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The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

blogs.windows.com

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Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#331

Post by ataylor32 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #226
dstaley wrote: post #2

I'm really curious why they released to stable with so many basic features missing. For example, your bookmarks won't sync between devices (although that was recently re-enabled in the preview channels). It sounds like they're not pushing out automatic updates right now anyway, so I'm not sure what this announcement amounts to. Why not wait until the 20H1 Windows 10 feature update (which sounds like the update that w…

The blog posts mention that releasing it today is a shot across the bow for Enterprise. Given Enterprises like their year+ efforts to "test" software before ever deploying it, they want Enterprise to start that process today , ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it. It's also a very subtle signal for several reasons to release it the day after Extended Support for Windows 7 ended . On the on…

> ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it

I'm not sure it will be part of 20H1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/01/15/upgrading-new... says:

> If you’d prefer not to install Microsoft Edge manually, you can wait for it to be installed in a future update to Windows 10, following our measured roll-out approach over the next several months. We will start to migrate Windows 10 customers to the new Microsoft Edge in the coming weeks, starting with a subset of Windows Insiders in the Release Preview ring.

I'm guessing 20H1 will be released sooner than several months.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#333

Post by rtpg »

sjwright wrote: post #291
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One huge advantage the Chromium has over Gecko is Google's Security Team (ie Project Zero). For most users, the web browser is one of the biggest attack surfaces and having arguably the best security team behind the browser engine is a good thing.

Google have certainly done a great job of maximizing the PR benefit from their security researchers. And it’s a great thing they’re doing. But regardless of how well individual companies market their respective security teams, Firefox has a comparable reputation for their browser engine. Yes some of that might be thanks to PZ, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it? Choosing Mozilla’s platform would have been better f…

I can understand value in multiple browsers for experimenting with new things (see Rust integration into Mozilla's engine), but what are the security benefits?

Like if you have 3 different crypto imlpementations, you have times more teams that have to get a thing right. It seems way easier to try and get it right just once.

Perhaps there's a holistic idea of "if one browser has an issue, at least it doesn't affect 100% of them" but given what CVEs look like in reality (often variations of the same attack across multiple programs) it seems like the cost/benefit would not be in our favor

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#334

Post by ataylor32 »

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 issues I have run into with Edge:

1. The :focus-within CSS pseudo-class doesn't work

2. object-fit only works on images

3. These SVG loaders don't work: https://samherbert.net/svg-loaders/

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#335

Post by I_AM_A_SMURF »

microcolonel wrote: post #268
bzbarsky wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked on both, it's no comparison. Firefox builds in about 40min on my macbook pro, Chromium takes like 4 hours?

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#336

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #302
tracker1 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest reason they went with Chromium/Blink is simply because of market share... most users at this point are using Chrome for better or worse, and MS is going with the safest bet in terms of user compatibility for today's web.

I believe the reason was NodeJS and Electron, wasn’t it? Basically, MS expects NodeJS and especially Electron to become fairly important going forward (MS’s 2 newest and highly successful apps are both Electron based...VS Code and Teams). There is no indication that either of those are moving away from Chromium anytime soon.

The sad thing is that those apps' HTML and JS probably are standards-compliant, so supporting Slack, Teams, VSCode, (Electron) Skype, etc in a Firefox-based version of Electron should be possible and very straightforward - yet it probably won't happen.

What's sad is that Windows 98 fully supported desktop-based HTML+JS apps ("HTA Applications"), with access to native resources (using COM via `new ActiveXObject`) and it works with IE11 still - Microsoft just never pitched it as a serious development platform for some reason. Just imagine what today's world would be like if Microsoft did pitch HTA as a successor to VB6 (instead of the quickly-abandoned WinForms platform, now barely on life-support) (I'm mostly thinking we wouldn't be stuck with excessive memory consumption in Slack, and these apps would be able to use things like native context-menus and accessibility features)

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#337

Post by techntoke »

catach wrote: post #292
techntoke wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of developer-first? My experience working at Microsoft in 2015 was the opposite of what you describe. They were too focused on supporting legacy MS that they couldn't innovate or find and keep talented developers in open source because they were forced to adopt tools and frameworks that were crap compared to standard open source development tools. The only reason people went there usually was…

External rather than internal dev support.

We all know Microsoft has a lot more internal documentation than external, especially with Windows around that time.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#338

Post by wavesplash »

Inityx wrote: post #330
alwillis wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the guy who literally birthed Firefox (Brendan Eich) picked Chromium for Brave, his new browser.

Yeah, but he also designed JavaScript, so...

Under a 2 week deadline. I challenge you to do better.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#339

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

tracker1 wrote: post #281
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…

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.

> 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.

We've been using TypeScript for all scripts longer than ~20 lines for years - so we got async functions for free (it compiles async/await TypeScript functions to IE11-compatible ES5 just fine).

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#340

Post by core-questions »

rtpg wrote: post #333
sjwright wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google have certainly done a great job of maximizing the PR benefit from their security researchers. And it’s a great thing they’re doing. But regardless of how well individual companies market their respective security teams, Firefox has a comparable reputation for their browser engine. Yes some of that might be thanks to PZ, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it? Choosing Mozilla’s platform would have been better f…

I can understand value in multiple browsers for experimenting with new things (see Rust integration into Mozilla's engine), but what are the security benefits? Like if you have 3 different crypto imlpementations, you have times more teams that have to get a thing right. It seems way easier to try and get it right just once. Perhaps there's a holistic idea of "if one browser has an issue, at least it doesn't affect 10…

> what are the security benefits?

Not everyone gets hit with every attack. Biological systems work this way too.

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