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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

#391

Post by igravious »

BrendanEich wrote: post #382
alwillis wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Hey, thanks for everything you've done for open source and open platforms.

The reason you gave here for Brave not choosing Gecko (or WebKit) is interesting – but given Microsoft's deep pockets and tech know-how those reasons don't apply to them.

I think this is a strategic blunder on Microsoft's part and I say this as a Linux user. :)

Microsoft has now warmly embraced Linux – and I think they could have chosen this time to warmly embrace Mozilla. Oh well.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#392

Post by rym_ »

Not completely related but does anyone know of an epub reader with the quality that Edge had? The EPUBReader extension in FF works but the rendering and UX is a lot worse. Calibre on the other hand is a great management system but with a horrendous reader.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#393

Post by rym_ »

spookyuser wrote: post #341
endothrowho333 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it's amazing how incredible Calibre is at organising books but terrible it is at displaying them. As a matter of fact though, I think I have found a very good epub reader which I don't see mentioned very much called Cover. It is ridiculously smooth at displaying epubs, maybe even more so than edge. I was reading an epub with tons of images and I could swipe left and right between pages multiple times without wai…

Agreed at Calibre! Ihave the same qualms with EPUBReader in FF, it does not get close to what edge was capable of. I'll take a look at cover at home as I sadly cannot install it at work.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#394

Post by mlang23 »

I wish Microsoft wouldn't alpha-test their browser-experiment on real-world-users. Since Edge is out, I find it totally useless. It has also been a total fail on the accessibility front. To release something that is inaccessible from the start is no longer acceptable in 2020 methinks, especially from a big player like MS. The word that comes to mind is embarrasment.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#395

Post by iaml »

ukyrgf wrote: post #327
crazygringo wrote: post #231

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…

The amount of hooks that Adobe Creative Cloud claws into your OS is enough to make any software developer want to rip their hair out. Anytime I notice my mouse lag for a moment or an Explorer window hiccup, 30 seconds later I get notification that there is a new update for the Creative Cloud app...

I recently noticed some adobe process trying to access a random ip address and promptly blocked it, because it was probably analytics. Then it started retrying it more than once a second. This makes me think it's even worse inside than I feared, so I'm using gimp now. It's pretty good!

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#396

Post by sime2009 »

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…

In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured in the early 2000s while trying to develop apps for IE6.

Just focussing on the browser itself:

* Today's developers enjoy a large and rich platform of (relatively) bug free functionality and APIs on which to build. The hellscape had very limited APIs and were riddled with bugs. For a long time IE and the other browsers didn't even agree on how to compute the width/height of an element w.r.t. padding and borders. (CSS box-models did not match!). We spent a lot of time just working around bugs and keeping up to date on the latest work-arounds for all the problems.

* Today's browsers have high performance JS JITs with very few user visible bugs. The hellscape had slow buggy JS implementations. I remember having to unregister event handlers on page unload otherwise the browser would leak memory.

* Today's browsers have excellent debugging tools built in. In the hellscape, if you had a trailing comma in a JS list on IE, it would give an error message (pop up) with either no file and line number or a bogus one. Yes, that bad.

Even when supporting just one browser, development was often a miserable experience. MS had won the browser war and was trying to kill the idea of apps on the web by neglect. It wasn't until Firefox got going that things improved.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#397

Post by bananicorn »

BrendanEich wrote: post #372
tomc1985 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I joined Netscape on April 3, 1995 but in the server team, due to a temporary requisition shortage. I worked on what would eventually become HTTP 1.1, which we wanted to be more like SPDY or HTTP 2. Therefore I had only spare time to think about what became JS, and I used it to study HyperTalk, Logo, and other languages, not just Scheme or Self. I finally got transferred to the client team one whole month later, in e…

Not that you need it or anything, but I'd like to thank you for your work on Javascript - without it I might never have gotten started with programming.

So, thank you very much for laying down the foundation for a whole generation of new programmers!

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#398

Post by zapzupnz »

tsimionescu wrote: post #249
crazygringo wrote: post #231

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…

> because these tools are installed for all users

So all they should require is to be dragged into the /Applications folder (or /System/Applications in Catalina). That's it.

That's how a macOS app should be installed. That should be the end of the process unless it needs to install kernel extensions (and even then, from Catalina onwards, such extensions should become userland extensions).

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#399

Post by azangru »

sime2009 wrote: post #396
azangru wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured in the early 2000s while trying to develop apps for IE6. Just focussing on the browser itself: * Today's developers enjoy a large and rich platform of (relatively) bug free functionality and APIs on which to build. The hellscape had very limited APIs and were riddled with bugs. For a lo…

> In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured

I completely agree, but the points that you then make simply show how modern browsers are vastly better than the old ones. I love developing for a modern browser, such as Chrome. I just fail to see how the claim that having competing browser engines that do not have complete feature parity can be in any way considered desirable by web developers. I can understand this argument from end users' perspective (and even then not quite, because remember the days when sites would say that they were "best viewed in Netscape Navigator", or when you could watch Apple keynote presentation on Apple's site only in Safari?), but not from web developer's perspective. Wouldn't a single healthily evolving browser engine be better from web developer's point of view than multiple engines, each with its quirks?

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#400

Post by squiggleblaz »

Nullabillity wrote: post #263
Asooka wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

I'm so completely not a Windows developer or a C++ developer, but seriously, the experience working with Visual Studio on Windows/C++ when I didn't really know what I was doing - but I had to do undocumented things (I needed to get Haskell to talk to some Windows apis, for which no bindings exist) - was incredible. Second to none. I'm half thinking about changing career direction it was so nice.
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