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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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Microsoft is a feisty startup with a focused product line?

No, Microsoft is the same. My comment doesn't imply that Microsoft is somehow simpler than Google. The point is that the two people above me are disagreeing because they're over-simplifying these complex entities.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could have open sourced EdgeHTML. It's not like it was worse, than Gecko.

It was worse than Gecko. Gecko is excellent. Edge still has (had?) so many rendering issues on sites we make. One thing I find really impressive about Firefox, despite the completely different engine I _very_ rarely find FF-specific bugs.

www.just-eat.no

Many (all?) Oslo postcodes start with 0, and their site truncates the 0 when you try to enter your postcode. Their stated solution was to use Chrome, so they don't get any of my business.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Fair enough. I'll try to tie it back to the mono-culture question.

The primary reason why the hellscape was bad, and remained bad for so long, was because we had a single "winner" of the browser wars. Microsoft won and they immediately tried to strangle the web for years. There were no alternative browsers for a long time to provide some kind of competition which might improve the matter. Sure, we could just test on IE and only support IE, but it was still an awful browser and MS wanted it that way.

The point is that the bad "technical" level situation was sustained by the browser political mono-culture. I'm somewhat positive now about the current situation with MS getting more involved because it will add more diversity to our current political browser situation. This should translate into better results for everyone on all levels, technical, user, privacy (I hope), etc.

So maybe from a pure browser engine point of view there is the same or less diversity, but this situation is very different from the early 2000s one.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use Sumatra PDF for PDF/mobi/epub.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#405

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 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.

> I just wish they'd moved to Gecko instead of Chromium.

The usual answer to that complaint is that Gecko is harder to embed. MDN pages on the subject even mention it’s deprecated and that the documentation is obsolete.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#406
post #367

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.

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where you could tell a web app from a document before you opened it. No need for apps to be native, but on a different protocol.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#407
One of the reasons there are so many incompatibilities between browsers in every era is that the web is not built out of a small set of primitives: everyone that wants to provide a web interface must implement the whole set of WWW standards (html, scripting, css, etc), which is very difficult and error prone.

If there was only a handful of primitives to implement, and everything else was built on it, then it would be much easier to stay compatible.

This is the kind of situation that has led to IE6 dominating the web, then motivating Google to create a browser, take the market and then Microsoft finally dropping their web engine and taking up Chromium.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC it exists for Android.

Android is open source in the same way that Chrome is. That is to say, not.

I'd contend that it is closer to Chromium as the Googley bits are in Play Services and OEM builds.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Electron is pretty much the same nightmare anyway. Just because it runs in chromium doesn't mean it preserves the sandbox. All electron apps have full access to your filesystem and os, even from their chromium window context.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was worse than Gecko. Gecko is excellent. Edge still has (had?) so many rendering issues on sites we make. One thing I find really impressive about Firefox, despite the completely different engine I _very_ rarely find FF-specific bugs.

www.just-eat.no Many (all?) Oslo postcodes start with 0, and their site truncates the 0 when you try to enter your postcode. Their stated solution was to use Chrome, so they don't get any of my business.

From your description, it sounds like they decided to use a "number" typed field for the post codes. This is of course incorrect, post codes are really just strings. While the bug manifests itself on firefox, it is hard to blame it for implementing the field according to spec [1]. Chrome decided to ignore the spec and leave the field more free-form, which in turn enables developers to use it incorrectly without detecting the compatibility bug.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/sec-forms.html#number-state-typ...

> User agents must not allow the user to set the value to a non-empty string that is not a valid floating-point number. If the user agent provides a user interface for selecting a number, then the value must be set to the best representation of the number representing the user’s selection as a floating-point number.

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