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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 Micros

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.
  - greenhatman 8y ago
    I've had to fix friends' computers who had their user profiles corrupted by an update so they can't log in.
    - RcIss 8y ago
      > I've had to fix friends' computers who had their user profiles corrupted by an update so they can't log in. An extremely recurrent issue with windows 10 updates (in particular, the big ones that happen every six months and behave like a complete OS reinstall) that manifests in so many different forms. I've seen it do stuff like only breaking UWP apps while leaving everything else intact. I've seen it break UWP apps + the start menu. And then I've seen it do the login breaking thing. The thing those symptoms have in common is that they were always solved by simply making a new user profile and logging into it then transferring the user data into the new profile, proving that the root of all horrors comes from bugs in the user profile migration that windows does during updates. I'm always horrified by the process not just because of the bugs but also because of how inane UWP is. Every new profile created will also get its amazing share of UWP crapware downloads, because of course it wouldn't make sense for software to be installed system wide, nah let's do that every time a profile is created and let's pull the microtransaction ladden mobile games while we're at it. Creating user profiles takes so much time on older acquaintance computers with spinning rust too.
jhare 8y ago
Why do we devs get the blame for avoiding their crap browser all that has burned us over and over? Repeatedly. For years. Hours and hours of frustration on this front. Encouraging the best-working alternative is the creation of monoculture? C'mon
- ComputerGuru 8y ago
  Edge isn’t IE. That you don’t know that is indicative of the problem.
  - ianschmitz 8y ago
    Have you opened up the dev tools?
  - bayindirh 8y ago
    Edge is an evolution of Internet Explorer. They removed some of the quirks they have added over the years, modernized the engine, but it's Internet Explorer to its core. It's just rebranded.
    - alimbada 8y ago
      No, it's a new browser built from the ground up with none of the baggage of IE.
      - bayindirh 8y ago
        Any reliable sources? I'd love to read more, and correct my knowledge if it's wrong.
        pndy 8y ago
        Edge uses forked Trident (named EdgeHTML) which was stripped of legacy code and tries to be compatible with WebKit engine: https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-explorer-of-course https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-...
happymellon 8y ago
How can I test Edge when Microsoft don't release it for Mac and Linux? A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.
- cmsimike 8y ago
  http://modern.ie http://modern.ie Free Windows VirtualBox images you can use for testing!
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    You've used these, right? It's an enormous pain to have to spin up a separate VM per version of Edge/IE to get a "Your copy of Windows might be stolen" message and have some finite period of time to test. I appreciate that they have these, but it's a real annoying hoop to jump through, and I've long suspected the hope is you'll just have your company buy a cheap windows box for testing. I can test the other browsers without doing this dance.
    - zuzun 8y ago
      How do you test Safari without an Apple device?
      - nkozyra 8y ago
        Yeah, Apple is also bad at this, I'm not sure why you're asking about Safari in a Microsoft thread, though. Luckily Safari has one fourth the userbase so it's a little easier to ignore them.
      - pluma 8y ago
        (Hint: you don't) I'm a web developer with an Android smartphone and Ubuntu as my main OS, Windows as my secondary. My primary means of testing on iOS/Safari is to be very careful about which features I target by checking caniuse.com and the JS compatibility list. And that doesn't protect you against iOS randomly doing something stupid like pretending to give you access to localStorage in private browsing mode but actually write everything to /dev/null instead.
partycoder 8y ago
It was a bad decision to make the logo similar to Internet Explorer, that alone is enough reason to not use it. They can change the tech as much as they want. They can hire armies of engineers and make the browser 1000% faster than Chrome... but if they reuse the stupid logo it will fail again, and again, and again until they give up and forget that logo ever existed.
- dmihal 8y ago
  Unfortunately, for some people that "E" means "internet"
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbuk 8y ago
    In the same unfortunate manner that the chrome icon means the same to more? Not saying that Chrome is a bad browser, but we railed against the IE monoculture, we railed against Webkit when Blink was released. Now we have a Google run monoculture.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  To be honest I thought changing the logo made sense since I didn't really believe they built an entirely new browser. Despite all the press about the core being somehow different I figured it must still share a lot of code (and I wasn't the only one [1])... [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-edge-hit-by-many-of-internet-explorers-security-flaws/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-edge-hit-by-many-of-...
