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

1061 points by rattt 8y ago

atonse 8y ago
Sad news. Chrome is an energy hog on the Mac compared to safari. It probably won’t be as tied to the OS APIs as Edge was.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > Chrome is an energy hog on the Mac compared to safari. It seems that with more interest in that, it's likely to improve. > It probably won’t be as tied to the OS APIs as Edge was What makes you say that? Seems like they could integrate it more or less exactly the same way.
  - atonse 8y ago
    Again with my limited experience on the Mac, chrome whatever safari is doing to take advantage of OS APIs, it always feels more native.
mooman219 8y ago
This has been in the works for a while! A number of Microsoft employees have been making contributions to Chromium too. I hope to see Chromium's performance and battery impact on Windows to improve with this decision which is great for those using the OS. It sounds like Microsoft really just wants a platform to route people into using Bing and service ads on the new tab page, which they're more than capable of doing on a reskin for Chromium. From a cost standpoint it makes sense to use the existing tools available. For developers, it's one less platform to target.
- millstone 8y ago
  This vision is pathetic, unambitious. What if Microsoft is content to reskin and rehome Chrome, submit their battery life PRs, and cede the web to Google? What is the web once Google dominates its access?
nwah1 8y ago
Very much hope Edge is open sourced.
- kainazzzo 8y ago
  It would be nice so then someone could fix the bugs with gitter.im
  - ataylor32 8y ago
    Out of curiosity, what bugs does it have?
- h1d 8y ago
  Do what with it?
  - Groxx 8y ago
    learn, if nothing else. surely there are some valuable pieces in there.
    - Spivak 8y ago
      Seriously there must be, if nothing else, some Windows black magic in there to make Edge so responsive.
vtesucks 8y ago
On the one hand developers have one less engine to worry about. On the other if it becomes a chromium monoculture then Firefox loses.
- mcny 8y ago
  On the front page, I saw another headline that said Firefox desktop market share is below nine percent.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - nerdbaggy 8y ago
    And nobody knows how that’s calculated. If the implementation is done via JS we can assume a good portion of all the browsers usage % is incorrect.
    - leeoniya 8y ago
      here are some actual metrics from our ecommerce site (US, home remodeling / DIY): if you look at desktop traffic only: Nov 2015: 16.01% Nov 2016: 13.27% Nov 2017: 10.33% Nov 2018: 8.14% Desktop IE in Nov 2018 was 11.37%, Edge 15.65%, Chrome 52.74% and Safari 11.65%. if you include mobile traffic (where Firefox is basically non-existent), then Nov 2018 is closer to 3.5%. talk about bleak :(
    - fabrice_d 8y ago
      The absolute number is not that important, the trend is. That's clear even in Mozilla's own data: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity shows they went from 303M monthly active users at the end of Nov. 2017 to 277M this year. This is a serious drop.
      - ngokevin 8y ago
        Even greater in the US, from 50M to 40M.
kainazzzo 8y ago
Great news! I really tried to like Edge, and used it exclusively for a few months. It just couldn't do the job.
- chocolatkey 8y ago
  There is one thing it does/did a very nice job with: EPUB viewing. I sure hope they port that over
Despegar 8y ago
And then there were three. Even more reason for Apple to never allow anything but WebKit on iOS. This monoculture isn't good for the web. edit: Guess the pro-monoculture folks flagged this.
- mossplix 8y ago
  So webkit is not monoculture? Are you forgetting about konqueror?
  - Despegar 8y ago
    How could it be a monoculture with 14% market share? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
    - zapzupnz 8y ago
      Why are you citing Safari's 14% market share when the person to whom you responded was stating that if it's true that Edge will become Chromium-based, then browsers running on Chromium will represent something like 66% of the world's web engine share. Heck, it's already 59%, over half. With Opera, Vivaldi, and Edge (or whatever Anaheim will become), we're talking two thirds of all browsers being based on one engine. That's the monoculture. Edit: didn't realise you were responding to someone refuting what you had said, haha. so basically we agree, I just thought you were someone else.
      - Despegar 8y ago
        I'm saying that WebKit can't be a monoculture because Safari only has 14% market share. It doesn't matter if other devices and browsers that no one actually uses are WebKit.
        deleted 8y ago
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        8y ago
sroussey 8y ago
All this coming from this build bug for ARM64Win? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460 Is there anything else to dig into to validate?
- petecox 8y ago
  Previously, MS and Google have publically announced they will collaborate on bringing Chrome to Windows on ARM. Abandoning EdgeHTML on the basis of that bug report would be drawing a long bow.
c-smile 8y ago
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.
- naner 8y ago
  Fair concern. On the other hand nobody uses Edge on Windows 10, do they? In my limited experience users seem to still use IE or go to Chrome or Firefox.
  - c-smile 8y ago
    I am using it on day per day basis. It has some problems but works for me in 99.9% of cases.
  - ztjio 8y ago
    I use it as much as possible. Its user experience on touch windows devices (Surface Go in this case) is several orders of magnitude better than Chrome and Firefox... is not a usable browser, performance-wise in my experience. Edge is brand new, and foolishly branded to look like IE, this might stop average users who know about getting Chrome from using it. But it shouldn't. It's extremely rare that I'm forced to swap over to Chrome. Mostly I use Chrome to keep my invasive work IT staff from having access to my private browsing info.
    - qwerty456127 8y ago
      The problem with Edge is it still (like IE had been always but at a small number of moments in history when it actually was the original source of an innovation) is the worst of the browsers from the standards (or non-standards, whatever) support perspective. See caniuse.com
    - naner 8y ago
      Thanks, that is what I was missing. It makes sense that Edge would be preferred on Win 10 touchscreen devices.
jccalhoun 8y ago
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.
- samspenc 8y ago
  My understanding is that they'll be using the Chromium engine underneath, but still their own Edge "browser" and UI on top. IMHO, I personally think it's a good thing to consolidate on one engine to render HTML cross-platform for these two reasons: 1. Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines. 2. The Chromium engine itself is open source. There are other browsers (Vivaldi, Opera, etc) that run on top of it. 3. While I think it's great the engine underneath is the same, I think it's equally great that there is a variety of UIs and browsers built on top of the same engine - the innovation happens in the browser space, not the engine, anymore.
  - kibwen 8y ago
    > The Chromium engine itself is open source Being open source is a red herring in this instance. Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. You fork the browser and remove that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so your fork doesn't work with those websites. Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. You fork the browser and add the feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use your feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and your fork is no better off. The insidious part of a web monoculture is allowing Google to dictate the standards of the web platform. Being able to fork the codebase only gives one the power to change things that are strictly client-side.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - joesb 8y ago
      Your examples have nothing to do with whether you use Chrominum engine, though. Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that doesn't have that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so MS Edge doesn't work with those websites. Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that has that feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use MS Edge feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and MS Edge browser is no better off.
cwyers 8y ago
I don't know, I am typing this post on Edge, and HTML rendering is way down on my list of complaints about it. Is switching to Chromium going to fix the lack of a "Paste As Plain Text" option, for instance? (Not the biggest issue, just the one that's freshest in my mind.) And I hope that whatever they do retains their focus on not burning battery, which is a big reason I use Edge as much as I do.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
If Microsoft really does this and makes the Chromium based browser the default in Windows, what is the value proposition of installing Chrome? Presumably all the websites will work exactly as they do in Chrome and it will be no faster or slower?
- wmf 8y ago
  The value proposition is that Google will bombard you with ads to install Chrome until you relent.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  It's value proposition is integration with the Google ecosystem. If one rejects Google then there isn't much of a reason to use Chrome over another Chromium-based web browser. I try to avoid Google as much as possible these days, thus it's funny because I never thought I'd consider using a Microsoft browser instead of a Google one. I think this is a potentially good move on Microsoft's part(the EdgeHTML thing turned out not to be).
- deleted 8y ago
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- walterbell 8y ago
  Also: Data collection by Microsoft instead of Google. Since Microsoft is already collecting data from the Windows OS, they are already part of your trust chain.
talawahdotnet 8y ago
Interesting, but what I really, really want them to do is EOL IE 11 so that the web can move forward without feeling guilty about the X% of users still on it. IE 11 has unfortunately become the new IE 6. As it is right now I believe the IE 11 EOL is tied to the Windows 10 EOL...which is not happening anytime soon. Many frameworks are dropping support for it anyway so I guess it will end up being defacto desupported.
- chipperyman573 8y ago
  As someone who has (luckily) only had to support Firefox/Edge/Chrome, can you go into why IE11 is so bad? In the very small amount of testing I've done, everything seems to render just fine (especially compared to IE6/7/8)
  - pier25 8y ago
    Huh... JavaScript?
  - srgpqt 8y ago
    https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs
  - le-mark 8y ago
    I've been on multi year projects to modernize old IE applications, and one of the things that IE11 misses is "standard" xpath evaluation. A lot of old "dhtml" apps were all in on soap/xml. There's some wierd IE only hold over css in it like cursor hand vs pointer. On the whole it's not too bad really. The reason why IE11 will live for a long, long time is it's compatability modes. You can run apps all the way back to IE7 on it. And yes these still exist.
    - chipperyman573 8y ago
      >There's some wierd IE only hold over css in it like cursor hand vs pointer Wow, that would really frustrate me. One of the first things I do (or check to make sure it's done by whatever css library I'm using) is add a { cursor:pointer; } to my css file. The first time I tested a website in IE11, I would be pulling my hair out!! Or more likely I would google it, but still, it would be frustrating.
thrower123 8y ago
Broken shit should die. And Edge was definitely broke. Safari is next, with 5% market. Chrome is the clear winner in the end.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Edge and Safari are not broken.
  - thrower123 8y ago
    The reality is that whatever google implements is the standard. If you don't comply you are an also-ran
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      Sorry, what? Were you cut off there?
- fourthark 8y ago
  How was it broken? I only tested visualization stuff on it but it seemed to work pretty well. Honestly asking...
  - nikkwong 8y ago
    It just depends on how far you're trying to push these browsers. Chrome has a lot of crazy cutting edge APIs which allow amazing developer and therefore user experiences. For example, IntersectionObserver, which allows developers to know when a part of a page is active, and respond accordingly; Safari doesn't even implement IntersectionObserver, even though it's been a standardized spec since like 2013. It might seem like minutiae, but, safari also doesn't pay any attention to SVG specs. This makes the pages I build for beaver [1] like, impossible. They work beautiful in chrome; but they don't work at all in safari; and because of that, I can't really explore what potential experiences pushing the limits on SVG might have for my clients. Whatever you build has to work in all clients. It's a sad state of affairs, because if safari wasn't so far dilapidated, I would have been able to build some really impressive experiences; but, without safari support it's a no-go. (1) www.beaver.digital
fourthark 8y ago
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 something else.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  > compatibility with standards was actually the best IMHO Unfortunately it wasn't. See caniuse.com. > And yeah, we need the competition. This is the key point. Indeed. Google becoming the ultimate web monopolist seems scary. I just hope Mozilla is going to be able to keep competing (but I'm not sure how long will it stand, a neighbour post says "Firefox desktop market share now below 9%"). I wish MS could choose the Mozilla engine instead...
