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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

#431

Post by microcolonel »

millstone wrote: post #368
microcolonel wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general quality of Firefox is worse, the tooling is more fiddly, some of it is written in languages which are not as familiar to Microsoft, it is considerably less straightforward to customize; and on top of this, performance is similar at best. Chromium has an architecture which lends itself to deep integration, and the default UI is much closer to Microsoft's own designs. > WebKit and Firefox are good starting…

What is Microsoft hoping to achieve? "Starting point" for what? Is MS foolish enough to believe they can have influence on the evolution of the web through github.com/google/chromium pull requests? Alternatively, has MS has given up? Perhaps they are content to rebrand Chrome and collect the bing.com seignorage from new Windows installs. Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.

> Is MS foolish enough to believe they can have influence on the evolution of the web through github.com/google/chromium pull requests?

I mean, "influencing the web" or otherwise, they accept heaps and heaps of patches that aren't about their core business. The Chromium project is really healthy.

> Unless they fork, it's either naïveté or negotiated surrender.

They can fork, but they probably won't need to. Even if they wanted to maintain an entirely separate shell, it is basically trivial to link such a thing in to Chromium.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#432

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #428
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish they'd moved to Gecko instead of Chromium. It's not like Gecko is an inherently inferior engine by any stretch, and it would significantly bolster their marketshare so that developers actually have to test against it.

Responding to a reply that was deleted while I was in the process of writing my response: --- > I don't see why it's Microsofts responsibility to do whats worse for their products, users and business just to bring some sort of benefit to Mozilla which has awfully mismanaged over the past 10 years or so. The browser monoculture didn't happen over night it happened thanks to years of neglect from the other browser engi…

I think Quantum is smarter about what it prioritizes rendering. Time to complete page load may be slower in Quantum, but Quantum makes sure to display key parts of the page so that it appears to load faster.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#433

Post by olah_1 »

dataflow wrote: post #134
c-smile wrote: post #76

What happened with font rendering? Fonts are rendered with thinner lines in new Edge (on the left): http://terrainformatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IE-fo... Such rendering does not match rest of Windows... New Edge is definitely less readable, and Google Chrome exhibits the same problem.

Left side is actually sharp, with subpixel smoothing. Right side is awful (just like many parts of post-Vista Windows) with apparent grayscale AA. This is something they actually got right; it's one thing that was terrible about IE and the old Edge, and that I'd bet was subconsciously turning many people off (in my case, consciously making me want to tear my eyes out). If you can't see the difference, open dev consol…

> Firefox's bold font rendering is one thing keeping me away from it.

You are not alone. Firefox font rendering actually upsets me. Comparing to Chrome rendering, it's just a non-starter.

I have brought this up many times, but I get blasted for it. Apparently it's all based on opinion alone and you and I have a very minority opinion in these tech communities. I suspect that the silent majority is with us though.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#434

Post by TimTheTinker »

_pmf_ wrote: post #373
sime2009 wrote: post #184

Regarding the topic of browser mono-cultures, I was web developer in the post browser war era in the early 2000s where we had a dominant IE6 and a stagnant browser landscape. It was bad. Real bad. But I'm actually fairly positive about MS getting into the chromium landscape and back into the game. Let's face it MS had lost all of its influence in the browser world before dropping IE and making this move. It is a Goog…

> It was bad. > Real bad. Apparently it was not so bad that we needed a multitude of JS to JS compilation stages and instead could just, you know, execute the same JS in the browser that we actually wrote. Also, MS invented DHTML and AJAX single handedly, against backlash from "pure" web developers.

Please don't argue with others about their experiences and feelings. I was there, and it was intensely bad. I think it's easy to forget how bad it was, even for those who went through it.

Starting mid-2006, I spent almost a year building a full-stack internal SPA for tracking manual and checklist testing at my company. I made the (then brave) decision to target Firefox instead of IE6, which everyone was using at the time - since FF was more standards-compliant.