- coldtea 8y ago
  Perhaps not everybody is as shallow -- or emotionally invested in the logo
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Nah, that was an obvious and clumsy sleight-of-hand "it's not IE, nononono, don't look there, look here, hey presto! A completely new browser which is not at all a reskin of IE!"
shmerl 8y ago
Embed Gecko or Servo?
Torwald 8y ago
I don't test for browsers. I test for web standards.
- watersb 8y ago
  web standards encompass a vast collection of specifications. It is reasonable to expect implementations to diverge. Then there is the rapid adoption of mobile platforms, which have become mass-market while at the same time evolving very rapidly, new versions every year. The result is a dispersive medium, a combinatoric sea of browsers, iOS and Android versions, and a crazy variety of form factors. Simply attempting to adhere to web standards is not sufficient.
  - Torwald 8y ago
    > Simply attempting to adhere to web standards is not sufficient. It is sufficient. The trick is to be good at marketing. What I mean by that is to niche your product properly and not to care about the rest. Gives you a much better overall structure for you business in every regard as well. I can discuss this point further… The other point here is the question of wether we should force browser vendors to comply to standards. Like we did back then on the desktop to end the browser wars. Again, I would discuss this point further…
- zingmars 8y ago
  So you've never actually shipped a product?
  - Torwald 8y ago
    If logic isn't your forte, try sales. You may be good at it.
- vegasdew 8y ago
  Is there any tool to test for standards? Also do you use W3C or WhatWG standards? /s
  - 8y ago
colordrops 8y ago
I can't quite put my finger on it but something feels wrong about blaming the general populace for Edge's failure as a browser. Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies on Earth. They've had every opportunity to use every marketing channel and dump resources into the team to make Edge an obvious winner. But they didn't.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  They want to avoid a second round of antitrust investigations. The first round was spurred in large part by the marketing push behind IE.
  - vorticalbox 8y ago
    It's not antitrust unless you're pushing install your own products and only pushing your products. You knowblike Google do if you access any of there services not in chrome "download chrome here", "this site works best in chrome".
    - coldtea 8y ago
      It's not antitrust until (a) you're a monopoly, and (b) blackmail/bribe OEMs to avoid competitor products.
      - tracker1 8y ago
        Is Chrome really that far off from IE on market share when the MS anti-trust talk started?
        criddell 8y ago
        Chrome could have 100% market share and it wouldn't necessarily be a problem. If I understand it correctly, Google would have to abuse their market position in some way.
        deleted 8y ago
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat So instead of giving users more control over the update process and the telemetry settings, without dirty tricks to reset these and so on, they decide to use another browser. Fine, but that doesn't solve their basic problem with the perception of Windows 10.
streptomycin 8y ago
I test my app in Edge, every time a new version is released. When it inevitably fails, I shake my head in disbelief that Microsoft still hasn't paid a dev to spend a couple months fixing their IndexedDB implementation, which has been incomplete since the IE days. Can't expect a small rag-tag group like Microsoft to compete with a rich corporate behemoth like Mozilla, I guess :)
- akira2501 8y ago
  > every time a new version is released. Exactly, which was 2 updates in 2017 and 2 updates in 2018; Microsoft isn't even attempting to play in the same ballpark as their competitors.. which is doubly frustrating every time Windows 10 tries to convince me that edge is better and that I should give it a try.
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > Exactly, which was 2 updates in 2017 and 2 updates in 2018; Microsoft isn't even attempting to play in the same ballpark as their competitors.. I actually like this kind of stability that Edge offers.
cletus 8y ago
Microsoft only releases it on one OS. so if you happen to use a Mac or Linux you need another browser. Chrome and Firefox are the only viable options. Also Microsoft are victims of their own legacy, namely what they did with Internet Explorer. Changing the box model, not adopting standards, not fixing bugs, causing no end of headaches for people having to support IE and so on. Trust needs to be earned. Apple had the same problem and briefly tried to have Safari on Windows but that didn't work out well and honestly I don't think they were ever that committed. Firefox is a viable alternative bit they still do stupid shit. My favorite is prompting me to restart to install an update when I open it. Well I just opened the app to do something but sure I'll interior what I'm doing so you can install an update that you could've done when I wasn't using it (ie like chrome). It's 2018. The era is office like updates is over.
- qmarchi 8y ago
  Few things to note: - Edge is (kindof) available on Android. It uses the Chromium engine, but includes bookmark and password syncing with the desktop version. - Firefox will (depending on platform support) update in the background and notify you to restart (Windows), or it will apply the update at app start (macOS).