  - krylon 8y ago
    > I wish MS could choose the Mozilla engine instead... At least they could send some money Mozilla's way to ensure there is an independent competitor around.
- taf2 8y ago
  It's a good thing more talented people can focus on development of an open source browser. That means more people can share in a consistent and reliable way. It also means much like Mozilla has been innovating with Servo we're seeing amazing things from that and it doesn't have to be X vs Y. MS vs Google. It can be a collective working towards a better common platform for everyone.
- afroboy 8y ago
  > And yeah, we need the competition. If they wanted competition they should released it under Mac and Linux.
qwerty456127 8y ago
… and it will always use a severely outdated version of the Blink engine with nothing but some of vulnerability fixes back-ported occasionally (after unreasonable pauses of course).
lwansbrough 8y ago
Stupid. Open source Edge and see where that gets us before you blow up the only chance we have of maintaining an open web standard.
- WalterGR 8y ago
  2008. “Fuck you, Microsoft, for not bundling Firefox or Chrome.” 2018. “Fuck you, Microsoft, for bundling Firefox or Chrome.” Hilarious.
  - lwansbrough 8y ago
    Very disingenuous comparison. Shows a lack of comprehension or wilful ignorance of the issue many have expressed in this thread.
    - vtesucks 8y ago
      "fuck you" is not same as stupid. The comment is good actually- edge has potential, why not open source it since you're not going to do much with it anyway in terms of making money. this also brings devs to windows eco system and helps them explore windows internals.
  - Grue3 8y ago
    I said back in 2008 and I'll say it now, that ruling was absolutely idiotic, and still is (especially considering Webkit/iPhone situation).
2bitencryption 8y ago
one browser to rule them all, one browser to find them; one browser to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them...
vbezhenar 8y ago
Sad news for me. I liked Edge. It missed few essential features for me (no search in history, really?), so after a while I switched to Chrome, but I was checking it from time to time and I never wanted it to have another engine. Microsoft seems to lost an ability to fight and make successful projects. There’s absolutely no reason for me to use their browser now.
deleted 8y ago
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chiefalchemist 8y ago
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 nature of guidelines. The fact that said "standard" so often led to a suboptional UX only poured salt on the wound. Maybe this really is bad news? But there doea seem to be some upside, monoculture or not.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  Standard is an interface with multiple implementations. Shipping container standard with certain dimensions is good. Shipping container standard “from evil Google” is bad.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Standard can also be a ubiquitous implementation: OOXML, PDF, CUDA, Linux, glibc, pulseaudo, ffmpeg, imagemagick, tensorflow, systemd, Windows, MySQL, React, Java, QT, Electron. Since standards bodies these days are really documentation effots it seems silly to say that implementation defined standards aren't. It's practically where any 'proper' standard comes from these days where the market leader is essentially the reference implementation.
- gok 8y ago
  "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.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    A standards spec should not yield different results. That, by definition, isn't a standard.
- mr_toad 8y ago
tambourine_man 8y ago
Interesting theory and thread: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1069776335336292352 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”
- interesthrow2 8y ago
  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? typical Microsoft... reminds me the whole ES4/Jscript.net debacle only to then reinvent the wheel (ineffectively) with Typescript... those who don't know the story should read about it, how many years wasted? 10, 15 years?... What MS is really doing is replacing HTA,WinStore apps, whatever with Chromium, because their own tech can't compete with Chromium as they didn't seriously invest in it. I'm actually starting to believe the people who are claiming that MS is rebuilding Office in JS from scratch...
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Their desktop strategy is really confusing. I think even to themselves. It seems since around 2000 or when .NET came out they lost direction, repeatedly tried something, didn't really finish and dropped it. Mobile strategy wasn't much better.
    - giancarlostoro 8y ago
      They are fragmented and not under a single focus and that is the problem. While the executives at the top are focused on cloud those in charge of the OS and other crucial products are making some oddball decisions for whatever reason. If Microsoft could push all their teams towards a consistent vision it would be great. Otherwise we will continue to see this giant love-hate of Microsoft vs the appreciation they deserve for the things they do get right. I am company neutral so I try to appreciate companies that do some things right.
wnevets 8y ago
how does this solve the market share problem of edge? The implementation isn't the problem, its the awful UI.
intellix 8y ago
As a front-end developer this is amazing news. Less work and can deliver faster
partiallypro 8y ago
I hope that while Microsoft does this, once they make the switch, they open source Edge.
nikkwong 8y ago
I can see how this is creating a monoculture on the web which could have some really negative implications going forward. However, chromium is open source; so I don't really think this is comparable to the IE days. Also, as a web dev who is trying to push the limits of what is possible given current web APIs, being shackled by edge's lack of compatibility is really a hindrance and makes really cutting-edge stuff impossible. So, it will be nice to not have to worry about that as much. It didn't seem like microsoft was ever serious about advancing the development of the web with edge; they were just always trying to catch up (and doing so poorly). Microsoft is probably gauging the state of their browser now and coming to the conclusion that they're too far behind to make a realistic comeback without totally revamping their approach; lots of firings/organizational reshuffling, etc. At least google is serious about the web APIs, even if its' only because it aligns with their financial interests—at least it does end up being a good user experience; i think that's what matters. -- edit: Also, not trying to belabor the point, but this subject on the whole is especially important to me. Chrome has allowed me to do crazy-amazing things with SVGs for my dev agency (1) since, well, they actually follow most of the SVG spec. I think most browser vendors see the SVG spec as superfluous and don't follow the spec verbatim, and that stops people like me from doing more awesome things with it; I'll literally have clients pitch me awesome ideas and my response is; sorry, we can do that but it just won't work in safari! So it becomes a no-go for all. If other vendors really were able to dedicate serious resources towards their browser implementations then yeah, I would also be unhappy about microsoft's decision here. Optimally they would shell out more resources to their Edge division; but since they don't care about web experience the way google does—I agree that deferring to the experts is the best case scenario for everyone (i.e. developers like me and then users). At least, until microsoft redefines their priorities. [1] www.beaver.digital
- kibwen 8y ago
  > chromium is open source On Chromium being open source, and why that doesn't matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595978
  - nikkwong 8y ago
sytelus 8y ago
Note from Erik Meijer :) https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/1069796773017710592 https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/1069796773017710592
- ravedave5 8y ago
  That is really funny. Also, it shows how much Microsoft has changed in the last few years.
sys_64738 8y ago
Microsoft should buy Vivaldi and make that their default browser.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
Someone needs to note that Chromium is a browser and the rendering engine is called Blink. You can't build a different browser and rename it based on Chromium but you can use Blink as your rendering engine. The article says "...building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine...".
- notatoad 8y ago
  You absolutely can build a new browser based on chromium. That's what opera is. It shares a lot more than just the blink code.
oksawe 8y ago
Is Chromium different than WebKit now?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Yes, and it has been for a while.
- fourthark 8y ago
  Since 2013 or so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
kgwxd 8y ago
If they had made it open source, cross-platform (like vs code), with sane telemetry options (unlike vs code) I would have gave it a go. I don't get why they though anything else had a chance in the current market.
- WalterGR 8y ago
  What are VS Code’s insane telemetry options?
  - asituop 8y ago
    The VS code you download is not Open Source, it has a special Microsoft license and includes close source Microsoft Telemetry ( which could be considered as spyware) which you cannot opt-out completely. See https://code.visualstudio.com/license https://code.visualstudio.com/license If you want a clean VS Code with MIT license and no spyware you have to build it yourself or use VS Codium : https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/README.md This pretty much the same idea as Chrome vs Chromium
    - kgwxd 8y ago
      Build it yourself with build tools from MS... which have telemetry :/
est 8y ago
I for one, welcome our one and only new browser overlord.
TheCoelacanth 8y ago
Yay, now instead of two crappy Microsoft browsers, I get to support three crappy Microsoft browsers.
Analemma_ 8y ago
I hope everyone complaining about this, and the web monoculture it will crystallize, uses Edge (or at least Firefox) when they're on Windows. Otherwise you're part of the problem. Just like on the "Firefox's market share dips below 9%" thread, everyone wants to gripe about Chrome's dominance but no one wants to do anything about it.
- deleted 8y ago
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Thann 8y ago
how the meeting went: "its really expensive to build a decent browser and a spyware engine for it... hmmmm"
- WalterGR 8y ago
  How does Edge’s telemetry compare to Chrome’s? Have there been any problems with Edge similar to Chrome’s suddenly logging people into the browser?
rmykhajliw 8y ago
Hallelujah! It's much better than maintaining a dead edge browser users use only once to download chrome. The biggest question whether people will use a new branded Microsoft browser or not because many of us remember a decade of ie6.
- russdpale 8y ago
  This is what I have been saying to my colleagues. Microsoft should not put their branding anywhere near the new browser even if it is industry acknowledged as their browser. That definitely includes any and all IE branding.
mark-r 8y ago
Had to double-check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1. I think I'll wait for a confirmation before I believe it.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
Embrace.
morpheuskafka 8y ago
This definitely makes sense from a business standpoint. MS gets two big things from Edge/IE: one, people using Bing by default, and two, tight integration with Windows/Office/MS Cloud services. All of that has nothing to do with engines, very little to do with even UI design.
sn41 8y ago
I am somewhat sad at this. I use Seamonkey, but when it comes to opening and annotating pdfs, djvu and epub files, edge does all this on my laptop with minimal fuss. I felt that Edge is one of the things that Microsoft is doing right.
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kerng 8y ago
For Microsoft this makes perfect sense, they can keep Edge UI and use that to build there own non Google experience. Maintaining the underlying details and stuff is just overhead, rather they can entirely focus on new things and experiences.
vtesucks 8y ago
What happens to chakra?
ToFab123 8y ago
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 engine is a big step in that direction. It is a step they have to do because.. and now comes the down votes... YOU don't test your work in Egde and because YOU tell all friends and family to use Chrome instead of edge. I bet many of you even helps friends and family in downloading it. So stop complaining about monoculture. Many of you helped create it.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I prefer Edge to chrome actually, and especially professionally where chromes security settings won’t accept internal SSL certs as safe. Bing is terrible, but I don’t think Edge is.
  - snupples 8y ago
    Chrome trusts the OS cert store on Windows. Works perfectly.
  - mapl 8y ago
    Perhaps Edge still relies on Common Name where Chrome needs a valid SAN Attribute. https://www.pei.com/2017/06/chrome-58-common-name/ https://www.pei.com/2017/06/chrome-58-common-name/
- codinger 8y ago
  Wait, I haven't heard of these recent stability issues with Windows 10 or experienced them myself. Do you have a link about it?
  - NolF 8y ago
    Maybe OP is mainly referring to the recent update issues where entire folders have been delated as part of the "forced" updates.
