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Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

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Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#311

Post by meuk »

TanakaTarou wrote: post #183

What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engin…

Well, Opera is a good browser that no-one uses, so it can't be just that. Tbh UX just isn't Microsofts strong suite (although I really like Windows 10).

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#312

Post by kiwijamo »

greenhatman wrote: post #279
badminton1 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari and Chrome are closely related.

Not so close that they don't often display things differently.

Gmail and Google Docs for instance operate fairly poorly on Safari. Gmail often has UI glitches (e.g. the top part sometimes scrolls up permamently with no way to get it back). Google Docs on Safari lacks support for many features that Firefox seems to support—I've seen many examples of Docs that appear fine on Firefox but appear mangled in Safari. The engine in Safari seems to differ enough from Chrome that it has different approaches to rendering things. Either that or Google is deliberatly pushing faulty codes to Safari. Not sure which...

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#313

Post by [deleted] »

sho wrote: post #247
cmsimike wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://modern.ie Free Windows VirtualBox images you can use for testing!

Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but if testing on your browser means downloading a 4GB+ image every couple months and having it take up all my memory in a clunky VM and messing around with how it gets its IP and then trying to update itself with another multi-gigabyte windows update while I'm tethering and did I mention you have to redo it all every couple of months?... then I'm not testing against your browser.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#314

Post by adimitrov »

sinstein wrote: post #284
happymellon wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I test Edge when Microsoft don't release it for Mac and Linux? A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.

Microsoft partnered with BrowserStack a while ago to allow free testing of Edge - https://www.browserstack.com/test-on-microsoft-edge-browser#...

I like BrowserStack, and I use it a lot at work, but it's way too slow to be part of the core code, test, debug loop, simply because it's far from a native experience.

As long as that's the case, support for Edge/IE is always going to be a second-class citizen for me. Safari, too, since that's only on Mac OS, and God help you if you need to debug web apps for iPads. There is no good way, and the only tool you have is a shotgun (dev tools don't always work with BrowserStack & mobile Safari, and we currently have an iPad, but no Mac to debug it with.)

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#315

Post by btschaegg »

swalladge wrote: post #305
TanakaTarou wrote: post #183

What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engin…

No, I tell my friends and family to use Firefox. There is more than one decent browser out there. I don't like the idea of everything using the Chromium engine; monoculture _is_ bad and we shouldn't put our eggs in the one basket. That said, IE and Edge have historically been terrible both compatibility and performance-wise. It's not just websites that aren't tested in Edge - my experience with Edge is that all aspec…

> It's not just websites that aren't tested in Edge - my experience with Edge is that all aspects of performance (initial load time, ui responsiveness, web site responsiveness) are terribly slow.

100% agree here. I'd be way more worried about monoculture if any other browser would be discontinued, but the MS browser history was and is just a shitshow.

I can't even remember how many years MS and even some people in my vincinity were going on about how amazing the new IE (or later Edge) were and that MS would totally be changing their ways now. Usually, if you used their browser for more than five minutes, that sounded more like a bad joke.

To this day, the (properly updated) Edge on my dev machine does user interaction orders of magnitude worse than FF/Chrome. Tabs frequently stop functioning properly and even won't reload anymore, until you find out that some subprocess crashed and you'll have to close and re-open the site to try again. The adoption of new web standards happens at a crawl.

Yet, at the same time, their "Edge is totally a next-gen browser! Promise!" rhetoric leads to actual companies prohibiting users from getting and using an actually useful browser like FF.

Their dev story sucks, too. The best of their jokes was when someone wanted to convince me on how cool VS2015 was for HTML/Javascript development. Yes, I totally want a 16GB+ IDE that literally can take minutes to load from an SSD and frequently freezes to do nimble HTML editing m(

The funny thing is: They actually arguably fixed that one in the mean time (VS Code), but their browser politics remained. Perhaps this signifies the same shift there?

TL;DR: I actually wouldn't mind that much, but MS has been repeatedly overselling and underdelivering for years and just slows down everyone else doing it.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#316

Post by swalladge »

happymellon wrote: post #197
TanakaTarou wrote: post #183

What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engin…

How can I test Edge when Microsoft don't release it for Mac and Linux? A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.

Theoretically this is why we have standards. Practically this is a nightmare that involves virtual machines, multiple devices, copious use of caniuse.com, and obscure bugs that only appear on a particular version of safari on a 10 year old mac. RIP web development.

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#317

Post by vijaybritto »

headmelted wrote: post #310
swalladge wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I tell my friends and family to use Firefox. There is more than one decent browser out there. I don't like the idea of everything using the Chromium engine; monoculture _is_ bad and we shouldn't put our eggs in the one basket. That said, IE and Edge have historically been terrible both compatibility and performance-wise. It's not just websites that aren't tested in Edge - my experience with Edge is that all aspec…

It's not really better though - having only two real browsers is not good for open standards or the open web. This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it , and starts using Chromium too. Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't…

The main reason developers prefer chrome over firefox is the devtools hands down. When firebug was amazing in the jquery era, we used firefox but now chrome's devtools is simple, fast and full featured to use. If firefox's devtools is as good as or better than chrome's maybe things can change!

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#318

Post by cwyers »

cjbprime wrote: post #246
cwyers wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble comes if they're not the same DLLs. Chromium updates often enough that there's lots of different versions you can bundle.

But how would that situation be any different in the presence of some kind of system Chromium install provided by MS? Chromium updates often, so you don't want to run your client-side JS against any other Electron version than the one you wrote it for because they change APIs frequently, so you'll still have one set of DLLs for each needed Electron version.

Given that it's Chromium (and thus effort to get things running should be minimal), and most Electron app writers aren't pushing Chromium to the bleeding edge, why wouldn't they test on the one that ships with the desktop OS with the largest installed base out there?

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#319

Post by millstone »

happymellon wrote: post #197
TanakaTarou wrote: post #183

What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engin…

How can I test Edge when Microsoft don't release it for Mac and Linux? A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.

It's pretty easy honestly. Download a free VM and test away: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

In practice Chrome is not that cross platform. WebGL is an example: Chrome renders differently due to its use of ANGLE, has bad performance due to its GPU blacklist, etc. If you want to support Windows you have to test on Windows, period, regardless of browser.

More generally this take was good back when IE was dominant. Now it's just terrible: Edge is resisting the monoculture, not propagating it. Chrome is working hard to make the OS irrelevant by defeating platform conventions. Standard Mac UI idioms like Quit and Hide don't even work properly in the latest Chrome. Eventually the platforms will become an undifferentiated soup with GMail key equivalents and innovation in OSes will end; why even bother to have more than one OS if it's just to run Chrome?

Re: Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

#320

Post by manigandham »

vijaybritto wrote: post #317
headmelted wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really better though - having only two real browsers is not good for open standards or the open web. This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it , and starts using Chromium too. Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't…

The main reason developers prefer chrome over firefox is the devtools hands down. When firebug was amazing in the jquery era, we used firefox but now chrome's devtools is simple, fast and full featured to use. If firefox's devtools is as good as or better than chrome's maybe things can change!

Agreed, the Chrome Devtools are amazing for development and the pace of new features helps in testing new standards.
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