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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

#491

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#492

Post by simias »

lgl wrote: post #457
simias wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I maintain that. Actually I think a modern browser is probably more complex than many small kernels.

It's probably not the best metric but my checkout of the Linux kernel (a very advanced OS with support for many architectures and devices) is at about 14 million lines of C code (per sloccount), although if you remove device drivers and only count the "core" of the kernel you end up with about 3M lines. I don't have any browser source code available on my computer but a website[1] says that Firefox 20 (released in 2013) was around 4M lines of code and was rising quite fast.

Again, this is comparing apples to kernels but it shows that it's still within the same order of magnitude as far as code size is concerned. The maintenance burden alone on these large codebases is huge, you need teams of engineers just dealing with things like testing and regressions. The bar is extremely high for competition, you won't have two clever engineers write the next killer browser in their basement.

[1] https://almossawi.com/firefox/

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

#494

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

Nonsense, I tell my friends and family to download firefox. I also tell them horror stories about Google and how they eat children to reinforce brand loyalty.

But to be serious, they are just the better browsers. Maybe the trident engine or whatever it is called right now does perform very well and I see no issues. I just cannot understand how anyone opening the settings of Edge would not get an instant aneurysm. I can't believe that people think this to be the "the new way" of structuring settings. It is just horrible and unusable.

But changing just the engine probably means the horrible things about Edge are here to stay.

I am no web developer, but if I have an application on the web, I do test compatibility with Edge.

Win10 does have serious issues, the engine of Edge was one of the things not relevant to the topic at hand.

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

#495

Post by pluma »

I wonder what this means for Chakra Core, their JS engine.

They previously tried to establish Chakra as an alternative to V8 and even maintained their own fork of Node.js running on it. It doesn't look like those efforts went anywhere.

If they're already throwing out their rendering engine, it seems odd if they want to keep Chakra, especially considering how Electron (which runs VSCode and GitHub's Atom) is already built on V8.

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

#496

Post by petee »

gamblor956 wrote: post #260
colordrops wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't quite put my finger on it but something feels wrong about blaming the general populace for Edge's failure as a browser. Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies on Earth. They've had every opportunity to use every marketing channel and dump resources into the team to make Edge an obvious winner. But they didn't.

They want to avoid a second round of antitrust investigations. The first round was spurred in large part by the marketing push behind IE.

I really doubt this is the reason; for starters, the update of windows 10 i have now removed the option to disable Bing in the start menu, nor can I change the search provider. They're headed right back to where they used to be.

If they are going Chromium based, its only to ensure everyone uses their chromium browser

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

#497

Post by ivanhoe »

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…

Yeah, monoculture is bad, but also having to constantly joggle between different engines when developing for web is not all that great either. So this is also a step toward a dream of having fully standardized set of web browsers' features. It means less polyfills, less compromises, more modern js and css and ultimately better and leaner sites and web apps experience for users.

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

#498

Post by cm2187 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #179
jccalhoun wrote: post #23

As a firefox fax, I hope this isn't true. The dominance of chrome isn't good for anyone. This will lead to (even more) sites not bothering to be made compatible with Firefox. We are headed back to the "designed for IE" days.

Yeah, this is just depressing and honestly a little baffling. Seems contrary to Microsoft's interests - why let Google control this aspect of the Web? (Obviously, MS will maintain their own fork and can permanently fork away whenever they want/need to, I guess, so it's not like they've locked themselves in forever, but still) I actually wasn't aware of the problems with Edge. This is the first I've heard of them... I…

Not that I have any insight into Microsoft but it appears to be consistent with their strategy of disengaging from the client. Why bear the cost of maintaining your own browser technology given the extraordinary complexity, a low market share and little to no associated revenues.

I wouldn't be too sad if Firefox was switching to chromium either. Then developers would only need to worry about rendering into one engine, and users would have all their sites always working.

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

#499

Post by whywhywhywhy »

mastrsushi wrote: post #221

Microsoft should give up entirely on Internet browser development. I cannot see any good reason to throw their money away like this. They are a company too dependant on legacy software to bother competing with Google and Mozilla. Cloud services seem to be their brightest modern opportunity, but they really weren't prepared for the 2010's. Competing with Chrome is just chasing cars. Of course they've always had the ad…

> Microsoft should give up entirely on Internet browser development. I cannot see any good reason to throw their money away like this.

If Microsoft release a low power device like Surface Go or future ARM devices then reviewers and people open up Chrome and it runs jerky and laggy then they'll blame the device. If Chrome becomes the default browser and gives you bad battery performance then people blame the device.

MS has to ship a browser for the exact same reasons Apple insists on shipping a browser. It's the most used application on the OS and the app that's almost used 100% of the time the device is running therefore it can make a good device feel like a bad device if its optimized poorly.

Notice all Apples web battery benchmarks use Safari not chrome.

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

#500

Post by asituop »

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…

You seems very certain that Firefox will switch to Chromium but the recent trend is going in the exact opposite direction :

- Firefox Focus is switching from Chromium Engine to Gecko Engine.

- Huge amount of work in WebRender, they're starting to test it. If it lives up its promise Chromium Engine might fall far behind in terms of performance.

So maybe you're right but from what we can tell right now, the current trend for Mozilla is to remove the last pieces of Chromium and bet everything on a new generation engine which is not Chromium.

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