BuckRogers 8y ago
This is the wrong strategy for adoption. Edge adoption will skyrocket if they give Win10S / a UWP-only version of Windows away for free. Edge locked and minimal ad support with no data collection business model. Or, give the user the choice between the two SaaS support models that they prefer, one of those combined with being funneled to MS services (Bing etc) should make it sustainable. This will result in being good for web standards, empowering MS, Google, Apple and Mozilla independently. To increase Electron app performance on Windows, it's a good way to go about it. But I have to wonder if in time Electron will be around when wasm will be a better universal app platform to build around. Little to no performance issues to resolve there. So some good and some bad. But I can't say that I think it makes as much sense as working hard on pushing wasm and releasing UWP-locked Win10 for any vendor to install or user to download.
chris_wot 8y ago
The only reason Edge isn't successful is because it's not cross platform. Which, I realize, is kind of the point - but sort of also why as a browser it is now dying.
Solar19 8y ago
This reminds me that I think there's a real market opportunity for a clean-sheet proprietary browser. Everyone just assumes open source (except for Safari and Edge until now). I think it's possible to build a significantly better browser than Chrome or anything else out there. And I think at least a few million people would pay more than $100 for it (there are 326 million people in the US alone). This would be a good time to do it.
- newuser6969 8y ago
  I wouldn't touch a proprietary browser if you paid me $100
- 1ris 8y ago
  Maybe 1$. There is Vivaldi. Its much better, but nobody wants to pay.
Osiris 8y ago
With so many browsers using Blink/V8, couldn't it be argued that an independent foundation should be created to take over the project so that no company (Google) controls the code? Each browser can then implement their fork / skin of the rendering engine / V8. It could even allow the foundation to experiment with larger changes how Mozilla has done with it's rust-based renderer.
- asituop 8y ago
  You mean everyone uses Blink/V8 and everyone does research as forks and merge it to master if they have something interesting to commit ? I would see a few issues : - The 1st problem I see is that open source is often meritocracy and so Google will always be deciding because there will be much more engineer from Google on the project than from other companies joining the project. And anyway Google has no interest to try to align with MS/Mozilla interests. - The other problem I see is that you need some independence to make fundamemtal changes. WebRender would never exist if Mozilla tried to fork an existing engine. They wrote everything from scratch and now they are doing fundamental changes to Gecko to be able to merge Webrender in it. If they add to agree with Google, MS, and other companies they would still be arguing and trying to convince them, and Google would refuse because they think their solution is better (or more suited to their own personal needs) and Rust would not even exist
baby 8y ago
Microsoft please, can we have the tabs on the side by default? There is a lot of vertical space that is unused and it is a thousand times more practical to have tabs there on the left or on the right. Try Tree Style Tabs for a week on Firefox and you will understand why it is the future of browsing the web.
- Osiris 8y ago
  Look at Vivaldi. It's a reimplementation of classic Opera 12 style browser as a Chromium-based browser. It supports tabs on all four sides by default.
alpb 8y ago
I honestly wondered, while I was at Microsoft‚ why this has not happened with Edge from the beginning. Microsoft knew how problematic mshtml.dll was and how frequently it led to zero-day vulnerabilities, while Chrome was not having any high-profile 0-days for many months, maybe years. Edge was mostly a UI remake of MSIE and it used mostly the same security model, rendering engine etc. It was never a real value add over MSIE.
mastrsushi 8y ago
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 advantage of being the default browser. I still don't think average users will ever see IE as anymore than a fly on a Window. Regardless of who's layout engine theyre forking.
- lmedinas 8y ago
  generally i agree they are spending a lot of money on development but they are also ensuring the future for their Web Tools when they have their own browser. Honestly speaking its good to have competition and apart from Firefox and Safari (partially due to being Apple sepcific), Edge was the only Browser (with an own engine) that could compete with Chrome.
- whywhywhywhy 8y ago
  > 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.
  - mastrsushi 8y ago
    Unless there is a major breakthrough in x86 compatibility, Windows isn't coming to ARM. They tried it with RT and they supported RISC far back as NT 4. I think 10 is great, but they've come to admit they're pretty much boxed into the whole Wintel monopoly they once thrived. You do have some good points. I was thinking how bad it would look on their part if their OS doesn't even have its own browser. Even Gnome has a browser, which is pretty much FirefoxGTK. I can't put my finger on why Microsoft should cease browser development. But adopting Chromium is definitely a good step in that direction. It's cheaper, normal people won't notice (or care), and they can keep branding.
no_wizard 8y ago
I think this is interesting. What is more interesting to me is that this would have been a very good chance to align themselves with Apple (WebKit) or Mozilla instead. Effectively Google is far far more of threat than either of these two companies. In fact I think at this point Apple and Microsoft have so much more in common than different in terms of goals, they don’t even really compete head on anymore. Shocks me they aren’t considering that
- kiriakasis 8y ago
  https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1069776335336292352 https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10697763353362923... The focus is electron "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 [...]"
technion 8y ago
The writing was on the wall when Microsoft release Windows Server 2019 - and announced it won't support Edge. Thinking of every corporate that's going to be using this new OS for RDS and Citrix farms, not shipping with Edge said they weren't going for the corporate market. Which happens to have been their biggest market.
akayoshi1 8y ago
Edge is only useful to download Google Chrome and Firefox.
zouhair 8y ago
Just buy Ubuntu and turn "windows" to a full on Linux Distro already.
ryacko 8y ago
I think I anticipated this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379360 >I wish Microsoft would just accept that no one will use Internet Explorer and devote resources to breaking MS-DOS compatibility.
zvrba 8y ago
WTF, what instability? I use it as my main browser and have (almost) no issues at all, even with ad blocker installed. Maybe 2x a month I need to launch Chrome for some weird site.
asien 8y ago
This is interesting . It’s coherent with their recent investments in Electron. Hence the need for MS to support PWA with excellent feature parity with chrome.
owaislone 8y ago
Wish they had gone with Mozilla tech instead. Would have created a nice balanced ecosystem.
t0astbread 8y ago
It's good that a Windows-only rendering engine where people working on other operating systems can't test their work is gone but this is problematic for tech diversity on the web
meruru 8y ago
They should just ship Firefox instead. They would get most of the benefits, wouldn't have to depend on Google tech, and could probably garner a lot of good will from the FOSS community. At least for me, it would mean much more than things like open-sourcing VS Code and other such moves do.
simfoo 8y ago
More monoculture :( I'm just waiting for the day Microsoft announces that they are dropping their own compiler in favor of Clang/LLVM.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Well, they have taken the effort of making C++/WinRT work with clang, and are contributing to the co-routines implementation in clang. But they have adopted GCC for Azure Sphere though.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
This is very sad, and a huge, terminal fail on the part of WHATWG to steer HTML, by making it so fscking complicated that it's infeasible to develop new browsers ever again. But maybe a monoculture was what they were heading for all the time.
russellbeattie 8y ago
If only they'd swap put the Windows kernel for Linux while they're at it...
nnq 8y ago
1. Embrace 2. ... 3. ... :)
King-Aaron 8y ago
Would be nice if they would pull their fingers out and update the rendering engine in Outlook from the 1995-esque bollocks they insist on using to this day.
qualsiasi 8y ago
Our customer only uses IE11, so this won't affect my work
zapzupnz 8y ago
Tangentially related to all the stuff about the impending browser monoculture (everything old is new; Chromium shall be the next IE, etc.), I wonder if Apple would ever revive Safari on Windows. There's probably more value in it now than there was before, because all those iPhone users who don't want to or don't the choice to use a Mac would still want iCloud bookmark and keychain sync on their machines. Plus, eventually, it might become another glass of that proverbial ice water in Hell that iTunes and Safari for Windows were once touted to be. Yes, I know Windows would still have Firefox and all that, but I don't think one competitor does competition make. You need many competitors to segment the market, because this is not a market where segmentation should be considered a problem; rather, it should be embraced as the way to drive standards forward. It's worked that way for us since 2007 up until the last couple of years, it'll work again.
tuananh 8y ago
what does this mean for ChakraCore?
totfz 8y ago
Edge's rendering engine is good. The only real problem Edge has is that they've built it using the ugly, unresponsive Metro UI. If they build a browser with the Chromium engine and a Metro UI, they can expect nobody to use it as well.
xaldir 8y ago
That reminds me of the Azure presentation where the Microsoft employee switch to Chrome after Edge crashed.
EdSharkey 8y ago
I complained here when the Windows Subsystem for Linux was released that Microsoft was capitulating to Linux, giving customers a migration path away from Windows. That Microsoft had lost confidence in the homespun Win32/Win64/UWP/... API's to court developers. I caught some flak for that, but I was right. Here, again, we see Microsoft signalling surrender in a HUGE market. Why should I be troubled to run Windows 10, again? Where is the technical distinctiveness in rebranding Chromium? There is no advantage to Microsoft in doing that. It's less disgraceful to keep building out Edge than to rebrand Chromium. I'm not claiming Microsoft has done a great job. Edge was another mixed bag in a long line of mixed bags on the Web front from Microsoft. But they did compete for a really long time with no shortage of technical distinctiveness. Active Desktop, in the right product manager's hands, could have been a really amazing system. IE6, when it came out, was technically very awesome, doing HTML5-like functionality 7 years before the other browser vendors. I'd wager open sourcing Windows is next because they're not doing the brand any favors; they'll dump it and move on. Microsoft will focus on Azure and SaaS apps or whatever new market crops up and we'll all be poorer for it. Windows 7 will be my last Windows unless some amazing direction change happens in the product. I'm just waiting for support to end. Debian Linux, here I come!
Neil44 8y ago
Will the homepage be Google... or Bing? There’s the question!
- krylon 8y ago
  Do people still use that? On any browser I use, I change the settings so when I restart it, it will open whatever tabs I had last opened. I almost never get to see the browser's homepage.
Endy 8y ago
Chromium, great. With this move, Google gets to take one more step toward total domination of the Web. I'll be honest, I use WebKit-Edge on my iPad and it's fine; but I believe that the desktop space needs a new engine. We need something that isn't Chromium or the Chromium-Gecko that's backing Firefox since the intro of WebExtensions. There's only one problem - that's a hard challenge, and just blindly following Google is the easy way out.
baybal2 8y ago
Tell me this is a late April fools joke
buboard 8y ago
Hopefully they will use it to compete against google , rather than helping them with their world domination plans. This might be a good thing
saghul 8y ago
I wonder if this also means ChakraCore would be abandoned. I haven't played with it directly, put it seems to be a very capable JS runtime, which has no home outside of Edge. Well, there is node-chakracore, but I wonder why Microsoft would interested in keeping that effort. Unless... they replace V8 in their Chromium build with Chakra. They already have a V8 API shim, so I guess that would be within reach.
yason 8y ago
