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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

#361

Post by millstone »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #276
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish they'd moved to Gecko instead of Chromium. It's not like Gecko is an inherently inferior engine by any stretch, and it would significantly bolster their marketshare so that developers actually have to test against it.

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 is here to protect you from the lovely document reader that they forcibly mutated into a toxic app platform.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#362

Post by tasogare »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #336
thawaway1837 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Just imagine what today's world would be like if Microsoft did pitch HTA

That would have been a security nightmare.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#363

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

tomc1985 wrote: post #350
wavesplash wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most likely he had been thinking about the project for some time. But the 10-days-execution story sounds much nicer

He was... kind of. My understanding is Eich had been thinking for a while about the idea of bringing a version of Scheme into the browser. He was lured to work for Netscape by the promise that yes, he could do this. Unfortunately the business decision came down that the language's syntax had to approximate Java. So the semantics of the language had probably been settled in his mind for quite some time, but the syntax change still makes the 10 days an impressive feat. (And also explains a lot of the weirdness in JavaScript -- you're writing code and expecting it to behave like a C-like, but you're actually kind of writing quasi-Scheme and you don't know it.)

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#364

Post by millstone »

mc3 wrote: post #289
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 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.

The spec will comply with Chrome.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#365

Post by Nullabillity »

eyegor wrote: post #320
Nullabillity wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

As someone who uses visual studio + code literally every day, I'm not sure what you're referring to with most of these complaints. The project/solution files are bog standard xml, and well documented, but in general you shouldn't need to touch them. The migration from framework to core 3.0 is now very simple thanks to xaml support, but it used to be a huge hassle. You can literally just edit the tags in your csproj/f…

> The project/solution files are bog standard xml, and well documented, but in general you shouldn't need to touch them.

Project files are "bog standard" XML (except for all the weird magic, like variable resolution and conditionals), but solution files are some unholy VB-like abomination.

But regardless, that doesn't help much when the schema is clearly not designed for human editing (incredibly verbose, UUIDs everywhere for references, etc).

> The migration from framework to core 3.0 is now very simple thanks to xaml support, but it used to be a huge hassle.

No idea how a GUI description language is supposed to help you here.

> You can literally just edit the tags in your csproj/fsproj/etc to enable different target frameworks

Didn't work for me.

> or you can use the ui [0], and then you'll need to do a nuget reinstall. One command [1].

Keep in mind that that command is free to update dependencies as it feels like.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#366

Post by onion2k »

jammygit wrote: post #345
Inityx wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I like JavaScript... it’s very flexible and incredibly expressive. Using c# lately, I just feel shackled

Moving for any modern language you know well to any other modern language will feel like that. You need to spend time learning. It has nothing to do with the what the language is capable of.

"I can code in X so I should be able to jump in to any other language and get to speed instantly." is obviously wrong.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#367

Post by feross »

millstone wrote: post #361
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 is here to protect you from the lovely document reader that they forcibly mutated into a toxic app platform.

So you’d rather live in a world where all the web apps you use every day need to be installed and run with full user permissions?

The web is the safest, most battle-tested sandbox environment to run apps in. It’s so safe that you click random links all day long, running 1000s of apps and never have to worry.

I’ll take web apps over native apps from a security perspective, thank you.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#368

Post by millstone »

microcolonel wrote: post #294
duhi88 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they could have picked up one of the other less-dominate browser engines. WebKit and Firefox are good starting points, and both could use the extra help maintaining their open-source core. I get that they wanted to use the same browser as Electron, now that they own it...it just sucks.

The general quality of Firefox is worse, the tooling is more fiddly, some of it is written in languages which are not as familiar to Microsoft, it is considerably less straightforward to customize; and on top of this, performance is similar at best. Chromium has an architecture which lends itself to deep integration, and the default UI is much closer to Microsoft's own designs. > WebKit and Firefox are good starting…

What is Microsoft hoping to achieve? "Starting point" for what?

Is MS foolish enough to believe they can have influence on the evolution of the web through github.com/google/chromium pull requests?

Alternatively, has MS has given up? Perhaps they are content to rebrand Chrome and collect the bing.com seignorage from new Windows installs.

Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#369

Post by emayljames »

microcolonel wrote: post #294
duhi88 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they could have picked up one of the other less-dominate browser engines. WebKit and Firefox are good starting points, and both could use the extra help maintaining their open-source core. I get that they wanted to use the same browser as Electron, now that they own it...it just sucks.

The general quality of Firefox is worse, the tooling is more fiddly, some of it is written in languages which are not as familiar to Microsoft, it is considerably less straightforward to customize; and on top of this, performance is similar at best. Chromium has an architecture which lends itself to deep integration, and the default UI is much closer to Microsoft's own designs. > WebKit and Firefox are good starting…

That of course is personal conjecture, of which mine is the exact opposite.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#370

Post by onion2k »

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…

I'm glad we probabbly can direct them to the new Edge now (after some testing).

I would be surprised if they still want to be a customer.

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