  - toyg 8y ago
    They should apply it when the last window is closed (checking the OS is not shutting down).
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  In 2018 in a real OS (linux) it shows up along with all the other updates in a central gui for updating your OS that depending on your flavor may notify you of available updates for example by incriminating the number in a tray icon but never forces you to install except when it is convenient for you. If you install locally. Example downloading the nightly build to a local dir or installing in windows you may receive notifications of a new version when you open it but you can safely dismiss them with one click and update next Thursday if you like. At no point will it decide that its time whether you like it or not like windows update.
Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
Seeing what they did to the electron on VSCode, I'm really hopeful about their version of Chromium.
- tracker1 8y ago
  This is actually what gives me hope they create a UWP like platform that runs well in windows based on Node-style interfaces and maybe React Native for Windows.
swalladge 8y ago
No, I tell my friends and family to use Firefox. There is more than one decent browser out there. I don't like the idea of everything using the Chromium engine; monoculture _is_ bad and we shouldn't put our eggs in the one basket. That said, IE and Edge have historically been terrible both compatibility and performance-wise. It's not just websites that aren't tested in Edge - my experience with Edge is that all aspects of performance (initial load time, ui responsiveness, web site responsiveness) are terribly slow. I applaud the death of IE and Edge. One thing I'm worried about though is that Chromium may take over the market and we end up with websites working only in Chromium based browsers and other important browsers like Firefox and Safari get left in the dirt.
- headmelted 8y ago
  It's not really better though - having only two real browsers is not good for open standards or the open web. This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too. Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).
  - vijaybritto 8y ago
    The main reason developers prefer chrome over firefox is the devtools hands down. When firebug was amazing in the jquery era, we used firefox but now chrome's devtools is simple, fast and full featured to use. If firefox's devtools is as good as or better than chrome's maybe things can change!
    - manigandham 8y ago
      Agreed, the Chrome Devtools are amazing for development and the pace of new features helps in testing new standards.
    - sunaurus 8y ago
meuk 8y ago
Well, Opera is a good browser that no-one uses, so it can't be just that. Tbh UX just isn't Microsofts strong suite (although I really like Windows 10).
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Sorry, Opera is dead, and has been for years. It's now also frankenChrome, and none of the old, infinitely customizable options from the actual Opera has remained. The only thing left alive from Opera is the name.
  - meuk 8y ago
    At least it adheres to most standards, unlike many browsers. Many people don't care about customization.
    - AlexandrB 8y ago
      That’s because it’s just re-skinned Chromium: “In 2013, Opera changed its layout engine to Blink, the layout engine of its competitor Google Chrome.”[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)
- Markoff 8y ago
  i would not trust any Chinese browser with my data
  - glenneroo 8y ago
    Are you not concerned with NSA or other five-eyes countries (or Israel, which had unfettered access to raw data from the US[0])? I mean, it's downright dystopian what the Chinese are doing lately in regards to privacy, but what advantage will they have over you as an individual if they have all your data? If I had to (or was able to) choose which government had my data, the NSA or the Chinese government, I might (perhaps naively) choose the Chinese. On a related note, Microsoft gave the NSA complete backdoor access to Skype years ago[0], not to mention Outlook.com and who knows what else the NSA "needed" to build Prism and other tools, which remote contractors in Bahamas apparently have access to (thanks Snowden!). [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-israel-documents https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
I test in Edge, and then I get shit cause it doesn't work in IE11. The only family member I tell anything about what tech to use is my wife, and she uses FF like me, which is irritating because then she logs in and out of my services and I have to do double the work.
- Nullabillity 8y ago
  > which is irritating because then she logs in and out of my services and I have to do double the work. Multi-Account Containers let you keep multiple sessions, to avoid that problem: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
  - piyush_soni 8y ago
    Or the good old Firefox Profiles. Because Multi-account containers are still not 'that' separate when it comes to browser settings and add-ons etc.
__m 8y ago
i don’t think some css layout bug or js script will crash windows. The people complaining about monoculture probably don’t install or recommend Chrome
kowdermeister 8y ago
Because Edge might have a good rendering engine, but it sucks as a browser. You can't even drag and drop files (images, html files, pdf) to it. Totally useless for daily work. Just 1 example, why would I recommend a sub-par alternative? I also test in Edge, always looks good and then I close it.