I would tend to frown upon shrinking competition but in this case Edge wasn't really a player. The markets were already shared by the Chromium engine and Firefox. Chromium has the ancestry back to WebKit and KHTML so, to my knowledge, Safari also isn't a direct competitor. So, we're looking at a duopoly which naturally happens when things get complex enough and smaller players are left behind by the sheer lack of resourcing. Browsers always were hubs of a number of technologies because loading markup language documents over network and rendering them onto screen with some dynamic programming abilities covers a lot of ground. While we sort of agree on the rendering, scripting, and styling of HTML5 by now this has just intensified with features like WebGL of WebAssembly which reach out to completely new domains. So, it's near impossible to compete in the scene unless you're a big, established player. A modern browser is a lot more complex than operating systems these days and probably 10x more complex than old operating systems from the era where it was still possible for a small group of people to write a competely usable kernel and desktop in a relatively short time. In effect, the browser has become the operating system and to think, that's probably the very reason it's much easier to be a Linux or Apple user these days. As long as you can run Firefox or Chrome, 90% of your problems are solved. Even Windows is, for most people, just a platform to run your browser on. Then you use things like Google Docs or the web-implementation of Office to launch Word or Excel to do your work. But you don't need Windows to do that, and with a Chromium based browser that Microsoft must fully support for their web services you can just use any Chrome/Chromium based implementation. In this light I'm amazed Microsoft would be giving power to Chrome and Google. Microsoft was and still is an operator in the operating system and platform space. How are they going to stay at all relevant if they just officially reposition Windows as a host for Chromium build? Surely things aren't as black and white but that's effectively how it is, giving up control. Microsoft can't reinvent themselves as the new Google because that's an uphill battle. They'd need to create a new space where they can thrive because operating systems don't matter that much anymore and the lock-in cash-cow that is Windows+Outlook+Office is gradually munched away by the web technologies.
tinus_hn 8y ago
None of my issues with Edge have anything to do with the browser engine. All of them have to do with stupid Microsoft like decisions, like ‘you can’t avoid the internal pdf reader’.
jeromebaek 8y ago
(Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft.) This is a good move. Microsoft is further embracing open source technology. I really want to use Edge, I gave it so many tries, but every time I keep coming back to Chrome because Edge is just so damn unreliable. And Chrome is creepy as hell. And Firefox just... is slow and not smooth. A not-creepy web browser from Microsoft, with the same reliability and speed of Chrome? Sign me up.
- krylon 8y ago
  My work laptop still runs Windows 7, so I have no experience with Edge; but Firefox feels a lot faster than Internet Explorer 11, even though it hogs memory like crazy.
firemelt 8y ago
Anyone here use edge for epub reader?
captainmuon 8y ago
That's quite unfortunate. I like Edge - the rendering engine, not so much the browser. If Edge would let me sync my bookmarks with Firefox, I would switch immediately. I found it quite fast, and no other engine works so well with touch. I also don't recall rendering problems. What MS should do IMHO is to package Edge as a component (like IE was in the old days), and let people build shells around it (like the Maxthon browser was). I don't think I would use an Edge based on Chromium much, as I liked the UI itself not so much.
Yizahi 8y ago
A pity really, even though I never used it. One more brick in the future googlenet wall.
prossercj 8y ago
Hm, my first thought is "will this work with carlo?" [0]. I'm excited about that project, but one big downside is that Chrome has to be installed. It would be great to write desktop applications that render through a browser, without having to either download Chrome (like carlo) or bundle it (like electron). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355345
gpvos 8y ago
Could Microsoft at least open-source their Edge code, so others can develop it further? It's really important for the openness of the web that we don't get a Chromium/Webkit monoculture. I'd also like to see if there is any way the Opera source code could be opensourced.
mustardo 8y ago
I hope they continue to struggle for many more years in the browser market. I and millions of devs lost many years on IE 6/8 crap they shouldn't be forgiven so easily
pluma 8y ago
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.
thedonkeycometh 8y ago
Microsoft should have had the bravery to push Edge into a different direction to Chrome. Going hard in VR or AR, or introducing a plugin framework specifically for EDGE.
fiatjaf 8y ago
I'm a Linux user and I use Firefox, but recommend Edge to all my Windows friends that don't care about browsers, it's a great browser, probably better than Chrome.
fiatjaf 8y ago
Wait, Microsoft, do you think people will use your Chromium-based browser more than they use Edge? Of course not, people will still be dumb and download Chrome. Don't throw the towell!
ksec 8y ago
I would much rather Microsoft works with Apple to bring Safari/Webkit to Windows, then bending over to Chrome.
Mindwipe 8y ago
I look forward to yet another Microsoft browser that does not work correctly with SharePoint.
morganvachon 8y ago
From the article: > In addition, Microsoft engineers were recently spotted committing code to the Chromium project to help get Google Chrome running on ARM. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something, Chromium already runs on ARM SoCs. Raspbian even ships with it as the default browser. Also, as to Edge and stability, I don't use Windows 10 for any serious work anymore in light of the recent update gaffes[1], but Edge has been consistently stable and fast in my experience. In fact it's one of the better things about Windows 10; it can correctly render certain websites that Firefox/Waterfox struggles with, and it's as fast as or faster than Chromium across the board. [1] Even running Windows 10 Pro and deferring updates, I had stability issues with the OS from day one. I had relegated it to just gaming and went back to macOS and Linux for serious work at home, but lately I've decided to stop putting so much time into games and focus on learning and music again. Therefore, I no longer use Windows 10 at all apart from IT duties at my job.
- gsnedders 8y ago
  > Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something, Chromium already runs on ARM SoCs. AIUI, Chromium didn't run on WinNT/ARM64.
shacharz 8y ago
Anyone has more details, regarding the roadmap and timeline?
mesaframe 8y ago
Edge didn't have any issues besides it's UI. It doesn't make sense to me that for UI MS halted it's development.
userbinator 8y ago
Edge was already in a difficult place from the beginning --- a new browser engine in a new UI that tried to be yet-another-Chrome-clone. They alienated both their IE users, which hate the UI changes, and weren't very successful in pleasing web developers with their new browser engine either. I would much rather have the classic familiar IE UI with a new browser engine, because the UI is the only reason I use IE over other browsers (which are increasingly turning into approximations of Chrome's UI.) There used to be many browsers. Not so long ago, it was mainly a choice between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and IE. Now it'll be more like a choice between Chrome, Chrome, and Firefox.
amelius 8y ago
Next up: Windows 10 kernel replaced by BSD
emeraldd 8y ago
A big reason Inuse chrome is that it is literally everywhere I need it to be: Mac, Linux, Windows, IOs, and Android. Edge is only on one of those and the only time I interact with a Windows machine is when my wife needs help fixing/recovering from something majorly broken on her computer. I haven't used a windows machine in a professional setting in ... 8 or 9 years at a minimum. Purely anecdotal, but my experience leads me to believe that, even though users on alternative platforms may be smaller in number, they tend to be the people building things for everyone else to use. Hence, Edge is stuck in a walled garden of Microsoft's own making and they aren't putting in the effort to make it work with the stuff that runs everywhere else.
g051051 8y ago
It's unfortunate to lose another implementation...and very telling about Microsoft. They'll spend infinite money (which they effectively have) to try to take a dominance position, but will give up if they can't be the top of the heap. How much would it really cost them to keep maintaining Edge, even if it's not the most popular browser? How was that generating revenue for them, anyway?
MarkMc 8y ago
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why did Microsoft create a web browser in the first place? Did Microsoft make any more money by having control of the dominant web browser? They could have just let Netscape win. Later when Google demonstrated the value of search, Microsoft could have just shipped Firefox with Bing set at the default search engine. Microsoft wouldn't have had to pay for decades of browser development, and it wouldn't have been slapped with a huge anti-trust action by the US Department of Justice.
- thrownaway954 8y ago
  You're a definitely a programmer and not a marketer. When you control the product, you control the experience.
thrownaway954 8y ago
FINALLY!!! The bottom line is that Chromium has won in all areas of the engine wars and Chrome has won the browser wars. Heck Chrome has even won in the testing area once it release a headless version. Everyone uses Chrome as a baseline when checking how their site renders. Like 99% of Windows users, I used Edge to download Chrome. This is a smart move by Microsoft, having the browser that is package with Windows, using the most popular rendering engine, will make people think twice about having to download another browser. https://imgur.com/gallery/9TxWoa9 https://imgur.com/gallery/9TxWoa9
- kapsi 8y ago
  I don't think most people know that rendering engines exist.
dschuetz 8y ago
How ironic. But, kudos to the responsible decision makers. It's a shame though that they haven't decided to make a modern and decent engine that works at least as reliable as FF or Chrome(ium), Edge always felt like a recycled version of IE. I think the move was done because the Chromium engine also has a strong extensions base. That's something I found Edge was lacking, ultimately.
akmittal 8y ago
It shows how difficult it is to rewrite a browser. I am glad firefox didn't go for full rewrite but going for progressive changes.
me551ah 8y ago
I recently made the switch to Firefox from chrome. Webrender is a revolution in web technology since it primarily uses the GPU for rendering resulting in much faster and smoother websites. I'd urge everyone to give webrender a shot, it feels noticeably smoother than chrome.
gwbas1c 8y ago
Hell has frozen over! I occasionally use Edge in my Windows VMs. It's just kind of... Well... I'm not sure, but I like Chrome better. The irony is that I religiously used Explorer for years because I believed that the browser isn't an accessory; the browser provided with the computer should be good enough. I only switched to Chrome because the multiprocess model made it easy to kill that one misbehaving tab that was hogging CPU.
saranshk 8y ago
One less browser for the front-end folks to support in the long run!
oscargrouch 8y ago
We need to remember MS bought Github recently, and with that Electron. Electron is based on Chrome so.. It makes total sense for them to concentrate the effort in Chromium and Blink, and just reuse it as their default Windows browser. I think this is much more about Electron than it is about Edge.
mises 8y ago
But I thought edge was faster. Every time I open a new installation, it's got that page with the speedometers showing that "edge is faster".
merb 8y ago
To be fair, chakra is/was a really really solid JavaScript engine. And it's probably easier to embed than anything inside Chrome. (https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore) Hope they are still comitted to chakra.
johnvega 8y ago
I think this is a great idea. I use 3 Windows computers and use Chrome Firefox and Edge on all three computers. My experience is that Edge is less stable than Chrome which surprised me at first since Edge is owned by the host OS having all the advantages of access to all the private code. You can throw all the money and resources in the world, and something like a browser is too complex to quickly catch up.
OliverJones 8y ago
FINALLY. They're laying the Redmond Middle School Science Projects (the Microsoft browsers) to rest. In the 2+ year timeframe, this will save independent SaaS and software vendors MASSIVE amounts of time and money. Thank you, Satya Nadella. Hopefully this will resolve the Web Extension store headaches induced by having to distribute through the Microsoft Store. I suppose those of us who sell to large organizations will still have to support IE11 and Edge for the foreseeable future. Or maybe MS could help us all out by pushing an update to put Rick Astley on the default home page for those browsers, as an encouragement to upgrade.
WorldMaker 8y ago
There is something really weird/off about this rumor. It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to drop EdgeHTML. EdgeHTML is doing really well. The big thing that jumps out here is the repeated use of the term Chromium rather than Blink. That might just be a non-technical writer here, but what if it is not? EdgeHTML has been working for years to be open source, and maybe even cross-platform. Could this project actually be the completion of that effort? Maybe they are using Chromium to host EdgeHTML (and ChakraCore) instead of Blink/V8? Edge for macOS and Linux, maybe?
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  I'm increasingly convinced that this rumor is about a replacement for ElectronJS that somehow got filtered through a non-technical reporter telephone game.

