Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 487 posts

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#411

Post by Wowfunhappy »

tracker1 wrote: post #280
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.

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.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that perpetuates monocultures once they start.

Sadly, that doesn't make it wrong per se, just deeply discouraging. It makes me think we're past the point of no return.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#412

Post by astura »

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…

>Edge, just not worth it for a small team.

I just can't get behind this lazy "small team" excuse; it's really unnecessary hubris.

I worked on a "small team" of 1 (just myself - I was the only dev) for several years on an enterprise webapp. The kind that does complicated stuff - not a simple CRUD app. [Sidenote: I would have killed for a team of three!!] Yet I supported Edge since the day it came out and never dropped support of IE. In fact, I even supported old versions of IE (7 and up) until the day Microsoft EOLed older version of IE (that was January 12th, 2016, FWIW). It honestly isn't very hard these days. Annoying sometimes, yes, but not difficult.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#413

Post by wlesieutre »

balls187 wrote: post #343
wlesieutre wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extra sad because Microsoft briefly had their own PDF program (Reader) in Windows 8, but removed it in favor of making Edge the default program for opening PDFs.

Are you sure it's gone? I just checked the Microsoft App Store and Reader is available. https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9WZDNCRFHWG5 Funny because with Windows Ink, I loved Edge's PDF abilities. Made my life so much easier.

Huh, I'm happy to see it's still available. I sold my Surface years ago and tend to not look at PDFs on Windows anymore, all I'd noticed was that I didn't have Reader installed anymore.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#414

Post by duxup »

astura wrote: post #412
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…

>Edge, just not worth it for a small team. I just can't get behind this lazy "small team" excuse; it's really unnecessary hubris. I worked on a "small team" of 1 (just myself - I was the only dev) for several years on an enterprise webapp. The kind that does complicated stuff - not a simple CRUD app. [Sidenote: I would have killed for a team of three!!] Yet I supported Edge since the day it came out and never dropped…

I don't want to get into technical details except to say some of what we support are/is some legacy stuff customer's use ... that we did not create. It's weird, and faced with the choice of fixing some old products with a lot of unknowns ... and moving customers to something more modern that is more compatible with Edge... we chose the latter.

I suspect the agility of any team is heavily influenced by not just numbers, but tech debt, and other choices.

All future work we do is compatible with Edge, it's not like NOTHING works with Edge, but to say "We support Edge"... customers expect that to mean everything.

Fortunately I don't think we'll have to have that conversation anymore.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#415

Post by astura »

duxup wrote: post #414
astura wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Edge, just not worth it for a small team. I just can't get behind this lazy "small team" excuse; it's really unnecessary hubris. I worked on a "small team" of 1 (just myself - I was the only dev) for several years on an enterprise webapp. The kind that does complicated stuff - not a simple CRUD app. [Sidenote: I would have killed for a team of three!!] Yet I supported Edge since the day it came out and never dropped…

I don't want to get into technical details except to say some of what we support are/is some legacy stuff customer's use ... that we did not create. It's weird, and faced with the choice of fixing some old products with a lot of unknowns ... and moving customers to something more modern that is more compatible with Edge... we chose the latter. I suspect the agility of any team is heavily influenced by not just number…

Yeah, I worked around technical debt and legacy support too, it goes with the field.

Still not an excuse to alienate your customers who want to use a browser that comes with their OS. Enterprise customers never want to go through the hassle of installing external software company wide just to use your services.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#416

Post by duxup »

astura wrote: post #415
duxup wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to get into technical details except to say some of what we support are/is some legacy stuff customer's use ... that we did not create. It's weird, and faced with the choice of fixing some old products with a lot of unknowns ... and moving customers to something more modern that is more compatible with Edge... we chose the latter. I suspect the agility of any team is heavily influenced by not just number…

Yeah, I worked around technical debt and legacy support too, it goes with the field. Still not an excuse to alienate your customers who want to use a browser that comes with their OS. Enterprise customers never want to go through the hassle of installing external software company wide just to use your services.

This is a pretty niche area, "enterprise" would be generous to call these customers that even if it technically fits. It's a surprisingly small ask to have them install a browser.

Lots of customers still on Windows 7... that's bad, but we can't change that.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#417

Post by microcolonel »

tim-- wrote: post #353
I_AM_A_SMURF wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can't even get Chromium to build on my MacBook Pro, so there's that. (15-inch, 2018, 16GB RAM) What magic are you using to be able to build Chromium?

AFAIK you'd need to limit the compiler threads, and hopefully the linker doesn't run out of memory. 16GiB of memory is really not enough.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#418

Post by elproxy »

kerpele wrote: post #146

If someone told the young Linux freak me back in the early 2000s that one day Internet Explorer’s rendering engine is based on the KDE rendering engine I would’ve probably died laughing and frozen in horror at the same time. Yeah, I realize there’s probably nothing left if the old KHTML but it still does give me a chuckle.

There's still plenty of references and small but essential stuff. One notorious example that comes to mind is the KURL name that stuck: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink.git/+/maste...

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#419

Post by astura »

steve1977 wrote: post #359
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…

> We had a customer push us to support Edge. Why though?

Many company's IT departments don't find it worth downloading, supporting, and updating external applications just to access the web when the OS provides that functionality out of the box. You could argue that's "wrong," but that doesn't change reality. I even had a government customer remove IE, clicking on the IE icon launched Edge.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#420

Post by jdlyga »

I switched over to Firefox about 6 months ago, and I'm surprised by how much I love it. It's great to be able to have separate home and work accounts while still being logged into the same gmail account. Plus, there's certain interface decisions like putting Undo Close Tab in more places that makes it a nicer experience. The only issue I run into with Firefox is my company's intranet site makes me login once per day where with Chrome it doesn't.
Post reply on HN