- zmw 8y ago
  > You can't even drag and drop files (images, html files, pdf) to it. Worse, you can’t even save from it. IIRC my first interaction with Edge was trying to grab one of my scripts or config files off GitHub. Opened the raw text file and couldn’t save it. Searched frantically for “how to save from Edge”, got joke answers like “you can print it”. What a disaster.
jcbrand 8y ago
Actually, Microsoft's insistence that IE or Edge only run on Windows has been the main reason why I don't test either. You can get free virtual machines for testing, but it's still a slow, annoying and irritating experience to test in a Windows virtual machine. That and the fact that IE has always had terrible developer tools.
- dsego 8y ago
  When you spin up an IE11 on Win 10 virtual machine to test something and windows decides to run updates. Ain't nobody got time for that man.
- jamaicahest 8y ago
  > Actually, Microsoft's insistence that IE or Edge only run on Windows has been the main reason why I don't test either. I'm sorry, are you developing for your own personal pleasure or for a business? If it is the latter, keep your opinions to yourself and do what is in the best interest of your employer/clients.
sjellis 8y ago
> Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. This is at least partly self-inflicted damage by Microsoft. Edge only works on Windows 10, which not only excludes all of the regular Win 7 and 8 desktops that haven't been push upgraded, but also kiosk-type devices and at least some VDI (which use Windows Server with a "Desktop Experience" that does not include Edge). So Microsoft ended up with IE11, which is supported but frozen, Edge that doesn't even run on all Microsoft platforms, and no browser for Macs (because IE for Macs is long dead). So if you are trying to deliver or support a Web application, Microsoft aren't helping, hence "just download Chrome". Firefox didn't support enterprise Windows deployment as well as they could have (though they now seem to picked that up), and can't match the market power of Google. I would like to see a grass-roots move back to Firefox, but it's going to be up-hill work.
- lozenge 8y ago
  You can test against IE and Edge for free with VM images from Microsoft.
  - sjellis 8y ago
    You can, but all of those issues apply to user desktops, and they won't run VMs. There's no advantage to anybody apart from Windows-only corporate system administrators to even try to work with Microsoft browsers right now.
unixhero 8y ago
After 20 years of cluster fuck after cluster fuck release, I am never ever going to consider supporting Internet Explorer with any of my work. It doesn't matter how good Edge would be. The damage is done. It's like the old adage: You cannot un-kick someone in the face.
- criddell 8y ago
  Was your problem with IE or Microsoft? If it's the former, then you shouldn't have a big problem with Edge because it's an entirely different browser.
  - unixhero 8y ago
    Yeah. I don't trust MS with my browser needs any longer. Call me difficult, I can go with that :)
jchw 8y ago
Is there anything to complain about here really? I'm a lot more upset over Firefox market share slipping than this. Edge sucks, and it's not because people don't test on it. It's because it sucks. It sucks in ways that Microsoft can literally only blame themselves for. Me not testing software in Edge didn't cause the design catastrophe that is UWP to be used for Edge. It's not very developer friendly anyways, it doesn't even like to connect to local servers or display local pages. I think everyone wants healthy competition in the web browser space, but I didn't want a closed-source browser that didn't run on Mac or Linux with a UI I can't agree with and an already disappointing track record. It only hurts worse that I humored Microsoft once when they forced my browser back to Edge only to discover that practically I still couldn't stand it. Maybe we should feel bad here, but I don't. If I feel bad for anything it's for the good people at Microsoft that brought us this great piece of engineering delivered in such a disappointing fashion.
tracker1 8y ago
If Edge had a shorter development/release cycle and even came close to catching up to Chrome on features, I'd be happy to suggest it to people. I have time and again seen one feature or another just not work right when I have tested with Edge. Right now, I'm just happy that I am able to put IE behind me at work. TBH, I like having some competition. I think the single bigest miss with Edge is the fact that people search for "Internet Explorer" and many wind up running that in windows out of habit, and those that know better prefer Chrome or Firefox. Beyond that, the fact that it's shoved in your face at every other turn. Chrome syncs my settings cross platform. And I just haven't liked IE/Edge UI any time I've tried either. Despite issues I have with Chrome, it just works more like I want it to than the alternatives. Frankly, I'm happy to see MS making a shift. A lot of tools have been made using Electron from MS at this point, with more in the works. So it makes sense that they'd make a shift. For that matter, I'd like to see better platform support with Node style APIs for application development in general, which may be the final target for these changes.
cm2187 8y ago