1061 points by rattt 8y ago

Sad news. Chrome is an energy hog on the Mac compared to safari. It probably won’t be as tied to the OS APIs as Edge was.

microcolonel 8y ago
> Chrome is an energy hog on the Mac compared to safari. It seems that with more interest in that, it's likely to improve. > It probably won’t be as tied to the OS APIs as Edge was What makes you say that? Seems like they could integrate it more or less exactly the same way.
- atonse 8y ago
  Again with my limited experience on the Mac, chrome whatever safari is doing to take advantage of OS APIs, it always feels more native.

mooman219 8y ago

This has been in the works for a while! A number of Microsoft employees have been making contributions to Chromium too. I hope to see Chromium's performance and battery impact on Windows to improve with this decision which is great for those using the OS. It sounds like Microsoft really just wants a platform to route people into using Bing and service ads on the new tab page, which they're more than capable of doing on a reskin for Chromium. From a cost standpoint it makes sense to use the existing tools available. For developers, it's one less platform to target.

millstone 8y ago
This vision is pathetic, unambitious. What if Microsoft is content to reskin and rehome Chrome, submit their battery life PRs, and cede the web to Google? What is the web once Google dominates its access?

nwah1 8y ago

Very much hope Edge is open sourced.

kainazzzo 8y ago
It would be nice so then someone could fix the bugs with gitter.im
- ataylor32 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, what bugs does it have?
h1d 8y ago
Do what with it?
- Groxx 8y ago
  learn, if nothing else. surely there are some valuable pieces in there.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Seriously there must be, if nothing else, some Windows black magic in there to make Edge so responsive.

vtesucks 8y ago

On the one hand developers have one less engine to worry about. On the other if it becomes a chromium monoculture then Firefox loses.

mcny 8y ago
On the front page, I saw another headline that said Firefox desktop market share is below nine percent.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nerdbaggy 8y ago
  And nobody knows how that’s calculated. If the implementation is done via JS we can assume a good portion of all the browsers usage % is incorrect.
  - leeoniya 8y ago
    here are some actual metrics from our ecommerce site (US, home remodeling / DIY): if you look at desktop traffic only: Nov 2015: 16.01% Nov 2016: 13.27% Nov 2017: 10.33% Nov 2018: 8.14% Desktop IE in Nov 2018 was 11.37%, Edge 15.65%, Chrome 52.74% and Safari 11.65%. if you include mobile traffic (where Firefox is basically non-existent), then Nov 2018 is closer to 3.5%. talk about bleak :(
  - fabrice_d 8y ago
    The absolute number is not that important, the trend is. That's clear even in Mozilla's own data: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity shows they went from 303M monthly active users at the end of Nov. 2017 to 277M this year. This is a serious drop.
    - ngokevin 8y ago
      Even greater in the US, from 50M to 40M.

kainazzzo 8y ago

Great news! I really tried to like Edge, and used it exclusively for a few months. It just couldn't do the job.

chocolatkey 8y ago
There is one thing it does/did a very nice job with: EPUB viewing. I sure hope they port that over

Despegar 8y ago

And then there were three. Even more reason for Apple to never allow anything but WebKit on iOS. This monoculture isn't good for the web. edit: Guess the pro-monoculture folks flagged this.

mossplix 8y ago
So webkit is not monoculture? Are you forgetting about konqueror?
- Despegar 8y ago
  How could it be a monoculture with 14% market share? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    Why are you citing Safari's 14% market share when the person to whom you responded was stating that if it's true that Edge will become Chromium-based, then browsers running on Chromium will represent something like 66% of the world's web engine share. Heck, it's already 59%, over half. With Opera, Vivaldi, and Edge (or whatever Anaheim will become), we're talking two thirds of all browsers being based on one engine. That's the monoculture. Edit: didn't realise you were responding to someone refuting what you had said, haha. so basically we agree, I just thought you were someone else.
    - Despegar 8y ago
      I'm saying that WebKit can't be a monoculture because Safari only has 14% market share. It doesn't matter if other devices and browsers that no one actually uses are WebKit.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - 8y ago

sroussey 8y ago

All this coming from this build bug for ARM64Win? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460 Is there anything else to dig into to validate?

petecox 8y ago
Previously, MS and Google have publically announced they will collaborate on bringing Chrome to Windows on ARM. Abandoning EdgeHTML on the basis of that bug report would be drawing a long bow.

c-smile 8y ago

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.

naner 8y ago
Fair concern. On the other hand nobody uses Edge on Windows 10, do they? In my limited experience users seem to still use IE or go to Chrome or Firefox.
- c-smile 8y ago
  I am using it on day per day basis. It has some problems but works for me in 99.9% of cases.
- ztjio 8y ago
  I use it as much as possible. Its user experience on touch windows devices (Surface Go in this case) is several orders of magnitude better than Chrome and Firefox... is not a usable browser, performance-wise in my experience. Edge is brand new, and foolishly branded to look like IE, this might stop average users who know about getting Chrome from using it. But it shouldn't. It's extremely rare that I'm forced to swap over to Chrome. Mostly I use Chrome to keep my invasive work IT staff from having access to my private browsing info.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    The problem with Edge is it still (like IE had been always but at a small number of moments in history when it actually was the original source of an innovation) is the worst of the browsers from the standards (or non-standards, whatever) support perspective. See caniuse.com
  - naner 8y ago
    Thanks, that is what I was missing. It makes sense that Edge would be preferred on Win 10 touchscreen devices.

jccalhoun 8y ago

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.

samspenc 8y ago
My understanding is that they'll be using the Chromium engine underneath, but still their own Edge "browser" and UI on top. IMHO, I personally think it's a good thing to consolidate on one engine to render HTML cross-platform for these two reasons: 1. Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines. 2. The Chromium engine itself is open source. There are other browsers (Vivaldi, Opera, etc) that run on top of it. 3. While I think it's great the engine underneath is the same, I think it's equally great that there is a variety of UIs and browsers built on top of the same engine - the innovation happens in the browser space, not the engine, anymore.
- kibwen 8y ago
  > The Chromium engine itself is open source Being open source is a red herring in this instance. Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. You fork the browser and remove that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so your fork doesn't work with those websites. Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. You fork the browser and add the feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use your feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and your fork is no better off. The insidious part of a web monoculture is allowing Google to dictate the standards of the web platform. Being able to fork the codebase only gives one the power to change things that are strictly client-side.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - joesb 8y ago
    Your examples have nothing to do with whether you use Chrominum engine, though. Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that doesn't have that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so MS Edge doesn't work with those websites. Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that has that feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use MS Edge feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and MS Edge browser is no better off.

cwyers 8y ago

I don't know, I am typing this post on Edge, and HTML rendering is way down on my list of complaints about it. Is switching to Chromium going to fix the lack of a "Paste As Plain Text" option, for instance? (Not the biggest issue, just the one that's freshest in my mind.) And I hope that whatever they do retains their focus on not burning battery, which is a big reason I use Edge as much as I do.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

If Microsoft really does this and makes the Chromium based browser the default in Windows, what is the value proposition of installing Chrome? Presumably all the websites will work exactly as they do in Chrome and it will be no faster or slower?

wmf 8y ago
The value proposition is that Google will bombard you with ads to install Chrome until you relent.
ravenstine 8y ago
It's value proposition is integration with the Google ecosystem. If one rejects Google then there isn't much of a reason to use Chrome over another Chromium-based web browser. I try to avoid Google as much as possible these days, thus it's funny because I never thought I'd consider using a Microsoft browser instead of a Google one. I think this is a potentially good move on Microsoft's part(the EdgeHTML thing turned out not to be).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
walterbell 8y ago
Also: Data collection by Microsoft instead of Google. Since Microsoft is already collecting data from the Windows OS, they are already part of your trust chain.

talawahdotnet 8y ago

Interesting, but what I really, really want them to do is EOL IE 11 so that the web can move forward without feeling guilty about the X% of users still on it. IE 11 has unfortunately become the new IE 6. As it is right now I believe the IE 11 EOL is tied to the Windows 10 EOL...which is not happening anytime soon. Many frameworks are dropping support for it anyway so I guess it will end up being defacto desupported.

chipperyman573 8y ago
As someone who has (luckily) only had to support Firefox/Edge/Chrome, can you go into why IE11 is so bad? In the very small amount of testing I've done, everything seems to render just fine (especially compared to IE6/7/8)
- pier25 8y ago
  Huh... JavaScript?
- srgpqt 8y ago
  https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs
- le-mark 8y ago
  I've been on multi year projects to modernize old IE applications, and one of the things that IE11 misses is "standard" xpath evaluation. A lot of old "dhtml" apps were all in on soap/xml. There's some wierd IE only hold over css in it like cursor hand vs pointer. On the whole it's not too bad really. The reason why IE11 will live for a long, long time is it's compatability modes. You can run apps all the way back to IE7 on it. And yes these still exist.
  - chipperyman573 8y ago
    >There's some wierd IE only hold over css in it like cursor hand vs pointer Wow, that would really frustrate me. One of the first things I do (or check to make sure it's done by whatever css library I'm using) is add a { cursor:pointer; } to my css file. The first time I tested a website in IE11, I would be pulling my hair out!! Or more likely I would google it, but still, it would be frustrating.

thrower123 8y ago

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

saagarjha 8y ago
Edge and Safari are not broken.
- thrower123 8y ago
  The reality is that whatever google implements is the standard. If you don't comply you are an also-ran
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Sorry, what? Were you cut off there?
fourthark 8y ago
How was it broken? I only tested visualization stuff on it but it seemed to work pretty well. Honestly asking...
- nikkwong 8y ago
  It just depends on how far you're trying to push these browsers. Chrome has a lot of crazy cutting edge APIs which allow amazing developer and therefore user experiences. For example, IntersectionObserver, which allows developers to know when a part of a page is active, and respond accordingly; Safari doesn't even implement IntersectionObserver, even though it's been a standardized spec since like 2013. It might seem like minutiae, but, safari also doesn't pay any attention to SVG specs. This makes the pages I build for beaver [1] like, impossible. They work beautiful in chrome; but they don't work at all in safari; and because of that, I can't really explore what potential experiences pushing the limits on SVG might have for my clients. Whatever you build has to work in all clients. It's a sad state of affairs, because if safari wasn't so far dilapidated, I would have been able to build some really impressive experiences; but, without safari support it's a no-go. (1) www.beaver.digital

fourthark 8y ago

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 something else.

qwerty456127 8y ago
> compatibility with standards was actually the best IMHO Unfortunately it wasn't. See caniuse.com. > And yeah, we need the competition. This is the key point. Indeed. Google becoming the ultimate web monopolist seems scary. I just hope Mozilla is going to be able to keep competing (but I'm not sure how long will it stand, a neighbour post says "Firefox desktop market share now below 9%"). I wish MS could choose the Mozilla engine instead...
- krylon 8y ago
  > I wish MS could choose the Mozilla engine instead... At least they could send some money Mozilla's way to ensure there is an independent competitor around.
taf2 8y ago
It's a good thing more talented people can focus on development of an open source browser. That means more people can share in a consistent and reliable way. It also means much like Mozilla has been innovating with Servo we're seeing amazing things from that and it doesn't have to be X vs Y. MS vs Google. It can be a collective working towards a better common platform for everyone.
afroboy 8y ago
> And yeah, we need the competition. If they wanted competition they should released it under Mac and Linux.

qwerty456127 8y ago

… and it will always use a severely outdated version of the Blink engine with nothing but some of vulnerability fixes back-ported occasionally (after unreasonable pauses of course).

lwansbrough 8y ago

Stupid. Open source Edge and see where that gets us before you blow up the only chance we have of maintaining an open web standard.

