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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

#371

Post by kkarakk »

alwillis wrote: post #236
thrower123 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is broken in ways that don't make sense if you don't live in apple land, so I can't bother with their mess for 5 or 6% of the total browser market Moreover, it's irrelevant to non apple people

Can’t believe web developers are willing to write-off over 2 billion Safari/WebKit users: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/12/apple-achieves-mi... This ain’t your father’s Safari web browser: https://webkit.org/status/#?status=under%20consideration,in%... There’s a lot of stuff that’s already supported in the released Safari and lots more stuff in development and being considered.

most of that 2 billion is concentrated in the US and the wealthier european nation states. places with people who are educated enough to understand "this website works best on chrome" or "this browser is not supported" error messages. it's pretty easy to see where the wind is blowing

i'm living in india right now and basic websites like dominoes ordering websites glitch out on safari/iphone prompting me to switch. complaining does nothing,i've had lengthy chats with dominoes support - it's just not a priority. apple is going to pay for ignoring developing markets imo

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

#372

Post by nordsieck »

jhasse wrote: post #296
pcwalton wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, how do I get the Chromium team to integrate parallel layout written in Rust? Sometimes innovation is at odds with whatever Google's Chrome team feels like doing. That is why engine diversity is a good thing.

Suggest it to them?? If it's really faster, why wouldn't they merge it?

>> OK, how do I get the Chromium team to integrate parallel layout written in Rust?

> Suggest it to them?? If it's really faster, why wouldn't they merge it?

How many major software projects do you know of that will casually add a programming language?

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

#373

Post by QasimK »

cletus wrote: post #278
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…

Microsoft only releases it on one OS. so if you happen to use a Mac or Linux you need another browser. Chrome and Firefox are the only viable options. Also Microsoft are victims of their own legacy, namely what they did with Internet Explorer. Changing the box model, not adopting standards, not fixing bugs, causing no end of headaches for people having to support IE and so on. Trust needs to be earned. Apple had the…

On Arch Linux, the browser would often crash after the system upgrade installed a newer version of Firefox. I read on their bug tracker that the upgrade prompt was a workaround for this (or at least one reason for it).

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

#374

Post by Vinnl »

ngokevin wrote: post #256
baroffoos wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soon to be Servo

There’s not much work on a pure Servo browser beyond experiment. They’ve just various uplifted Servo bits like webrenderer and stylo into Gecko.

There's this which I'm hopeful for: Android Components [1]. If Mozilla make it easy for Android apps to use Servo as the shell for modern web apps, then the improved performance might make it worth it to "restrict" yourself to using only the features supported by Servo (i.e. without many of the workarounds that make old websites work).

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components/

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

#376

Post by kibwen »

Karunamon wrote: post #172
kibwen wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just illustrated the advantage of a polyculture: changes to the platform are not unilateral decisions, and therefore require discussion, communication, and documentation. Furthermore, if one actor tries to do something out of blatant self-interest that would be a detriment to the platform as a whole, that action can be blocked. With a Google monoculture, at the end of the day, the web will be whatever the CEO…

The difference being now that we're in no danger of IE6-ification. If Google annoys enough people, people can take Webkit and do whatever they want. It happened to Microsoft, arguably to Mozilla, it can happen to Google. So long as the players are well behaved, having a single dominant browser is beneficial. How much time, energy, productivity, and money has been lost on cross-browser (in)compatibility wrangling?

> The difference being now that we're in no danger of IE6-ification. If Google annoys enough people, people can take Webkit and do whatever they want.

The entire point of this subthread is that it doesn't matter that you can take Webkit and do whatever you want, because the web is a client/server (browser/site) protocol, and having the ability to fork the client is irrelevant when this makes you incompatible with every server. Technical capital isn't sufficient; it takes social capital to pull off a hard fork.

> So long as the players are well behaved, having a single dominant browser is beneficial.

I've been on HN long enough to remember this tired argument from back before the Blink fork. The gain in efficiency from having a unilateral dictator is not worth the loss of mutual counterbalancing oversight. It is completely without foundation to give Google the benefit of the doubt that they will be well-behaved when there are no consequences for misbehavior. Google is not your friend, nor is Google's mission to make the web better. Google is a corporation whose purpose is to maximize profit by selling advertisements. You might as well hand stewardship of the web over to Comcast.

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

#377

Post by prince005 »

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…

I won't really complain if there are just 2 render engines out there in the market, given that both are open source. It will make work hell lot easier for so many developers and the competition and development will stay healthy.

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

#378

Post by sjellis »

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…

> Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge.

This is at least partly self-inflicted damage by Microsoft. Edge only works on Windows 10, which not only excludes all of the regular Win 7 and 8 desktops that haven't been push upgraded, but also kiosk-type devices and at least some VDI (which use Windows Server with a "Desktop Experience" that does not include Edge).

So Microsoft ended up with IE11, which is supported but frozen, Edge that doesn't even run on all Microsoft platforms, and no browser for Macs (because IE for Macs is long dead). So if you are trying to deliver or support a Web application, Microsoft aren't helping, hence "just download Chrome".

Firefox didn't support enterprise Windows deployment as well as they could have (though they now seem to picked that up), and can't match the market power of Google. I would like to see a grass-roots move back to Firefox, but it's going to be up-hill work.

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

#379

Post by SllX »

err4nt wrote: post #145
SllX wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If open web standards are to matter at all , it is more important for there to be multiple viable implementations of the same standards than it is for the lives of web developers to become easier. Using the same engine across multiple browsers, open source or not, just doesn’t cut it.

People in web standards community kind of anticipate browsers (there are 4 main browsers now) eventually kind of consolidating down to 2 engines. This seems like a step in that direction. Who knows, Safari might be next :D

Anticipate or hope?

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

#380

Post by manigandham »

cozuya wrote: post #168
TimTheTinker wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's referring to Microsoft's own Electron-powered apps, like VSCode. There have been rumblings in the past about MS wanting to fork Electron and replace Chromium with EdgeHTML in their fork, but it sounds like the strategy has changed to forking Chromium and using that in their future Electron fork instead. I have no idea if this correctly interprets the SwiftOnSecurity tweet, but that's the best I can make…

Off topic but I'll be that guy: I am continually blown away by just how good VSCode is and how it very much overcame two huge obstacles: being an election app, and its poisonous name.

Poisonous name? Are you referring to Visual Studio? That's widely considered as one of the best IDEs around.
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