I actually install firefox through chocolatey and chocolatey through a powershell command, so I get to never open Edge even once!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mschuetz 8y ago
> YOU don't test your work in Egde and because I already know the results of my tests. It won't work so I won't even bother testing. Because Edge doesn't support WebGL2.
jcelerier 8y ago
> YOU don't test your work in Egde and because YOU tell all friends and family to use Chrome instead of edge. my last interaction with edge was that it crashed twice on the path to downloading chrome - as in, clicking the "X" to quit it wouldn't work and I had to kill it in the process manager. This was on a pristine Windows 10 that was just installed. Very often when I had to use it (or didn't notice that windows opened it for some reason) I also could not close any tab.
kakarot 8y ago
Uh, no? I tell my friends and family that Chrome is the new IE and they should get Firefox or a different Chromium-based browser. Stop projecting.
timrichard 8y ago
> YOU don't test your work in Egde Yup, because it doesn't have the market share to justify it. Plus, for many years, IE compatibility was an extremely unpleasant aspect of my job, and I'm certainly not alone there. Mainly because they didn't really care about improving it or keeping track with browser standards after "conquest accomplished". Some people get what they deserve.
raxxorrax 8y ago
Nonsense, I tell my friends and family to download firefox. I also tell them horror stories about Google and how they eat children to reinforce brand loyalty. But to be serious, they are just the better browsers. Maybe the trident engine or whatever it is called right now does perform very well and I see no issues. I just cannot understand how anyone opening the settings of Edge would not get an instant aneurysm. I can't believe that people think this to be the "the new way" of structuring settings. It is just horrible and unusable. But changing just the engine probably means the horrible things about Edge are here to stay. I am no web developer, but if I have an application on the web, I do test compatibility with Edge. Win10 does have serious issues, the engine of Edge was one of the things not relevant to the topic at hand.
ivanhoe 8y ago
Yeah, monoculture is bad, but also having to constantly joggle between different engines when developing for web is not all that great either. So this is also a step toward a dream of having fully standardized set of web browsers' features. It means less polyfills, less compromises, more modern js and css and ultimately better and leaner sites and web apps experience for users.
Jnr 8y ago
I don't test it in Edge as much because there is no Edge on Linux or MacOS and I don't want to keep virtual machines running all the time to do it. And there is absolutely no benefit in helping them get more users on their proprietary browser. If they made it multi platform and open sourced it, that might have been a different story. I do test in Firefox and Chromium and only then if someone complains I look at Safari and Edge.
blablabla123 8y ago
Well to be fair, at many places developers are pushed towards deadlines and leads don't care if stuff works on <insert semi-exotic browser>. Oftentimes it's just a semicolon or one extra css rule to accomplish browser compatibility. Nobody says thanks for extra compatibility.
wolfgke 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. At least in Germany the perception of Chrome is "Google spyware". That is also the reason why in Germany (and I think in many other EU countries, too) Firefox has a much larger marketshare than in the USA. Since Windows 10 already has its spyware image in Germany, this just reinforces the impression (right or wrong) that Microsoft wants to become an even more spyware company. P.S.: Of course I test my work in Edge.
dyukqu 8y ago
Great comment. Thank you. I see a lot of people (developers mostly?) here complaining about browser monopoly, Google Chrome and still saying "yeahh..well..I tried Firefox..but..yeah..dev tools..why bother to test for FF? Chrome is faster blah blah...". Almost everybody talks how a laptop with 16 gb ram is so "meh" for them, they need/have computers which got 32 gb of ram at least and somehow it's still not enough for Firefox. Back in the days, I didn't ditch Firefox even on a machine running fucking Vista with 3 gb of ram; because I cared about them, I cared about their mission - the open web. I thought "even only one person is a plus". I think I did my best as an end user. Vista + 3 gb ram + maybe worst years (circa 2009) of FF, how much can a system get worse? I've never really understand these whiners, couldn't stop seeing them as hypocritics. I'm not able to agree with them even a slightest and I don't think they have really good reasons, haven't seen one.
devit 8y ago
Well, if Edge was open source and worked on non-Microsoft OSes, then maybe people would test on it.
plq 8y ago
> Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. I'd have loved to if it'd work on my development environment (! Windows) They should be focusing on porting IE to other operating systems and not leaving the control of a core component of their offering to somebody else. They've been doing some good stuff lately, and I'm sure this is another honest attempt towards doing good to developers, but they got this one completely backwards.
mesaframe 8y ago
>Changing the browser engine is a big step in that direction I doubt Browser's engine has much to do with application UI, which was the main issue of edge.
rohan1024 8y ago