WalterGR 8y ago
2008. “Fuck you, Microsoft, for not bundling Firefox or Chrome.” 2018. “Fuck you, Microsoft, for bundling Firefox or Chrome.” Hilarious.
- lwansbrough 8y ago
  Very disingenuous comparison. Shows a lack of comprehension or wilful ignorance of the issue many have expressed in this thread.
  - vtesucks 8y ago
    "fuck you" is not same as stupid. The comment is good actually- edge has potential, why not open source it since you're not going to do much with it anyway in terms of making money. this also brings devs to windows eco system and helps them explore windows internals.
- Grue3 8y ago
  I said back in 2008 and I'll say it now, that ruling was absolutely idiotic, and still is (especially considering Webkit/iPhone situation).

2bitencryption 8y ago

one browser to rule them all, one browser to find them; one browser to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them...

vbezhenar 8y ago

Sad news for me. I liked Edge. It missed few essential features for me (no search in history, really?), so after a while I switched to Chrome, but I was checking it from time to time and I never wanted it to have another engine. Microsoft seems to lost an ability to fight and make successful projects. There’s absolutely no reason for me to use their browser now.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

chiefalchemist 8y ago

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 nature of guidelines. The fact that said "standard" so often led to a suboptional UX only poured salt on the wound. Maybe this really is bad news? But there doea seem to be some upside, monoculture or not.

vbezhenar 8y ago
Standard is an interface with multiple implementations. Shipping container standard with certain dimensions is good. Shipping container standard “from evil Google” is bad.
- Spivak 8y ago
  Standard can also be a ubiquitous implementation: OOXML, PDF, CUDA, Linux, glibc, pulseaudo, ffmpeg, imagemagick, tensorflow, systemd, Windows, MySQL, React, Java, QT, Electron. Since standards bodies these days are really documentation effots it seems silly to say that implementation defined standards aren't. It's practically where any 'proper' standard comes from these days where the market leader is essentially the reference implementation.
gok 8y ago
"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.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  A standards spec should not yield different results. That, by definition, isn't a standard.
mr_toad 8y ago

tambourine_man 8y ago

Interesting theory and thread: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1069776335336292352 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”

interesthrow2 8y ago
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? typical Microsoft... reminds me the whole ES4/Jscript.net debacle only to then reinvent the wheel (ineffectively) with Typescript... those who don't know the story should read about it, how many years wasted? 10, 15 years?... What MS is really doing is replacing HTA,WinStore apps, whatever with Chromium, because their own tech can't compete with Chromium as they didn't seriously invest in it. I'm actually starting to believe the people who are claiming that MS is rebuilding Office in JS from scratch...
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Their desktop strategy is really confusing. I think even to themselves. It seems since around 2000 or when .NET came out they lost direction, repeatedly tried something, didn't really finish and dropped it. Mobile strategy wasn't much better.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    They are fragmented and not under a single focus and that is the problem. While the executives at the top are focused on cloud those in charge of the OS and other crucial products are making some oddball decisions for whatever reason. If Microsoft could push all their teams towards a consistent vision it would be great. Otherwise we will continue to see this giant love-hate of Microsoft vs the appreciation they deserve for the things they do get right. I am company neutral so I try to appreciate companies that do some things right.

wnevets 8y ago

how does this solve the market share problem of edge? The implementation isn't the problem, its the awful UI.

intellix 8y ago

As a front-end developer this is amazing news. Less work and can deliver faster

partiallypro 8y ago

I hope that while Microsoft does this, once they make the switch, they open source Edge.

nikkwong 8y ago

I can see how this is creating a monoculture on the web which could have some really negative implications going forward. However, chromium is open source; so I don't really think this is comparable to the IE days. Also, as a web dev who is trying to push the limits of what is possible given current web APIs, being shackled by edge's lack of compatibility is really a hindrance and makes really cutting-edge stuff impossible. So, it will be nice to not have to worry about that as much. It didn't seem like microsoft was ever serious about advancing the development of the web with edge; they were just always trying to catch up (and doing so poorly). Microsoft is probably gauging the state of their browser now and coming to the conclusion that they're too far behind to make a realistic comeback without totally revamping their approach; lots of firings/organizational reshuffling, etc. At least google is serious about the web APIs, even if its' only because it aligns with their financial interests—at least it does end up being a good user experience; i think that's what matters. -- edit: Also, not trying to belabor the point, but this subject on the whole is especially important to me. Chrome has allowed me to do crazy-amazing things with SVGs for my dev agency (1) since, well, they actually follow most of the SVG spec. I think most browser vendors see the SVG spec as superfluous and don't follow the spec verbatim, and that stops people like me from doing more awesome things with it; I'll literally have clients pitch me awesome ideas and my response is; sorry, we can do that but it just won't work in safari! So it becomes a no-go for all. If other vendors really were able to dedicate serious resources towards their browser implementations then yeah, I would also be unhappy about microsoft's decision here. Optimally they would shell out more resources to their Edge division; but since they don't care about web experience the way google does—I agree that deferring to the experts is the best case scenario for everyone (i.e. developers like me and then users). At least, until microsoft redefines their priorities. [1] www.beaver.digital

kibwen 8y ago
> chromium is open source On Chromium being open source, and why that doesn't matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595978
- nikkwong 8y ago

sytelus 8y ago

Note from Erik Meijer :) https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/1069796773017710592 https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/1069796773017710592

ravedave5 8y ago
That is really funny. Also, it shows how much Microsoft has changed in the last few years.

sys_64738 8y ago

Microsoft should buy Vivaldi and make that their default browser.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

Someone needs to note that Chromium is a browser and the rendering engine is called Blink. You can't build a different browser and rename it based on Chromium but you can use Blink as your rendering engine. The article says "...building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine...".

notatoad 8y ago
You absolutely can build a new browser based on chromium. That's what opera is. It shares a lot more than just the blink code.

oksawe 8y ago

Is Chromium different than WebKit now?

saagarjha 8y ago
Yes, and it has been for a while.
fourthark 8y ago
Since 2013 or so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)

kgwxd 8y ago

If they had made it open source, cross-platform (like vs code), with sane telemetry options (unlike vs code) I would have gave it a go. I don't get why they though anything else had a chance in the current market.

WalterGR 8y ago
What are VS Code’s insane telemetry options?
- asituop 8y ago
  The VS code you download is not Open Source, it has a special Microsoft license and includes close source Microsoft Telemetry ( which could be considered as spyware) which you cannot opt-out completely. See https://code.visualstudio.com/license https://code.visualstudio.com/license If you want a clean VS Code with MIT license and no spyware you have to build it yourself or use VS Codium : https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/README.md This pretty much the same idea as Chrome vs Chromium
  - kgwxd 8y ago
    Build it yourself with build tools from MS... which have telemetry :/

est 8y ago

I for one, welcome our one and only new browser overlord.

TheCoelacanth 8y ago

Yay, now instead of two crappy Microsoft browsers, I get to support three crappy Microsoft browsers.

Analemma_ 8y ago

I hope everyone complaining about this, and the web monoculture it will crystallize, uses Edge (or at least Firefox) when they're on Windows. Otherwise you're part of the problem. Just like on the "Firefox's market share dips below 9%" thread, everyone wants to gripe about Chrome's dominance but no one wants to do anything about it.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Thann 8y ago

how the meeting went: "its really expensive to build a decent browser and a spyware engine for it... hmmmm"

WalterGR 8y ago
How does Edge’s telemetry compare to Chrome’s? Have there been any problems with Edge similar to Chrome’s suddenly logging people into the browser?

rmykhajliw 8y ago

Hallelujah! It's much better than maintaining a dead edge browser users use only once to download chrome. The biggest question whether people will use a new branded Microsoft browser or not because many of us remember a decade of ie6.

russdpale 8y ago
This is what I have been saying to my colleagues. Microsoft should not put their branding anywhere near the new browser even if it is industry acknowledged as their browser. That definitely includes any and all IE branding.

mark-r 8y ago

Had to double-check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1. I think I'll wait for a confirmation before I believe it.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

Embrace.

morpheuskafka 8y ago

This definitely makes sense from a business standpoint. MS gets two big things from Edge/IE: one, people using Bing by default, and two, tight integration with Windows/Office/MS Cloud services. All of that has nothing to do with engines, very little to do with even UI design.

sn41 8y ago

I am somewhat sad at this. I use Seamonkey, but when it comes to opening and annotating pdfs, djvu and epub files, edge does all this on my laptop with minimal fuss. I felt that Edge is one of the things that Microsoft is doing right.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kerng 8y ago

For Microsoft this makes perfect sense, they can keep Edge UI and use that to build there own non Google experience. Maintaining the underlying details and stuff is just overhead, rather they can entirely focus on new things and experiences.

vtesucks 8y ago

What happens to chakra?

ToFab123 8y ago

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 engine is a big step in that direction. It is a step they have to do because.. and now comes the down votes... YOU don't test your work in Egde and because YOU tell all friends and family to use Chrome instead of edge. I bet many of you even helps friends and family in downloading it. So stop complaining about monoculture. Many of you helped create it.

eksemplar 8y ago
I prefer Edge to chrome actually, and especially professionally where chromes security settings won’t accept internal SSL certs as safe. Bing is terrible, but I don’t think Edge is.
- snupples 8y ago
  Chrome trusts the OS cert store on Windows. Works perfectly.
- mapl 8y ago
  Perhaps Edge still relies on Common Name where Chrome needs a valid SAN Attribute. https://www.pei.com/2017/06/chrome-58-common-name/ https://www.pei.com/2017/06/chrome-58-common-name/
codinger 8y ago
Wait, I haven't heard of these recent stability issues with Windows 10 or experienced them myself. Do you have a link about it?
- NolF 8y ago
  Maybe OP is mainly referring to the recent update issues where entire folders have been delated as part of the "forced" updates.

