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Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

computerworld.com

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Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#11
post #4

Its right about time for a disrupt effort, Chrome is outrageously slow.

Slow how to me it still loads any website the fastest. The biggest complain about chrome is that it is bloated specially if you use more than few tabs. But I don't see google working on fixing or improving that much simply because using more than a few tabs is an edge case which probably less than 1% of the users use.

If youre not seeing it, see it now: they are doing something about it: http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr...

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#12
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I don't understand why there are still memes against Internet Explorer floating around. Edge is not the problem.

As a web developer I'd rather develop for Chrome than IE/Edge. It's pretty much just that simple.

That is exactly the attitude web developers had toward the IE/Netscape situation around the year 2000.

I think that as web developers we have the responsibility to consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences. If not us, then who?

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#13
post #12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a web developer I'd rather develop for Chrome than IE/Edge. It's pretty much just that simple.

That is exactly the attitude web developers had toward the IE/Netscape situation around the year 2000. I think that as web developers we have the responsibility to consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences. If not us, then who?

It hardly matters; the Edge teams said that any differences in behaviour compared to Webkit are bugs[1], so they've given up their position as an alternative.

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mo...

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#14
post #5

Google and chrome are the biggest threat we have to the open internet at the moment.

No. Google wants an open internet because search (and hence ads) needs a lot of input. Google gets that input from the open internet (and, notably, shares that input with other search engines). Facebook gets input from 1.8Bn people, and owns access to it all.

(This is a generalization; Goog certainly owns access to plenty of input: email, docs, and hosting. But it is not, I think, on the scale of FB, because frequent, casual input requires a social context.)

Google's nightmare scenario is that everyone starts to use FB Pages for content, FB ads for that content, and something FB payments to pay for services, etc. In this way FB manages to build a private (but very large) vertically integrated internet. Like Alibaba. There are only three ways to disrupt this trend: the browser, the operating system, and the hardware. Each of these mediates between FB and the user, and each one is Google's opportunity to capture attention. (And this, I think, is why engineering talent is so valuable, just as much to deny FB from making things as to make things yourself.)

The nightmare scenario for the open internet is a Facebook Phone running Facebook OS.

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#15
post #6
post #5

Google and chrome are the biggest threat we have to the open internet at the moment.

Agreed. I don't understand why there are still memes against Internet Explorer floating around. Edge is not the problem.

For good reason. Microsoft left their browser dev abandoned for 5 years after they "won" their bitter war against Netscape. And only the Firefox (nee Phoenix) browser rising from the ashes of Netscape fought on.

Edge is a decent browser, but Microsoft was not kind nor to be trusted back then. They have to earn their new trust.

On the open-source front we now have several great browsers - Safari/Webkit (which is very strong on mobile), Chrome/Blink (was Webkit) which dominates, and Firefox/Gecko which is a solid reliable browser thats crossplatform.

Why should anyone choose Edge?

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#16
post #12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a web developer I'd rather develop for Chrome than IE/Edge. It's pretty much just that simple.

That is exactly the attitude web developers had toward the IE/Netscape situation around the year 2000. I think that as web developers we have the responsibility to consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences. If not us, then who?

Once Safari and Edge stop giving me headaches I might be more sympathetic to their cause.

We still have new browsers popping up, like Brave and Vivaldi. We still have Firefox, which is decent.

I don't understand what your concern is in this context.

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#17
post #3

won't be really hard to improve the market share: - make edge cross platform. - make the extensions system on par with chromes and as easy to launch an extension - fix its UI lag on Windows 10 - maybe open source it

I don't think adding OSX or Linux users will fix the problem. Nor will open or closed source.

I will never use IE if it doesn't support all platforms.

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#18
post #15
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I don't understand why there are still memes against Internet Explorer floating around. Edge is not the problem.

For good reason. Microsoft left their browser dev abandoned for 5 years after they "won" their bitter war against Netscape. And only the Firefox (nee Phoenix) browser rising from the ashes of Netscape fought on. Edge is a decent browser, but Microsoft was not kind nor to be trusted back then. They have to earn their new trust. On the open-source front we now have several great browsers - Safari/Webkit (which is very…

If you include Safari/Webkit on that list then don't forget to also include Edge/Chakra[0] ;)

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#19
post #3

won't be really hard to improve the market share: - make edge cross platform. - make the extensions system on par with chromes and as easy to launch an extension - fix its UI lag on Windows 10 - maybe open source it

Honestly I think the numbers on this would be poor. OS X users use Safari, and rightfully so because the performance tends to be very good compared to other browsers on Apple hardware. At best they could hope for bundled installs with Office 365 to bloat their numbers, but I'm just not sure it's worth the effort.

The rest I'm not really sure that there is much benefit to it save the UI lag fix. The oft-tossed about technical debt is incredibly real with Microsoft's browsers, and I believe a lot of the debt that IE had was inherited by Edge to ensure a transition for Microsoft's clientele relying on the IE support for their sites.

Unless Microsoft wants to branch into having a "business browser" and a "consumer browser", they can't give users a clean and non-burdened version of a Microsoft Internet Browser. I really doubt they're going to want to deal with the headache of splitting the focus to two versions. They can make all the changes they want public facing, but as long as they have a sacrosanct part of the browser that can't be altered or removed, they're destined to be an afterthought if a thought at all.

Re: Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share

#20
post #12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a web developer I'd rather develop for Chrome than IE/Edge. It's pretty much just that simple.

That is exactly the attitude web developers had toward the IE/Netscape situation around the year 2000. I think that as web developers we have the responsibility to consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences. If not us, then who?

I understand your point and I actually make sure that my websites target IE10 and up, but it usually happens after I'm done in Chrome.

Have you worked with Edge/IE? The pain starts with, as a Mac user, having to boot up a VM and ends with the, in my opinion, horrible development tools compared to Chrome or even Firefox. In this state Edge will never be more than an afterthought.

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