Gonna play devil's advocate here. Monoculture, is it really that bad? What if all these browsers start contributing to the chromium project so that we have one solid core. Chromium being open source won't end up as another IE as many seem to suggest here. Besides, we have already settled on Google, Linux in Cloud, Windows on consumer and corporate computers. Its simple process of elimination. Market is deciding what should get eliminated. Anything that doesn't have a steady or abundant flow of resources behind it will die eventually. Of course ethics and morals don't stand chance when it is survival of the fittest but that has been the case for billions of years.
j45 8y ago
Before using ie to download Chrome, IE was used to download Firefox. Chrome out-innovated Firefox for a lot of years and won the demand for a web browser (and now sell to it). The new Firefox, is similar to the new ground breaking features of a Chrome when it had come out. A few years of recommending Firefox will have an effect. Today I use Chrome, Chromium and Firefox. Firefox is my daily driver and it is no slower than Chroumium
bionoid 8y ago
> Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable Sorry for going off-topic on rant here, but yesterday I had a 3 months old win10 workstation refuse to start the built-in calculator app. It worked fine the evening before, and no updates were installed in between... This is apparantly a common problem for many users. I found lots of possible solutions, but of course, none of them worked for me. I took ownership of install dirs, redeployed the appx, every hack I could find... Eventually I gave up and copied calc.exe from a win7 computer -- of course it doesn't run on win10, that would be too easy. So I installed a third-party calculator and apologized to the user on behalf of Microsoft... > Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 Nothing will change my perception of win10.
sodosopa 8y ago
We don’t test with Edge because it’s less than 2% of our traffic. Same reason we don’t test Opera or the browser on the old Blackberry phones.
Bird2920 8y ago
Developers just need to do their due diligence to ensure their sites and products work on the entire spectrum. Including Opera, Safari, Chromium, Firefox, ie/edge, etc. Does it really add that much development time to just open a site and compare across multiple browsers?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
decebalus1 8y ago
> What other options do they have? Especially after Mariani left almost 2 years ago to join Facebook. I assume everything went to shit shortly before he left.
filomeno 8y ago
Well, it's not my fault that I can't use Edge on my operating system of choice. It's not "YOU don't test your work in Egde" but "YOU don't test your work in Edge but you wouldn't be able to". So please, do not blame the users, but Microsoft.
- h1d 8y ago
  It's not so hard to run it in virtualization to test.
  - filomeno 8y ago
    It's the same effort it takes to run Linux in virtualization to test your software on it yet nobody does.
cannedslime 8y ago
I test my stuff in IE, and honestly its not worth the extra time. So many inconsistencies with firefox & chrome, at least firefox behavior is well documented, but IE is not.
TheKarateKid 8y ago
Surprisingly, casual Windows users have been "trained" to use Chrome and Firefox instead of IE/Edge, and Edge has the same logo so they know not to use it. So there's not much casual usage of Edge to begin with even though it's the default OS browser out of the box. If Edge were multi-platform, then I'd consider it worth my time. But as Mac, Chrome OS, and Linux users continue to grow, I'm not going to waste my time making sure it works for a small amount of Windows users who barely even use the browser to begin with. Not to mention I'd need to dual-boot or run a VM just to test my work.
godot 8y ago
Is it really as bad as you say? Microsoft is not giving up on making a browser, they are switching rendering engine. I see this as a good thing overall -- one less rendering engine to worry about during dev, but still have a different browser maintained by a prominent company (that comes with the most used OS in the world, even). The net effect is that, stuff that Google tries to pull (like auto logging in accounts in Chrome based on your gmail) will still be negative for Google and still cause people to switch; because you have options. On the other hand, devs can expect code behavior to match more closely now even in MS Anaheim because its underlying rendering engine is now the same as Chrome. It's not monoculture of product choice, it's monoculture of underlying rendering engine, which seems like a good thing to me.
blue4 8y ago
Maybe this is just my opinion and not a fact but I have created tests and have found that Edge has the best quality of all three (Chrome, Firefox) when watching videos on Netflix. Can anyone explain this?
JohnBooty 8y ago
Market share isn't decided by power users like us. We influence it, sure, but most of the world just uses whatever's preinstalled on their OS.
daveheq 8y ago
Edge's browser engine is fine; people don't use it because it's not the defualt and Microsoft won't deprecate IE or just make it a not-so-prominent app. They can't keep IE alive forever yet businesses are not dropping it. They have to kill it at some point. The problem with Edge is it's missing features other browsers have had for years, including IE. Microsoft just needs to add those features, not reinvent their browser again.

