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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

#601

Post by AlexandrB »

Endy wrote: post #453
jarcane wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adv…

> 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.

This is increasingly not true. Between Bing and adding ads[1] to various parts of Windows 10, I expect Microsoft’a long term business strategy will be increasingly ad-heavy. And you can’t make them un-collect the data they’ve already collected on you.

[1] https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/192251/microsoft...

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

#603

Post by riskable »

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.

Consider the complexity of supporting all the dozens of CPU instruction sets and a few dozen more built-into-the-CPU hardware peripherals/extensions (e.g. SSE, hardware random number generators, etc). There's probably a thousand different combinations thereof across x86, ARM, MIPS, etc. There's only so many different kinds of hardware out there (and half as much quirky bullshit if you take out all the Sony laptops!)

Now consider how many websites that exist with all kinds broken code, use of dead APIs, old versions of, well, everything. Yet a modern browser can display those sites just fine 99% of the time. Users expect this!

Making a modern browser that works across all those nearly infinite combinations is considerably more difficult than making a kernel boot on a new board with a plethora of datasheets out in the wild to download at your leisure.

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

#604

Post by saagarjha »

thrower123 wrote: post #579
saagarjha wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge and Safari are not broken.

The reality is that whatever google implements is the standard. If you don't comply you are an also-ran

Sorry, what? Were you cut off there?

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

#605

Post by gvb »

pjmlp wrote: post #572
plq wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My favorite is prompting me to restart to install an update when I open it. It's the best they can do. Windows carries a lot of baggage and bad decisions around its OS design. One of them is that when a file has an exclusive lock (eg an .exe file that's running) it can't be deleted. NTFS and Windows Kernel don't implement reference counting like a proper OS. So Firefox (or any software package with in-place self-up…

Today I learned that VMS wasn't a proper OS, because proper OS let processes blindly overwrite files from others.

Unlink with reference counting, not overwrite. This allows the program to "delete" itself but the file remains as an unnamed file on the drive until the last program that references it exits.

If the file name was the last hard link to the file, the file itself is deleted as soon as no program has it open.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlink_(Unix)

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

#606

Post by zolthrowaway »

JoelTheSuperior wrote: post #415
koonsolo wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "open standards" is actually the reason why there can only be a limited amount of web browsers. Let me explain: there is no true open standard (as explained at https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/ ). You don't realize this until you make HTML5 games or apps, like when Google decided to break tons of HTML5 games with https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p... So basicall…

Not to mention that fixing it for one browser may well break it for another. Usually it leads to compromising but even then still favouring one browser (usually Chrome) over another.

This is my biggest gripe with Edge/IE.

- Build some webapp and get it working correctly in Chrome

- Test on Firefox. It works 90% of the time. 9% of the time it's relatively easy to support. 1% of the time it isn't worth the hassle.

- Test on Edge. It works 80% of the time. 10% it's an easy enough fix. 10% you have to move heaven and Earth to fix and when you contact Microsoft, they know about the issue but won't do anything to help.

- Test on IE. It works 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time you start looking for a new job so you don't have to write the same code a second time for IE.

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

#607

Post by pndy »

bayindirh wrote: post #519
alimbada wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's a new browser built from the ground up with none of the baggage of IE.

Any reliable sources? I'd love to read more, and correct my knowledge if it's wrong.

Edge uses forked Trident (named EdgeHTML) which was stripped of legacy code and tries to be compatible with WebKit engine: https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-...

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

#608

Post by bayindirh »

pndy wrote: post #607
bayindirh wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reliable sources? I'd love to read more, and correct my knowledge if it's wrong.

Edge uses forked Trident (named EdgeHTML) which was stripped of legacy code and tries to be compatible with WebKit engine: https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-...

That's also what I tried to say in my previous (grandparent) comment, no? :)

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

#609

Post by rohan1024 »

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…

Gonna play devil's advocate here. Monoculture, is it really that bad? What if all these browsers start contributing to the chromium project so that we have one solid core. Chromium being open source won't end up as another IE as many seem to suggest here.

Besides, we have already settled on Google, Linux in Cloud, Windows on consumer and corporate computers. Its simple process of elimination. Market is deciding what should get eliminated. Anything that doesn't have a steady or abundant flow of resources behind it will die eventually. Of course ethics and morals don't stand chance when it is survival of the fittest but that has been the case for billions of years.

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

#610

Post by taf2 »

manigandham wrote: post #322
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…

Safari is leaving itself in the dirt. It's the new IE with slow, quirky, and unreliable features. They made some advancements in privacy, but so did Firefox without giving up on actual rendering and standards.

Sorry safari isn’t great but it’s nothing like IE. It’s got an open rendering engine maintained by multiple corporations as well as contributions from others. WebKit the core of safari works on many different operating systems unlike IE that is basically a web view into activex controls for native windows only applications. Not at all comparable
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