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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

#471

Post by xp84 »

ewgoforth wrote: post #254
darekkay wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Edge has a good feature support (check caniuse.com). It would be interesting to know what the exact issues your app has with the browser. Otherwise it sounds more like your devs like to use some vendor-specific hacks and blame Edge for it. I know there are some Flexbox things to consider, but nothing a small team can't handle. IE11 is another story, though.

I'd also be curious to know what features that Edge doesn't support. I know it doesn't do everything Chrome does, but I haven't run into any scenarios that Edge didn't support in a long time. It's a pet peeve of mine that apps don't support Edge/Trident, Vivaldi, etc. It's easier to write cross-browser code than ever, but it seems like we're in the process of reverting back to the bad old days when IE6 was the only b…

It really is getting bad. I use Opera as my 'daily driver' for work, and I get warnings on sites at least weekly where the site will either complain like I'm using some dangerous outdated software, or just plain refuse to work, nevermind the fact that Opera actually uses regular old Blink. Present-day Opera is just a minor reskin of Chromium - and I think Vivaldi is Blink too, right?

People are literally doing User Agent Sniffing again, and even though these browsers carefully craft their UA string to pass naive checks, the sniffers are hacking around that and urging me to "Download Chrome" to use a website.

Notable Offenders: Google Hangouts, and banks. Not impressed, Google.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#472

Post by xp84 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #463
zapzupnz wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

But how could a regular user be allowed to install something for other users? That would be a breach of security.

The missing piece here:

Applications also don't need to be (and third party apps on most single-user systems arguably shouldn't be) in /Applications. Users can put apps wherever the heck they like (I keep mine in ~/Applications which even gets the same icon automatically if you create it).

Apple could really streamline this because all apps that can be drag-drop installed really belong in one's own home directory, where they'll be seamlessly migrated when you move to a new computer, or brought with you if you have a roaming profile. As it is right now, I just keep both Applications folders in my Finder Sidebar and remember that the bottom one is "mine."

In an ideal scenario, users could still drag apps to the "one" Applications folder and if they are not an Admin the app itself would actually be stored in a default-invisible ~/Applications. Then when you opened "/Applications" the system would show you the superset of both locations.

This is of course nearly exactly how the Windows Start Menu works except that it always had "installers" do the work of putting those program shortcuts in the respective directories, and only well-behaved apps ever asked which place you wanted apps installed.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#473

Post by xp84 »

mike_d wrote: post #311
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.

An open source project released by Apple, that Google added a bunch of features to - including DRM, and Microsoft adopted to help unify the web for internal enterprise apps. What a world we live in.

The story is told well by this user agent string:

   Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6)
     AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
     Chrome/79.0.3945.117 Safari/537.36 Edg/79.0.309.65
"Edg"* , like Chrome, like Safari/AppleWebKit, like KHTML, like Gecko, like Mozilla 5.0.

My lord, this ridiculous header is f'ed (and I don't mean this string, just this entire ridiculous slow-motion trainwreck that requires every browser to pretend to be every browser that ever came before).

\* presuming that spelling means 'please don't lock me out like Edge' -- modern Chromium Opera identifies as OPR, similarly

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#475

Post by svecoldr »

goto11 wrote: post #375
jammygit wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What can you express in JavaScript which you cant express in C#?

What can you express in C# which you cant express in Assembler?

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#476

Post by anoncake »

Frizi wrote: post #409
tasogare wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Microsoft rightfully decided not to push a garbage app platform. It couldn't know someone else would do so later.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#478

Post by sjwright »

rtpg wrote: post #333
sjwright wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can understand value in multiple browsers for experimenting with new things (see Rust integration into Mozilla's engine), but what are the security benefits? Like if you have 3 different crypto imlpementations, you have times more teams that have to get a thing right. It seems way easier to try and get it right just once. Perhaps there's a holistic idea of "if one browser has an issue, at least it doesn't affect 10…

The biggest security benefit is that competition motivates everyone to work harder, to explore alternative solutions, to raise expectations. Competition means investing in ideas like Rust and Servo.

Without serious competition you eventually get IE6.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#479

Post by zerr »

vtail wrote: post #123
zerr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I thought FF being a XUL app should've been easier to customize.

Firefox is actively moving away from XUL.

I guess they are moving towards web standards? (like Vivaldi). I don't think they will ditch XUL in favor of native (C++) tech.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#480

Post by smnthermes »

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…

Waterfox (a rebuild) and Basilisk (a hard fork) are based on Firefox, but they have Widevine.
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