just not worth it for a small team. I'm glad we pro…

Last time I was doing web dev (maybe 2 years ago), I worked primarily in Firefox and Safari. Chrome presented more issues for me than Edge ever did. I don't think I ever had anything work in Chrome, and fail in Edge.

I lived through the IE6 years, so I was never thrilled with any version of IE I had to support, but Edge was actually a good browser. Strange UI, solid engine.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#262

Post by chrismorgan »

dan1234 wrote: post #250
duxup wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a noob web dev working in a small shop that sells a niche SaaS product. We had a customer push us to support Edge. The dev team (3 dudes) just looked at eachother and laid down the "No, Firefox or Chrome...". It's just so much pressure to dance around the "this one does this, that one doesn't" and generally we rarely run into any Firefox and Chrome issues. Edge, just not worth it for a small team. I'm glad we pro…

What are you using that Edge doesn't support? We treat Chrome/Safari/Edge/FF all as 1st class browsers and haven't had many problems (aside from Safari lacking U2F and exotic CSS props like motion-path).

A few things I’ve been using without EdgeHTML support: #rgba and #rrggbbaa in CSS, , Custom Elements v1. On my personal website, I have deliberately chosen to no longer polyfill these or change my process to avoid #rgba in the final CSS, so various background colours are missing, the light/dark theme switcher doesn’t collapse (it should start collapsed), and a terminal recording will be missing in an upcoming blog post.

mix-blend-mode is another thing that EdgeHTML doesn’t support that I was using for a bit, but I stopped using it because I kept finding critical bugs with it in Chromium, most notably https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398 which was impossible to work around, simply stopping rendering the page after 8192px!

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#263

Post by Nullabillity »

Asooka wrote: post #237
gamblor956 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has always been developer-first, even when they didn't need them, and even during the Ballmer era. Google has never been about the developer experience, and is quite hostile to developers even when they need them. (See, e.g., Stadia.)

One difference that stands out to me about Microsoft vs Google. Both are very heavy C++ shops. Both have invested in developing tools for enhancing developer productivity on their respective platforms (Windows and Linux). Yes, Linux is not a Google product (thank god) but it is what they build on. Microsoft's C++ IDE and debugger are the gold standard for productivity and ease of use - everyone who writes native appl…

Have you actually tried to use Visual Studio? It's an unusable piece of crap.

The navigation is nearly unusable. Don't focus the project navigation on a tree browser if you're not going to integrate it into the rest of the navigation workflow.

NuGet regularly fails silently to restore packages.

It uses a virtual filesystem that usually maps 1:1 to the actual project folder.. except files created outside of VS are completely invisible to it, unless manually added to the project.

The project/solution files are very verbose and aren't designed to be edited by humans.

The migration path from .NET Framework to .NET Core seems to be "create a new project, copy the files over manually, and copy over your old settings one by one".

Some of these have been fixed for new projects, but there is no option to migrate to the new structure. Except, again, starting over with a new one.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#264

Post by scanr »

WorldMaker wrote: post #218
scanr wrote: post #20

It will make me happy to be able to stop supporting ie11 at some point in the future. Sadly, it doesn’t appear that ie11 will have an end of life date as it’ll be supported as long as Windows 10 is and Windows 10 appears evergreen. Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point.

> Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point. If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch. If you mean Edgmium (New Edge) over Edge Classic, it already replaces Edge Classic (entirely) when you install it, and there's a slow rollout through Windows Update already happening,…

Dang it. It probably is our group policy. I suspect that we have a lot of users with similar policies as we over index for ie11 in our stats too.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#265

Post by gruez »

irrational wrote: post #23
scanr wrote: post #20

It will make me happy to be able to stop supporting ie11 at some point in the future. Sadly, it doesn’t appear that ie11 will have an end of life date as it’ll be supported as long as Windows 10 is and Windows 10 appears evergreen. Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point.

2025 is the official end of life year. You can find a page on MS's website with all the end of life dates.

>2025 is the official end of life year

not according to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17454/lifecycle-faq....

>Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and the most current version will continue to follow the specific lifecycle policy for the operating system for which it is installed. To find the lifecycle dates for all operating systems, search the Microsoft Lifecycle Database here.

It's unknown how long MSFT will continue to include IE in Windows, but at the very least it will be supported until January 2029, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#266

Post by microcolonel »

sime2009 wrote: post #184

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 Goog…

Chromium is open source, Microsoft has published most of their interesting work on Chromium itself. A monoculture is a big problem if the alternative is to write a new browser to compete, less so if you can just fork and have the same start line.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#267

Post by mehrdadn »

noisem4ker wrote: post #257
dataflow wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Left side is actually sharp, with subpixel smoothing. Right side is awful (just like many parts of post-Vista Windows) with apparent grayscale AA. This is something they actually got right; it's one thing that was terrible about IE and the old Edge, and that I'd bet was subconsciously turning many people off (in my case, consciously making me want to tear my eyes out). If you can't see the difference, open dev consol…

>Right side is awful (just like many parts of post-Vista Windows) with apparent grayscale AA By "post-Vista" you mean Windows 8 and later? Vista and 7 (its refinement) were the peak of subpixel-antialiased ClearType with the Segoe font. It was with Metro and its animated, rotation-enabled, mobile-first design language that antialiasing was downgraded to greyscale.

No, I mean since Vista and later. Ever since DWM was introduced, anything rendered on a DWM surface (or something along those lines, I don't know the details) has been blurry. The taskbar text is an easy example. The Metro UI did extend that to even more places, though.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#268

Post by microcolonel »

bzbarsky wrote: post #223
dubcanada wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well lol it is a rather complex piece of software, so maybe take that one back. Firefox is comparable in that department.

Having compiled both: it's not. On the same hardware, Firefox takes ~4x less time to compile than Chromium for me...

Which platform were you compiling on, and when? It's been some years now, but Chromium used to build with MSVC on Windows.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#269

Post by robbrown451 »

mariushn wrote: post #246
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…

Exactly. I hope MS will also take Android and release an MS version of it. Privacy oriented, no Google apps (that can't be removed either). This would put more pressure on Google than privacy fines from EU. Competition works best. I'm not an MS fan (using Linux at home, with vscode), but I'll happily switch. I wondered why MS didn't do this or partnered with Ubuntu instead of closing their Windows Phone business, ful…

"Competition works best."

Right... I mean, a certain very strategic kind of competition. Co-opetition? Direct competition would be simply offering a competing fully in-house browser or competing fully in-house mobile OS. This is kind of sneaky in that it lets Google do a lot of the heavy lifting, while still being able to yank the things (or add the things) that Microsoft wants.

With regard to Edge adopting Chromium, I have to wonder whether Google sees this as a victory, or if they feel like Microsoft pulled one over on them.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#270

Post by smileybarry »

rdiddly wrote: post #26

Linked at https://microsoftedgewelcome.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy : "We will honor your choices about browsing data and collect only what is needed to make your experiences better."

And you can disable it entirely in "Settings" > "Privacy and services" > "Help improve Microsoft Edge".
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