BuckRogers 8y ago

This is the wrong strategy for adoption. Edge adoption will skyrocket if they give Win10S / a UWP-only version of Windows away for free. Edge locked and minimal ad support with no data collection business model. Or, give the user the choice between the two SaaS support models that they prefer, one of those combined with being funneled to MS services (Bing etc) should make it sustainable. This will result in being good for web standards, empowering MS, Google, Apple and Mozilla independently. To increase Electron app performance on Windows, it's a good way to go about it. But I have to wonder if in time Electron will be around when wasm will be a better universal app platform to build around. Little to no performance issues to resolve there. So some good and some bad. But I can't say that I think it makes as much sense as working hard on pushing wasm and releasing UWP-locked Win10 for any vendor to install or user to download.

chris_wot 8y ago

The only reason Edge isn't successful is because it's not cross platform. Which, I realize, is kind of the point - but sort of also why as a browser it is now dying.

Solar19 8y ago

This reminds me that I think there's a real market opportunity for a clean-sheet proprietary browser. Everyone just assumes open source (except for Safari and Edge until now). I think it's possible to build a significantly better browser than Chrome or anything else out there. And I think at least a few million people would pay more than $100 for it (there are 326 million people in the US alone). This would be a good time to do it.

newuser6969 8y ago
I wouldn't touch a proprietary browser if you paid me $100
1ris 8y ago
Maybe 1$. There is Vivaldi. Its much better, but nobody wants to pay.

Osiris 8y ago

With so many browsers using Blink/V8, couldn't it be argued that an independent foundation should be created to take over the project so that no company (Google) controls the code? Each browser can then implement their fork / skin of the rendering engine / V8. It could even allow the foundation to experiment with larger changes how Mozilla has done with it's rust-based renderer.

asituop 8y ago
You mean everyone uses Blink/V8 and everyone does research as forks and merge it to master if they have something interesting to commit ? I would see a few issues : - The 1st problem I see is that open source is often meritocracy and so Google will always be deciding because there will be much more engineer from Google on the project than from other companies joining the project. And anyway Google has no interest to try to align with MS/Mozilla interests. - The other problem I see is that you need some independence to make fundamemtal changes. WebRender would never exist if Mozilla tried to fork an existing engine. They wrote everything from scratch and now they are doing fundamental changes to Gecko to be able to merge Webrender in it. If they add to agree with Google, MS, and other companies they would still be arguing and trying to convince them, and Google would refuse because they think their solution is better (or more suited to their own personal needs) and Rust would not even exist

baby 8y ago

Microsoft please, can we have the tabs on the side by default? There is a lot of vertical space that is unused and it is a thousand times more practical to have tabs there on the left or on the right. Try Tree Style Tabs for a week on Firefox and you will understand why it is the future of browsing the web.

Osiris 8y ago
Look at Vivaldi. It's a reimplementation of classic Opera 12 style browser as a Chromium-based browser. It supports tabs on all four sides by default.

alpb 8y ago

I honestly wondered, while I was at Microsoft‚ why this has not happened with Edge from the beginning. Microsoft knew how problematic mshtml.dll was and how frequently it led to zero-day vulnerabilities, while Chrome was not having any high-profile 0-days for many months, maybe years. Edge was mostly a UI remake of MSIE and it used mostly the same security model, rendering engine etc. It was never a real value add over MSIE.

mastrsushi 8y ago

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 advantage of being the default browser. I still don't think average users will ever see IE as anymore than a fly on a Window. Regardless of who's layout engine theyre forking.

lmedinas 8y ago
generally i agree they are spending a lot of money on development but they are also ensuring the future for their Web Tools when they have their own browser. Honestly speaking its good to have competition and apart from Firefox and Safari (partially due to being Apple sepcific), Edge was the only Browser (with an own engine) that could compete with Chrome.
whywhywhywhy 8y ago
> 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.
- mastrsushi 8y ago
  Unless there is a major breakthrough in x86 compatibility, Windows isn't coming to ARM. They tried it with RT and they supported RISC far back as NT 4. I think 10 is great, but they've come to admit they're pretty much boxed into the whole Wintel monopoly they once thrived. You do have some good points. I was thinking how bad it would look on their part if their OS doesn't even have its own browser. Even Gnome has a browser, which is pretty much FirefoxGTK. I can't put my finger on why Microsoft should cease browser development. But adopting Chromium is definitely a good step in that direction. It's cheaper, normal people won't notice (or care), and they can keep branding.

no_wizard 8y ago

I think this is interesting. What is more interesting to me is that this would have been a very good chance to align themselves with Apple (WebKit) or Mozilla instead. Effectively Google is far far more of threat than either of these two companies. In fact I think at this point Apple and Microsoft have so much more in common than different in terms of goals, they don’t even really compete head on anymore. Shocks me they aren’t considering that

kiriakasis 8y ago
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1069776335336292352 https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10697763353362923... The focus is electron "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 [...]"

technion 8y ago

The writing was on the wall when Microsoft release Windows Server 2019 - and announced it won't support Edge. Thinking of every corporate that's going to be using this new OS for RDS and Citrix farms, not shipping with Edge said they weren't going for the corporate market. Which happens to have been their biggest market.

akayoshi1 8y ago

Edge is only useful to download Google Chrome and Firefox.

zouhair 8y ago

Just buy Ubuntu and turn "windows" to a full on Linux Distro already.

ryacko 8y ago

I think I anticipated this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379360 >I wish Microsoft would just accept that no one will use Internet Explorer and devote resources to breaking MS-DOS compatibility.

zvrba 8y ago

WTF, what instability? I use it as my main browser and have (almost) no issues at all, even with ad blocker installed. Maybe 2x a month I need to launch Chrome for some weird site.

asien 8y ago

This is interesting . It’s coherent with their recent investments in Electron. Hence the need for MS to support PWA with excellent feature parity with chrome.

owaislone 8y ago

Wish they had gone with Mozilla tech instead. Would have created a nice balanced ecosystem.

t0astbread 8y ago

It's good that a Windows-only rendering engine where people working on other operating systems can't test their work is gone but this is problematic for tech diversity on the web

meruru 8y ago

They should just ship Firefox instead. They would get most of the benefits, wouldn't have to depend on Google tech, and could probably garner a lot of good will from the FOSS community. At least for me, it would mean much more than things like open-sourcing VS Code and other such moves do.

simfoo 8y ago

More monoculture :( I'm just waiting for the day Microsoft announces that they are dropping their own compiler in favor of Clang/LLVM.

pjmlp 8y ago
Well, they have taken the effort of making C++/WinRT work with clang, and are contributing to the co-routines implementation in clang. But they have adopted GCC for Azure Sphere though.

tannhaeuser 8y ago

This is very sad, and a huge, terminal fail on the part of WHATWG to steer HTML, by making it so fscking complicated that it's infeasible to develop new browsers ever again. But maybe a monoculture was what they were heading for all the time.

russellbeattie 8y ago

If only they'd swap put the Windows kernel for Linux while they're at it...

nnq 8y ago

1. Embrace 2. ... 3. ... :)

King-Aaron 8y ago

Would be nice if they would pull their fingers out and update the rendering engine in Outlook from the 1995-esque bollocks they insist on using to this day.

qualsiasi 8y ago

Our customer only uses IE11, so this won't affect my work

zapzupnz 8y ago

Tangentially related to all the stuff about the impending browser monoculture (everything old is new; Chromium shall be the next IE, etc.), I wonder if Apple would ever revive Safari on Windows. There's probably more value in it now than there was before, because all those iPhone users who don't want to or don't the choice to use a Mac would still want iCloud bookmark and keychain sync on their machines. Plus, eventually, it might become another glass of that proverbial ice water in Hell that iTunes and Safari for Windows were once touted to be. Yes, I know Windows would still have Firefox and all that, but I don't think one competitor does competition make. You need many competitors to segment the market, because this is not a market where segmentation should be considered a problem; rather, it should be embraced as the way to drive standards forward. It's worked that way for us since 2007 up until the last couple of years, it'll work again.

tuananh 8y ago

what does this mean for ChakraCore?

totfz 8y ago

Edge's rendering engine is good. The only real problem Edge has is that they've built it using the ugly, unresponsive Metro UI. If they build a browser with the Chromium engine and a Metro UI, they can expect nobody to use it as well.

xaldir 8y ago

That reminds me of the Azure presentation where the Microsoft employee switch to Chrome after Edge crashed.

EdSharkey 8y ago

I complained here when the Windows Subsystem for Linux was released that Microsoft was capitulating to Linux, giving customers a migration path away from Windows. That Microsoft had lost confidence in the homespun Win32/Win64/UWP/... API's to court developers. I caught some flak for that, but I was right. Here, again, we see Microsoft signalling surrender in a HUGE market. Why should I be troubled to run Windows 10, again? Where is the technical distinctiveness in rebranding Chromium? There is no advantage to Microsoft in doing that. It's less disgraceful to keep building out Edge than to rebrand Chromium. I'm not claiming Microsoft has done a great job. Edge was another mixed bag in a long line of mixed bags on the Web front from Microsoft. But they did compete for a really long time with no shortage of technical distinctiveness. Active Desktop, in the right product manager's hands, could have been a really amazing system. IE6, when it came out, was technically very awesome, doing HTML5-like functionality 7 years before the other browser vendors. I'd wager open sourcing Windows is next because they're not doing the brand any favors; they'll dump it and move on. Microsoft will focus on Azure and SaaS apps or whatever new market crops up and we'll all be poorer for it. Windows 7 will be my last Windows unless some amazing direction change happens in the product. I'm just waiting for support to end. Debian Linux, here I come!

Neil44 8y ago

Will the homepage be Google... or Bing? There’s the question!

krylon 8y ago
Do people still use that? On any browser I use, I change the settings so when I restart it, it will open whatever tabs I had last opened. I almost never get to see the browser's homepage.

