Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

windowscentral.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 774 posts

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

#501

Post by baq »

vic20forever wrote: post #370
headmelted wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Watching Mozilla align Firefox's extension API with Chromium's, I'm a little surprised that they haven't already made the move. If browser evolution continues along the current path, I predict Firefox will switch to Chromium withi…

i'd bet my money (not all of it, though) that firefox actually adopts servo as its rendering engine instead of chromium.

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

#502

Post by tambourine_man »

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.

Electron is becoming the new Win32. Might as well own it and make it faster, more native.

I think it’s a better alternative to Apple's Marzipan.

It’s a tragedy for the Web but makes sense for Windows.

Anyway, as others have noted, this seems more and more prophetical every year:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1069787375247622144

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

#503

Post by welly »

ako wrote: post #237
hkai wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is similar to saying that one party rule in politics is good for the country (because the party is nice, has competent people at the top, and helps people a lot).

Well, it's better than two parties that are putting all their energy into fighting each other, instead of governing a country in hot best way possible for its citizens...

North Korea, Soviet Union, China, Syria, East Germany.

Take your pick.

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

#504

Post by chiefalchemist »

gok wrote: post #190
chiefalchemist wrote: post #56

A number of the comments mention monoculture. But where does monculture end and a solid reliable and honest standard begin? For exampke, at some point the power grid and gasoline formulations were standardized, yes? TV screen sizes, tin cans and shipping containers. Is the browser not the shipping container of our time? To call W3C a standard and then have different implementations is no standard at all. That is the…

"To call W3C a standard and then have different implementations is no standard at all" Precisely false. A standard must have different implementations to ensure it is robust.

A standards spec should not yield different results. That, by definition, isn't a standard.

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

#505

Post by [deleted] »

happymellon wrote: post #197
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…

How can I test Edge when Microsoft don't release it for Mac and Linux? A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.

[deleted]

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

#506

Post by Jnr »

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…

I don't test it in Edge as much because there is no Edge on Linux or MacOS and I don't want to keep virtual machines running all the time to do it. And there is absolutely no benefit in helping them get more users on their proprietary browser. If they made it multi platform and open sourced it, that might have been a different story. I do test in Firefox and Chromium and only then if someone complains I look at Safari and Edge.

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

#507

Post by skriticos2 »

toyg wrote: post #438
mr_toad wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unreliable standards I presume you mean that Safari doesn’t support experimental standards that Chrome is pushing because they align with Google’s businesses strategy. This is exactly the problem with a browser monoculture. If we’re not lucky Google will be the new Microsoft.

“Will be”? Google owns Android, which is the Windows of the mobile world. They push a development monoculture based on their platform. They leverage their de-facto monopoly in some sectors to penetrate other sectors. They hoover up young developers and keep them in gilded cages that encompass as much of their lives as possible. The only difference is that their cash-cow is advertising rather than an office suite. Goo…

Nah, wrong comparison. Microsoft mostly stayed in their corner (Software) while the others (Google, Amazon) are branching out to everything else. Things like Waymo will probably even take over the revenue of pure digital services (though it's tied into). Transportation is a big business.

Better analog would be Wayland-Yutani I guess. The corporations that are manifesting currently are nothing that the world has ever seen before in size and interconnections.

Not that I'm against it, it's just my observation. I'm an avid customer of both.

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

#508

Post by leni536 »

majewsky wrote: post #468
toyg wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just do it when you close the last window, if the OS is not shutting down.

On Linux, Firefox does not really have a choice. When the system rips out some vital libraries from under you because of an update, you can continue to use the old libraries in processes where they are already loaded. But new processes (i.e. new tabs) will not be able to load the old libraries. It's similar to how, when you install a kernel update, new devices are not recognized anymore because the loadable kernel mo…

> But new processes (i.e. new tabs) will not be able to load the old libraries.

I think it should be possible under Linux. Firefox could pass the old libraries as file descriptors to its child process and and the child could dlopen those through /proc/self/fd/... . Or a more robust mechanism along these lines. But I wouldn't seriously suggest that Firefox should do something like this, restarting Firefox every once in a while is fine.

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

#509

Post by Dayshine »

fourthark wrote: post #49
thrower123 wrote: post #32

Broken shit should die. And Edge was definitely broke. Safari is next, with 5% market. Chrome is the clear winner in the end.

How was it broken? I only tested visualization stuff on it but it seemed to work pretty well. Honestly asking...

Well, if you want an example:

The latest version of Edge broke the "FormData" constructor. So you can't manually create FormData to post from a set of elements not already in a form element together.

And the failure is insidious, it would wipe the value, but still submit the key. Overwriting any previously saved data.

Reported it three months ago, assigned to someone, no progress.

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

#510

Post by WA »

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…

Not sure about that, because after all, most users use their smartphones and iOS has quite a big market share. So there's at least Chromium and Webkit. Web devs simply won't get away with testing only in Chrome that easily.
Post reply on HN