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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

#381

Post by caspper69 »

azangru wrote: post #378
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…

Could you elaborate on what made it bad? I am a web developer too, and for me, the biggest annoyance is feature inconsistency between browsers. Only yesterday, I was cursing under my breath, because webkit-based browsers allow scrollbar styling, but firefox doesn't. In our org, we have embraced CSS grid, but by doing so, made a conscious decision to finally ignore IE11 (rather than to use @supports and write fallback…

Stagnation was the biggest problem. Stagnation is not the problem with Chromium; in fact, it's the opposite, and that's really what's forced Microsoft's hand. They were simply wasting resources playing catch up to Chromium. Why bother?

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#382

Post by BrendanEich »

alwillis wrote: post #329
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.

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

We started with Gecko in 2015, but it lost on many dimensions in a head to head comparison enumerating gaps vs. Chrome. DRM is just one example. We don't like DRM, but users want Netflix to work, and Google makes WideVine free-as-in-beer; whereas at the time, Mozilla had an Adobe deal that did not extend to non-Firefox Gecko embeddings.

So we switched to chromium/Blink in late 2015. Much later, when I visited Apple in early 2017, a devrel friend asked why we couldn't use WebKit. A WebKit founder in the meeting agreed with me that there was no way for Brave to do so on Windows w/o running out of capital. DRM again was an issue too, without WideVine. Don’t blame startup for not carrying a full engine — that needs deep pockets. While MS does have deep enough pockets, it is starting by using chromium/Blink and slow-forking.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#383

Post by bzzzt »

alwillis wrote: post #342
Inityx wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Considering he designed it in about 10 days, it could have been much worse… and now it’s one of the most popular and important programming languages in the world; go figure: https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-top-program... In 2001, Apple could have picked Gecko but forked KHTML instead to create WebKit/Safari because it was smaller and seemed easier to work with. It doesn’t change the fact that back in…

KHTML was always designed and positioned as an embeddable browser engine. Mozilla deprecated the embedding of Gecko, so you have to fork and change the whole browser instead of just lifting the engine...

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#385

Post by simongray »

ataylor32 wrote: post #334
dan1234 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Damn, lacking :focus-within is a big one. That pseudo-selector is very useful when creating custom widgets.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#386

Post by caspper69 »

feross wrote: post #367
millstone wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really think this is a problem anymore. It's more that no desktop OS provides secure native execution facilities a la iOS. The web browser was the best solution for sandboxing web applications in 1995-200x, but now CPUs have multiple cores, virtualization extensions, systems with multiple gigabytes of ram, etc.

There are better ways to sandbox applications in 2020.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#387

Post by doctor_eval »

ijidak wrote: post #285
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…

> 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.

Google forked WebKit and it worked out pretty well for them.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#389

Post by ChicagoDave »

kxrm wrote: post #131
ChicagoDave wrote: post #72

I use Edge on my iPhone and Firefox on my laptop. Trying to reduce my Google footprint as much as possible.

Just for clarity, iPhone browsers all use Safari, so Edge on iPhone will just be an Edge skinned Safari.

Using WebKit as a foundation is not the same as using Safari.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#390

Post by asiachick »

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…

This is flatly not true. Just dig through the CVEs and you'll see while they have a similar number of bugs Chrome's are mostly in the harmless category (browser got DOSed) where as Firefox's has had like 10x the bad category (code got executed outside the sandbox).
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