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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

#451

Post by buboard »

c-smile wrote: post #19

That's just the disaster. And the end of W3C standard development process. AFAIR it should be 3 independent implementations of the feature in order for Draft to reach Recommendation status. So technically all that means that web standards will be written by WebKit team alone. Sic transit Gloria mundi, sigh.

> will be written by WebKit team alone.

or, webkit will become the equivalent of linux for browsers. Considering that there will be less incompatibilities , it's a good thing. The hope is that competition for users will lead to innovations that benefit them, and not wall them off from competing platforms.

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

#452

Post by d--b »

cjbprime wrote: post #83
tambourine_man wrote: post #57

Interesting theory and thread: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10697763353362923... “This isn’t about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork”

Honestly having trouble making a coherent strategy out of those words, despite knowing what all of them mean. Seems like at the least it is written with way more confidence than could possibly be appropriate.

The problem with electron is that every electron app is shipping with chromium, which means a lot of resources are being duplicated.

A way to solve this is to make the JavaScript/html layer part of the OS, so that electron apps would ship as thin layers on top of a the system’s engine (The same way that java applications are thin layers on top of Java’s virtual machine).

Apparently, the way Edge is built doesn’t allow for replacing chromium in electron apps. So they need their own version of chromium instead.

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

#453

Post by Endy »

jarcane wrote: post #272
satyenr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they intend to let Google control anything — least of all the future of the web. They have been burned too badly by them for that. They are more likely to do what Google did — they used WebKit in the early years of Chrome and then forked it to create Blink once it had gained enough traction. Microsoft is likely to do the same at some point — assuming their browser gains traction. And I, for one, hope it…

You really think a Microsoft browser is going to track you less ? The same company whose entire OS is deliberately riddled with spyware and tracking, and even managed to sneak telemetry into an open source code editor?

It's a different source of tracking, and frankly speaking, we know why Microsoft wants to track us - the same reason they always have. Microsoft wants to sell us more of their own products, generally speaking. It's not about throwing all private data to the open market for the highest bidder. I'd rather have M$ out there looking to sell their own products and services to me than Google looking to sell me to their advertisers and whoever pays them this week.

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

#454

Post by pimeys »

x0x0 wrote: post #396
wlll wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago my main issues are: * No spellcheck in form fields (without a plugin, and I hate plugins). * It feels slower. There's something about it that just doesn't feel as fast. Mostly things like opening windows etc. * There's some annoying defaults. * Dev tools aren't as good. * Updates aren't installed automatically. I mean, it's close to Chrome, which is good…

on my box FF is a stunning memory pig I understand this is my fault for having 10-30 tabs open at any point in time, but still, chrome will generally manage that at 2-4gb ram. FF often breaks 10gb. I understand Jira is a pig of an app (Atlassian software is generally shit), but I unfortunately need to use it all day long. Chrome seems to be able to handle 2-4 each of jira, gmail, google cal, github, aws console, and…

I never see my total RAM usage going over 6G to the whole system if I don't compile anything. I have tens of tabs open and the 32G of RAM is most of the time useless. Mind you the ThinkPad RAM upgrade was about 120€...

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

#455

Post by cm2187 »

reitanqild wrote: post #444
cm2187 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome didn’t come to dominate the desktop browser market by forcing users’ hand, but by offering a better experience. The few times I used Edge, nothing gave me a remotely better experience, I only noticed small annoyances and moved on.

> Chrome didn’t come to dominate the desktop browser market by forcing users’ hand, but by offering a better experience. Disagree strongly. Reasons: - Google has been extremely pushy with Chrome, including lying (IMO) about it on their front page, a place where no other ads have been shown ever (IIRC). - Their own products often don't work in other browsers. Might be an honest mistake but personally I really don't bu…

It doesn't matter how pushy or honest is google. Users have to go out of their way to use chrome instead of the default browsers and they still do. And I haven't heard anyone saying "I'd rather use Edge or IE but site xxx only works on Chrome".

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

#456

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #162
cjbprime wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly having trouble making a coherent strategy out of those words, despite knowing what all of them mean. Seems like at the least it is written with way more confidence than could possibly be appropriate.

"drop-in feature-parity with Chromium" == They want to be able to replace Chromium with their own engine, but it must be very compatible. "duplication is becoming a significant performance drain" == Every electorn app bundles its own browser engine (as opposed to a single browser engine for the whole OS, like a shared library), which increases system RAM usage and hinders performance. "They want to single-instance El…

Another thought: If the same browser shared library can be used for every process, the same RAM pages should be executed for each process, so the CPU should be able to keep more of the code in CPU cache, along with probably branch prediction statistics as well. To the CPU it is the same code running which has many performance impacts. Less code = faster.

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

#457

Post by lgl »

simias wrote: post #416
pietrovismara wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy not to be left in the dirt, just keep the same pace of the other vendors in implementing support for new JS features.

A modern browser is effectively on par with an Operating System complexity-wise. You need to implement a huge number of APIs (many of which are security-sensitive), you need to have a good UI, you need to be super fast while making all that play together nicely etc... If you don't have a large team of developers and a few millions in the bank you basically don't have a chance. As Google keeps pushing more and more fe…

> A modern browser is effectively on par with an Operating System complexity-wise.

I don't think this is even remotely true. Those same arguments (using apis, good security, good ui, speed, etc) could be made for any piece of non-trivial software. But there's no way a browser is "on par" in complexity with an operating system.

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

#458

Post by mda »

reitanqild wrote: post #444
cm2187 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome didn’t come to dominate the desktop browser market by forcing users’ hand, but by offering a better experience. The few times I used Edge, nothing gave me a remotely better experience, I only noticed small annoyances and moved on.

> Chrome didn’t come to dominate the desktop browser market by forcing users’ hand, but by offering a better experience. Disagree strongly. Reasons: - Google has been extremely pushy with Chrome, including lying (IMO) about it on their front page, a place where no other ads have been shown ever (IIRC). - Their own products often don't work in other browsers. Might be an honest mistake but personally I really don't bu…

So many conspiracy theories. When did HN become this hysterical...

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

#459

Post by mr_toad »

interesthrow2 wrote: post #82
tambourine_man wrote: post #57

Interesting theory and thread: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10697763353362923... “This isn’t about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork”

The irony. They had HTA apps (running on IE engine which still work more or less, I replaced most default Win10 apps like the image viewer and the "groove" music player with a version of them built with HTA since they were slow as hell to start up) for 20 years already, they did barely anything with it, they didn't really invest seriously in a good browser engine (Edge isn't) and now all they can do is use Google's?…

> MS is rebuilding Office in JS from scratch...

Well if it’s going to run on Electron, that’s a given.

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

#460

Post by afroboy »

fourthark wrote: post #37

Very sad. I'm not a Microsoft fan but I thought this was one of the things they were doing right. The performance was really good, compatibility with standards was actually the best IMHO. Every thing (SVG) I tried that got past Firefox and Chrome worked on Edge without modification. And yeah, we need the competition. It's not like Microsoft is running out of money. Guess they need their most talented people doing som…

> And yeah, we need the competition.

If they wanted competition they should released it under Mac and Linux.

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