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.
- greenhatman 8y ago
  I've had to fix friends' computers who had their user profiles corrupted by an update so they can't log in.
  - RcIss 8y ago
    > I've had to fix friends' computers who had their user profiles corrupted by an update so they can't log in. An extremely recurrent issue with windows 10 updates (in particular, the big ones that happen every six months and behave like a complete OS reinstall) that manifests in so many different forms. I've seen it do stuff like only breaking UWP apps while leaving everything else intact. I've seen it break UWP apps + the start menu. And then I've seen it do the login breaking thing. The thing those symptoms have in common is that they were always solved by simply making a new user profile and logging into it then transferring the user data into the new profile, proving that the root of all horrors comes from bugs in the user profile migration that windows does during updates. I'm always horrified by the process not just because of the bugs but also because of how inane UWP is. Every new profile created will also get its amazing share of UWP crapware downloads, because of course it wouldn't make sense for software to be installed system wide, nah let's do that every time a profile is created and let's pull the microtransaction ladden mobile games while we're at it. Creating user profiles takes so much time on older acquaintance computers with spinning rust too.

jhare 8y ago

Why do we devs get the blame for avoiding their crap browser all that has burned us over and over? Repeatedly. For years. Hours and hours of frustration on this front. Encouraging the best-working alternative is the creation of monoculture? C'mon

ComputerGuru 8y ago
Edge isn’t IE. That you don’t know that is indicative of the problem.
- ianschmitz 8y ago
  Have you opened up the dev tools?
- bayindirh 8y ago
  Edge is an evolution of Internet Explorer. They removed some of the quirks they have added over the years, modernized the engine, but it's Internet Explorer to its core. It's just rebranded.
  - alimbada 8y ago
    No, it's a new browser built from the ground up with none of the baggage of IE.
    - bayindirh 8y ago
      Any reliable sources? I'd love to read more, and correct my knowledge if it's wrong.
      - pndy 8y ago
        Edge uses forked Trident (named EdgeHTML) which was stripped of legacy code and tries to be compatible with WebKit engine: https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-explorer-of-course https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-...

happymellon 8y ago

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

cmsimike 8y ago
http://modern.ie http://modern.ie Free Windows VirtualBox images you can use for testing!
- nkozyra 8y ago
  You've used these, right? It's an enormous pain to have to spin up a separate VM per version of Edge/IE to get a "Your copy of Windows might be stolen" message and have some finite period of time to test. I appreciate that they have these, but it's a real annoying hoop to jump through, and I've long suspected the hope is you'll just have your company buy a cheap windows box for testing. I can test the other browsers without doing this dance.
  - zuzun 8y ago
    How do you test Safari without an Apple device?
    - nkozyra 8y ago
      Yeah, Apple is also bad at this, I'm not sure why you're asking about Safari in a Microsoft thread, though. Luckily Safari has one fourth the userbase so it's a little easier to ignore them.
    - pluma 8y ago
      (Hint: you don't) I'm a web developer with an Android smartphone and Ubuntu as my main OS, Windows as my secondary. My primary means of testing on iOS/Safari is to be very careful about which features I target by checking caniuse.com and the JS compatibility list. And that doesn't protect you against iOS randomly doing something stupid like pretending to give you access to localStorage in private browsing mode but actually write everything to /dev/null instead.

