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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

#281
post #232

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…

Been tacitly supporting Edge myself, but drew a hard line at IE (even 11) for current projects. Without async functions, promises etc, it's just too much extra boilerplate, a separate build setup and a huge payload just to support IE11, let alone older.

I'll be glad if/when Edge (blink) is deployed with a windows update.. the sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Edge has a good feature support (check caniuse.com). It would be interesting to know what the exact issues your app has with the browser. Otherwise it sounds more like your devs like to use some vendor-specific hacks and blame Edge for it. I know there are some Flexbox things to consider, but nothing a small team can't handle. IE11 is another story, though.

I'd also be curious to know what features that Edge doesn't support. I know it doesn't do everything Chrome does, but I haven't run into any scenarios that Edge didn't support in a long time. It's a pet peeve of mine that apps don't support Edge/Trident, Vivaldi, etc. It's easier to write cross-browser code than ever, but it seems like we're in the process of reverting back to the bad old days when IE6 was the only b…

IE6 was closed source and only ran on Windows... Chromium/Blink run cross platform, open source and already 2 forks in. There's some stark contrast, even if it's more of a mono-culture, it's nothing like the IE6 days, even if google does have more power/control than other stakeholders.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#283
post #142
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...

The fuck is your problem?

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#284
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.

It was my hope as part of Edge migrating to Chromium that they’d contribute proper native-appearance font rendering, just as they’ve been contributing a few other things now (“To date we’ve made more than 1900 contributions across areas like accessibility, modern input including touch, speech, digital inking, and many more.”).

Chromium’s Windows font rendering is better than it was a few years ago (when it was really pretty awful), but as you say, it’s still not right. Firefox’s font rendering is much truer to the platform conventions.

I hope that this is still on their radar as something to improve.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#285

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…

> If push came to shove, forking chromium wouldn't be an idle threat from MS

Can almost guarantee this will happen in 2-5 years.

Given Microsoft's history, I don't see Microsoft and Google playing nice for too long.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conveniently leaving out the hundreds of times that Google has randomly terminated APIs or entire products with minimal if any forewarning, or reduced API functionality or pricing without forewarning, and the complete and utter lack of support [edit] Google provides to developers who don't already have their own twitter following.

It's almost as if Google is a massive organization running hundreds of initiatives spanning decades, making it difficult to simplify things with a single description.

And yet one constant that connects all past Google projects: premature, without-warning shuttering of operations*

* not all operations, but enough for it to become a cliche

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynical thought: in no way am I claiming this was the only reason for Microsoft choosing Blink, but it’s probably easier to find and replace Google analytics APIs with Microsoft endpoints than it is to add them into a code base after the fact.

Chromium is not the same as Google Chrome. Chromium is open source and vendor neutral. Google Chrome adds the Google stuff on top of it. Both chromium and Firefox can be customized and vendor branded (see the countless privacy oriented browsers built on top of Firefox).

Chromium still has Google endpoints.

Iridium was developed specifically to degoogle all attempts at phoning home.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#288
post #3

If you use the PDF or e-book functionality in Edge, you may want to hold off on upgrading. The PDF scrolling is not as smooth as on the older version.

I am so sad about the fact that Edge can no longer read epubs and seems to have (so far) sub par pdf reading. It's been my go to pdf reader for a while now and I love the way it scrolls. It is so smooth - just like preview on a mac. I haven't found anything else that comes close to edge for the smoothness of its pdf reading on windows, so I will definitely be holding out on this update for as long as I can. I don't r…

Have you found any good ePub reader?

Zathura and Calibre are insanely bloated. FBreader is just no. Emacs works, but has similar functionality to FBreader.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#289

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 think it will be bad for different reasons. Will Chrome not comply with the spec. Nope because the spec follows what the browsers actually do, and Chrome is the browsers.

Will it have bugs that make the web unusable? Probably not. What makes it bad? The world's biggest ad company is in charge of it, so privacy is at risk.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, that bugs the hell out of me too. Why do I need to give Adobe admin rights to install Photoshop? Why do I need to give Microsoft the same to install Word? And now for a web browser? If I'm installing something low-level like a window manager or a keyboard shortcut tool, I get it . But for a normal mainstream flagship consumer application, what on earth do they need admin privileges for?! I hate the fact I…

Well, there is an extremely simple reason: because these tools are installed for all users, not just your own. Doing it any other way would be wasteful on an actual multi-user machine. But some tools do support it - both Chrome and Firefox can be installed without admin privileges. There is also the fact that Office and many other products rely on demons starting at boot time, which can only be installed with admin r…

"Doing it any other way would be wasteful on an actual multi-user machine."

On Windows at least, UWP apps are deduplicated across all users on the same system so when user #2 installs the same app already installed by user #1, it will just point to the same existing shared instance of the app's files. I don't know much about MacOS but I'd guess there's a similar packaging system. These systems also incorporate sandboxes which address the other problems you mentioned in your last paragraph.

The problem is just when the OS teams can't convince other developers (even ones inside the same company in Microsoft's case) to actually use their packaging and sandbox systems.

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