Endy 8y ago

Chromium, great. With this move, Google gets to take one more step toward total domination of the Web. I'll be honest, I use WebKit-Edge on my iPad and it's fine; but I believe that the desktop space needs a new engine. We need something that isn't Chromium or the Chromium-Gecko that's backing Firefox since the intro of WebExtensions. There's only one problem - that's a hard challenge, and just blindly following Google is the easy way out.

baybal2 8y ago

Tell me this is a late April fools joke

buboard 8y ago

Hopefully they will use it to compete against google , rather than helping them with their world domination plans. This might be a good thing

saghul 8y ago

I wonder if this also means ChakraCore would be abandoned. I haven't played with it directly, put it seems to be a very capable JS runtime, which has no home outside of Edge. Well, there is node-chakracore, but I wonder why Microsoft would interested in keeping that effort. Unless... they replace V8 in their Chromium build with Chakra. They already have a V8 API shim, so I guess that would be within reach.

yason 8y ago

I would tend to frown upon shrinking competition but in this case Edge wasn't really a player. The markets were already shared by the Chromium engine and Firefox. Chromium has the ancestry back to WebKit and KHTML so, to my knowledge, Safari also isn't a direct competitor. So, we're looking at a duopoly which naturally happens when things get complex enough and smaller players are left behind by the sheer lack of resourcing. Browsers always were hubs of a number of technologies because loading markup language documents over network and rendering them onto screen with some dynamic programming abilities covers a lot of ground. While we sort of agree on the rendering, scripting, and styling of HTML5 by now this has just intensified with features like WebGL of WebAssembly which reach out to completely new domains. So, it's near impossible to compete in the scene unless you're a big, established player. A modern browser is a lot more complex than operating systems these days and probably 10x more complex than old operating systems from the era where it was still possible for a small group of people to write a competely usable kernel and desktop in a relatively short time. In effect, the browser has become the operating system and to think, that's probably the very reason it's much easier to be a Linux or Apple user these days. As long as you can run Firefox or Chrome, 90% of your problems are solved. Even Windows is, for most people, just a platform to run your browser on. Then you use things like Google Docs or the web-implementation of Office to launch Word or Excel to do your work. But you don't need Windows to do that, and with a Chromium based browser that Microsoft must fully support for their web services you can just use any Chrome/Chromium based implementation. In this light I'm amazed Microsoft would be giving power to Chrome and Google. Microsoft was and still is an operator in the operating system and platform space. How are they going to stay at all relevant if they just officially reposition Windows as a host for Chromium build? Surely things aren't as black and white but that's effectively how it is, giving up control. Microsoft can't reinvent themselves as the new Google because that's an uphill battle. They'd need to create a new space where they can thrive because operating systems don't matter that much anymore and the lock-in cash-cow that is Windows+Outlook+Office is gradually munched away by the web technologies.

tinus_hn 8y ago

None of my issues with Edge have anything to do with the browser engine. All of them have to do with stupid Microsoft like decisions, like ‘you can’t avoid the internal pdf reader’.

jeromebaek 8y ago

(Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft.) This is a good move. Microsoft is further embracing open source technology. I really want to use Edge, I gave it so many tries, but every time I keep coming back to Chrome because Edge is just so damn unreliable. And Chrome is creepy as hell. And Firefox just... is slow and not smooth. A not-creepy web browser from Microsoft, with the same reliability and speed of Chrome? Sign me up.

krylon 8y ago
My work laptop still runs Windows 7, so I have no experience with Edge; but Firefox feels a lot faster than Internet Explorer 11, even though it hogs memory like crazy.

firemelt 8y ago

Anyone here use edge for epub reader?

captainmuon 8y ago

That's quite unfortunate. I like Edge - the rendering engine, not so much the browser. If Edge would let me sync my bookmarks with Firefox, I would switch immediately. I found it quite fast, and no other engine works so well with touch. I also don't recall rendering problems. What MS should do IMHO is to package Edge as a component (like IE was in the old days), and let people build shells around it (like the Maxthon browser was). I don't think I would use an Edge based on Chromium much, as I liked the UI itself not so much.

Yizahi 8y ago

A pity really, even though I never used it. One more brick in the future googlenet wall.

prossercj 8y ago

Hm, my first thought is "will this work with carlo?" [0]. I'm excited about that project, but one big downside is that Chrome has to be installed. It would be great to write desktop applications that render through a browser, without having to either download Chrome (like carlo) or bundle it (like electron). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355345

gpvos 8y ago

Could Microsoft at least open-source their Edge code, so others can develop it further? It's really important for the openness of the web that we don't get a Chromium/Webkit monoculture. I'd also like to see if there is any way the Opera source code could be opensourced.

mustardo 8y ago

I hope they continue to struggle for many more years in the browser market. I and millions of devs lost many years on IE 6/8 crap they shouldn't be forgiven so easily

pluma 8y ago

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.

thedonkeycometh 8y ago

Microsoft should have had the bravery to push Edge into a different direction to Chrome. Going hard in VR or AR, or introducing a plugin framework specifically for EDGE.

fiatjaf 8y ago

I'm a Linux user and I use Firefox, but recommend Edge to all my Windows friends that don't care about browsers, it's a great browser, probably better than Chrome.

fiatjaf 8y ago

Wait, Microsoft, do you think people will use your Chromium-based browser more than they use Edge? Of course not, people will still be dumb and download Chrome. Don't throw the towell!

ksec 8y ago

I would much rather Microsoft works with Apple to bring Safari/Webkit to Windows, then bending over to Chrome.

Mindwipe 8y ago

I look forward to yet another Microsoft browser that does not work correctly with SharePoint.

morganvachon 8y ago

From the article: > In addition, Microsoft engineers were recently spotted committing code to the Chromium project to help get Google Chrome running on ARM. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something, Chromium already runs on ARM SoCs. Raspbian even ships with it as the default browser. Also, as to Edge and stability, I don't use Windows 10 for any serious work anymore in light of the recent update gaffes[1], but Edge has been consistently stable and fast in my experience. In fact it's one of the better things about Windows 10; it can correctly render certain websites that Firefox/Waterfox struggles with, and it's as fast as or faster than Chromium across the board. [1] Even running Windows 10 Pro and deferring updates, I had stability issues with the OS from day one. I had relegated it to just gaming and went back to macOS and Linux for serious work at home, but lately I've decided to stop putting so much time into games and focus on learning and music again. Therefore, I no longer use Windows 10 at all apart from IT duties at my job.

gsnedders 8y ago
> Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something, Chromium already runs on ARM SoCs. AIUI, Chromium didn't run on WinNT/ARM64.

shacharz 8y ago

Anyone has more details, regarding the roadmap and timeline?

mesaframe 8y ago

Edge didn't have any issues besides it's UI. It doesn't make sense to me that for UI MS halted it's development.

userbinator 8y ago

Edge was already in a difficult place from the beginning --- a new browser engine in a new UI that tried to be yet-another-Chrome-clone. They alienated both their IE users, which hate the UI changes, and weren't very successful in pleasing web developers with their new browser engine either. I would much rather have the classic familiar IE UI with a new browser engine, because the UI is the only reason I use IE over other browsers (which are increasingly turning into approximations of Chrome's UI.) There used to be many browsers. Not so long ago, it was mainly a choice between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and IE. Now it'll be more like a choice between Chrome, Chrome, and Firefox.

amelius 8y ago

Next up: Windows 10 kernel replaced by BSD

emeraldd 8y ago

A big reason Inuse chrome is that it is literally everywhere I need it to be: Mac, Linux, Windows, IOs, and Android. Edge is only on one of those and the only time I interact with a Windows machine is when my wife needs help fixing/recovering from something majorly broken on her computer. I haven't used a windows machine in a professional setting in ... 8 or 9 years at a minimum. Purely anecdotal, but my experience leads me to believe that, even though users on alternative platforms may be smaller in number, they tend to be the people building things for everyone else to use. Hence, Edge is stuck in a walled garden of Microsoft's own making and they aren't putting in the effort to make it work with the stuff that runs everywhere else.

g051051 8y ago

It's unfortunate to lose another implementation...and very telling about Microsoft. They'll spend infinite money (which they effectively have) to try to take a dominance position, but will give up if they can't be the top of the heap. How much would it really cost them to keep maintaining Edge, even if it's not the most popular browser? How was that generating revenue for them, anyway?

MarkMc 8y ago

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why did Microsoft create a web browser in the first place? Did Microsoft make any more money by having control of the dominant web browser? They could have just let Netscape win. Later when Google demonstrated the value of search, Microsoft could have just shipped Firefox with Bing set at the default search engine. Microsoft wouldn't have had to pay for decades of browser development, and it wouldn't have been slapped with a huge anti-trust action by the US Department of Justice.

thrownaway954 8y ago
You're a definitely a programmer and not a marketer. When you control the product, you control the experience.

thrownaway954 8y ago

FINALLY!!! The bottom line is that Chromium has won in all areas of the engine wars and Chrome has won the browser wars. Heck Chrome has even won in the testing area once it release a headless version. Everyone uses Chrome as a baseline when checking how their site renders. Like 99% of Windows users, I used Edge to download Chrome. This is a smart move by Microsoft, having the browser that is package with Windows, using the most popular rendering engine, will make people think twice about having to download another browser. https://imgur.com/gallery/9TxWoa9 https://imgur.com/gallery/9TxWoa9

kapsi 8y ago
I don't think most people know that rendering engines exist.

dschuetz 8y ago

How ironic. But, kudos to the responsible decision makers. It's a shame though that they haven't decided to make a modern and decent engine that works at least as reliable as FF or Chrome(ium), Edge always felt like a recycled version of IE. I think the move was done because the Chromium engine also has a strong extensions base. That's something I found Edge was lacking, ultimately.

akmittal 8y ago

It shows how difficult it is to rewrite a browser. I am glad firefox didn't go for full rewrite but going for progressive changes.

me551ah 8y ago

I recently made the switch to Firefox from chrome. Webrender is a revolution in web technology since it primarily uses the GPU for rendering resulting in much faster and smoother websites. I'd urge everyone to give webrender a shot, it feels noticeably smoother than chrome.

gwbas1c 8y ago

Hell has frozen over! I occasionally use Edge in my Windows VMs. It's just kind of... Well... I'm not sure, but I like Chrome better. The irony is that I religiously used Explorer for years because I believed that the browser isn't an accessory; the browser provided with the computer should be good enough. I only switched to Chrome because the multiprocess model made it easy to kill that one misbehaving tab that was hogging CPU.

saranshk 8y ago

One less browser for the front-end folks to support in the long run!

oscargrouch 8y ago

We need to remember MS bought Github recently, and with that Electron. Electron is based on Chrome so.. It makes total sense for them to concentrate the effort in Chromium and Blink, and just reuse it as their default Windows browser. I think this is much more about Electron than it is about Edge.

mises 8y ago

But I thought edge was faster. Every time I open a new installation, it's got that page with the speedometers showing that "edge is faster".

merb 8y ago

To be fair, chakra is/was a really really solid JavaScript engine. And it's probably easier to embed than anything inside Chrome. (https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore) Hope they are still comitted to chakra.

johnvega 8y ago

I think this is a great idea. I use 3 Windows computers and use Chrome Firefox and Edge on all three computers. My experience is that Edge is less stable than Chrome which surprised me at first since Edge is owned by the host OS having all the advantages of access to all the private code. You can throw all the money and resources in the world, and something like a browser is too complex to quickly catch up.

OliverJones 8y ago

FINALLY. They're laying the Redmond Middle School Science Projects (the Microsoft browsers) to rest. In the 2+ year timeframe, this will save independent SaaS and software vendors MASSIVE amounts of time and money. Thank you, Satya Nadella. Hopefully this will resolve the Web Extension store headaches induced by having to distribute through the Microsoft Store. I suppose those of us who sell to large organizations will still have to support IE11 and Edge for the foreseeable future. Or maybe MS could help us all out by pushing an update to put Rick Astley on the default home page for those browsers, as an encouragement to upgrade.

WorldMaker 8y ago

There is something really weird/off about this rumor. It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to drop EdgeHTML. EdgeHTML is doing really well. The big thing that jumps out here is the repeated use of the term Chromium rather than Blink. That might just be a non-technical writer here, but what if it is not? EdgeHTML has been working for years to be open source, and maybe even cross-platform. Could this project actually be the completion of that effort? Maybe they are using Chromium to host EdgeHTML (and ChakraCore) instead of Blink/V8? Edge for macOS and Linux, maybe?

WorldMaker 8y ago
I'm increasingly convinced that this rumor is about a replacement for ElectronJS that somehow got filtered through a non-technical reporter telephone game.