It was a very good decision in retrospect. But I had to spend 4-5 weeks just getting the front-end to work in IE6. So many HTML/CSS hacks, trying to wrangle the layout engine to do my bidding. Check out the Wikipedia article on the Acid2 test, and the image at the bottom of IE6's rendering, to get an idea how far IE6's layout was from standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#435

Post by jammygit »

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#?

Serialization for one thing. You can work with JSON extremely freely without creating weird serializable classes for every combination of data you might need to work with - eg, no class named "DoodadList" for when you want to de-serialize a JSON list (maybe that's a Unity3D thing?).

You can nest functions nicely and work with closures when it makes sense, if you like that sort of thing.

The async programming model is also really nice to work with.

You also don't need to create classes for every noun, verb, and adjective in your system either - when all you need is a function, you just write a function, not some weird object to hold it.

You also don't have to write a f after all of your decimal values to tell the silly compiler that you mean for 0.25 to be a float. (this one truly does not matter, but there are a lot of little things like this that add up)

I know you can do a lot of that in C#, but its just so effortless in javascript. You just need to be more disciplined about how you code it

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#436

Post by oaiey »

localhost wrote: post #220
mrr54 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet when I open Edge, I get a million ads for crappy tabloid news websites thrust in my face, while when I open Chrome I don't see any ads.

I just setup Edge a few minutes ago. There are two options "Inspirational" and "Focused" that show no crappy tabloid news websites and one that does - I didn't pick that one :) Also, happy to report that 1password has an extension for Edge as well - that's awesome. Only thing I'm missing is a dark mode extension. I don't trust the somewhat sketchy ones that I see so far on the store.

The tabloid you can further deactivate under the gear of the new tab

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#438

Post by WorldMaker »

ataylor32 wrote: post #331
WorldMaker wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blog posts mention that releasing it today is a shot across the bow for Enterprise. Given Enterprises like their year+ efforts to "test" software before ever deploying it, they want Enterprise to start that process today , ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it. It's also a very subtle signal for several reasons to release it the day after Extended Support for Windows 7 ended . On the on…

> ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it I'm not sure it will be part of 20H1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/01/15/upgrading-new... says: > If you’d prefer not to install Microsoft Edge manually, you can wait for it to be installed in a future update to Windows 10, following our measured roll-out approach over the next several months. We will start to migrate Windows 10 customers…

That says they are starting now, so they are starting with 19H2 (in Release Preview to start, which is still 19H2 by the way, then into the wilds). "Several months" here could mean they want everything done by 20H1 (somewhere between March and May, given the usual pattern). I don't know if that also means that they are planning to move to packing New Edge in the RTW images for 20H1; so far 20H1 on Insiders still seems to have Edge Classic. But the clear thing is that these are clearly parallel rollouts right now.

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#439

Post by iudqnolq »

wbkang wrote: post #211
iudqnolq wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link to a Google Analytics API call in Chromium? It's OSS. Edit: Chromium connects to Google servers to update extensions and for captive portal detection. Firefox does pretty much the same.

Search for UMA metrics.

Firefox does something similar, but calls it Firefox Health Reports. See https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/fhr-faq/

(note that I think there's nothing wrong with this at all, just pointing out that this isn't chromium-specific)

Re: The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview

#440

Post by WorldMaker »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #430
WorldMaker wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point. If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch. If you mean Edgmium (New Edge) over Edge Classic, it already replaces Edge Classic (entirely) when you install it, and there's a slow rollout through Windows Update already happening,…

>If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch. LTSC/LTSB versions of Windows 10 (i.e. the ones that enterprises are supposed to use) don't have Edge and there's no way to install it. The same goes for Windows Server 2016 and 2019.

Enterprises are not supposed to use LTSC/LTSB builds as daily machines; those are intended for critical services and embedded systems. Microsoft keeps saying that in their documentation. Businesses should use the Current Branch for Business and stop shooting themselves so much in the feet with Windows updates.
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