41–50 of 64 posts
The most important thing is not Edge surpassing Firefox, but the fact that Edge switched to Chromium, so Firefox is the only alternative to Chrome. And FF market share is tiny. That is bad for end users and businesses alike.
Safari may be proprietary, but its engine remains OSS and you could fork it, which is what Google did.
That said I'm a happy Firefox user.
The most important thing is not Edge surpassing Firefox, but the fact that Edge switched to Chromium, so Firefox is the only alternative to Chrome. And FF market share is tiny. That is bad for end users and businesses alike.
I like Mozilla because of Rust efforts and I recently tried switching on OSX since Chrome is a CPU hog and I was looking in to alternatives - Firefox was the most unstable experience I had in years - I had a news site consistently crash the browser tab which also caused audio in other tabs to get screwed up, occasional redraw issues (flickering when resize), developer settings that are trivial to find in chrome (disable localhost CORS with SSL) - just a subpar experience.
For anyone who comes straight to the comments, I recommend passing on this article. If you already clicked through, I'm sorry :) It it misleading, the writer is only considering desktop usage, and then constraining the data the the month of March. The 'evidence' is in the form of a single screenshot, from his lone data source NetMarketShare. He is trying to hype it up as some sort of 'grand' milestone. Here is anothe…
At one point IE was the number one desktop browser. So this is really just a continuation of the story about how Microsoft lost its browser dominance to Chrome, and then conceded defeat by adopting its engine.
The Japanese IME in Windows 10 is borked. The solution? Install Google Japanese Input, never look back.
(It must be working somehow in Japanese Windows 10 sold in Japan, but it's broken in English Windows.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a dev perspective it also loosens Google's grip on Chromium, the #1 rendering engine :D Having Microsoft collaborate and diversify that project is a major win for all of us. I am hoping/wishing that Mozilla will drop gecko development and repackage WebKit - it would be great for them to join forces and pool resources with the #2 engine!
It's not just a drop in replacement and since Firefox quantum the rending engine has felt butter smooth. Overall Firefox personally 'feels' faster than Chrome, just a personal view but I do love Chrome's developer tools. Not sure if there's a way to improve Firefox's developers tools to bring it in line with a similar experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a dev perspective it also loosens Google's grip on Chromium, the #1 rendering engine :D Having Microsoft collaborate and diversify that project is a major win for all of us. I am hoping/wishing that Mozilla will drop gecko development and repackage WebKit - it would be great for them to join forces and pool resources with the #2 engine!
There is no such thing as Chromium, it is just a Chrome-lite. Nobody took Chromium and made a separate browser with a separate code from what Google pushes in the trunk. All others do is just add or remove whatever Google allows them, while accepting all serious commits coming down from Chrome. Webkit on the other hand had produced truly different engines - Chromium and Safari, developed differently and making differ…
Why is it so hard for a mammoth company like MS to maintain their own browser?! Is this because gaining market share with an alternate browser is simply impossible?
Google cares because of advertising and Apple really could care less about browser marketshare. It just doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone else.
> But all of these show that Microsoft Edge is now a fully-featured alternative to Google Chrome Given that it uses Chrome's engine, Edge isn't an alternative to Chrome. It's just an alternative version of Chrome. Sure, from a user perspective, it's an alternative. From a dev perspective, it adds to the dominance of Chrome.
From a dev perspective it also loosens Google's grip on Chromium, the #1 rendering engine :D Having Microsoft collaborate and diversify that project is a major win for all of us. I am hoping/wishing that Mozilla will drop gecko development and repackage WebKit - it would be great for them to join forces and pool resources with the #2 engine!
But let's assume they switch to Webkit. In itself that is a huge investment. Then either they track whatever Google wants to do with Webkit, or they fork. But once they fork, they're pretty much on their own again. So there was no gain. To profit from Google's dev, they have to track whatever Google does, and maintain patches for their own things that Google doesn't want to merge. In some important ways, they'd be dependent on Google. Their direct competitor.
For anyone who comes straight to the comments, I recommend passing on this article. If you already clicked through, I'm sorry :) It it misleading, the writer is only considering desktop usage, and then constraining the data the the month of March. The 'evidence' is in the form of a single screenshot, from his lone data source NetMarketShare. He is trying to hype it up as some sort of 'grand' milestone. Here is anothe…
It's hardly even the right story on the desktop. It was obviously going to be the case that Edge would take market share from IE over time, because it acquires users in the same way that IE did (by being the default on Windows), and they're the same users. At one point IE was the number one desktop browser. So this is really just a continuation of the story about how Microsoft lost its browser dominance to Chrome, an…
IE was just a better browser and that's how it gained market share - the same way Chrome did. The fact that IE was the default was secondary. If being the default was all that was needed, IE would have never lost any market share.
Having your competitor do all the work and then using it to your advantage sounds like a win to me though. Also as a user and a developer I consider it a win on multiple levels. I'm happy that every desirable target platform now has a default embeddable browser engine derived from a common high-quality WebKit heritage. I also now have a major non-Google fork of Chrome to choose from, one that I know will be there for the next decade.