partycoder 8y ago

It was a bad decision to make the logo similar to Internet Explorer, that alone is enough reason to not use it. They can change the tech as much as they want. They can hire armies of engineers and make the browser 1000% faster than Chrome... but if they reuse the stupid logo it will fail again, and again, and again until they give up and forget that logo ever existed.

dmihal 8y ago
Unfortunately, for some people that "E" means "internet"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sbuk 8y ago
  In the same unfortunate manner that the chrome icon means the same to more? Not saying that Chrome is a bad browser, but we railed against the IE monoculture, we railed against Webkit when Blink was released. Now we have a Google run monoculture.
mehrdadn 8y ago
To be honest I thought changing the logo made sense since I didn't really believe they built an entirely new browser. Despite all the press about the core being somehow different I figured it must still share a lot of code (and I wasn't the only one [1])... [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-edge-hit-by-many-of-internet-explorers-security-flaws/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-edge-hit-by-many-of-...
coldtea 8y ago
Perhaps not everybody is as shallow -- or emotionally invested in the logo
Piskvorrr 8y ago
Nah, that was an obvious and clumsy sleight-of-hand "it's not IE, nononono, don't look there, look here, hey presto! A completely new browser which is not at all a reskin of IE!"

shmerl 8y ago

Embed Gecko or Servo?

Torwald 8y ago

I don't test for browsers. I test for web standards.

watersb 8y ago
web standards encompass a vast collection of specifications. It is reasonable to expect implementations to diverge. Then there is the rapid adoption of mobile platforms, which have become mass-market while at the same time evolving very rapidly, new versions every year. The result is a dispersive medium, a combinatoric sea of browsers, iOS and Android versions, and a crazy variety of form factors. Simply attempting to adhere to web standards is not sufficient.
- Torwald 8y ago
  > Simply attempting to adhere to web standards is not sufficient. It is sufficient. The trick is to be good at marketing. What I mean by that is to niche your product properly and not to care about the rest. Gives you a much better overall structure for you business in every regard as well. I can discuss this point further… The other point here is the question of wether we should force browser vendors to comply to standards. Like we did back then on the desktop to end the browser wars. Again, I would discuss this point further…
zingmars 8y ago
So you've never actually shipped a product?
- Torwald 8y ago
  If logic isn't your forte, try sales. You may be good at it.
vegasdew 8y ago
Is there any tool to test for standards? Also do you use W3C or WhatWG standards? /s
- 8y ago

colordrops 8y ago

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

gamblor956 8y ago
They want to avoid a second round of antitrust investigations. The first round was spurred in large part by the marketing push behind IE.
- vorticalbox 8y ago
  It's not antitrust unless you're pushing install your own products and only pushing your products. You knowblike Google do if you access any of there services not in chrome "download chrome here", "this site works best in chrome".
  - coldtea 8y ago
    It's not antitrust until (a) you're a monopoly, and (b) blackmail/bribe OEMs to avoid competitor products.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      Is Chrome really that far off from IE on market share when the MS anti-trust talk started?
      - criddell 8y ago
        Chrome could have 100% market share and it wouldn't necessarily be a problem. If I understand it correctly, Google would have to abuse their market position in some way.
        deleted 8y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat So instead of giving users more control over the update process and the telemetry settings, without dirty tricks to reset these and so on, they decide to use another browser. Fine, but that doesn't solve their basic problem with the perception of Windows 10.

streptomycin 8y ago

I test my app in Edge, every time a new version is released. When it inevitably fails, I shake my head in disbelief that Microsoft still hasn't paid a dev to spend a couple months fixing their IndexedDB implementation, which has been incomplete since the IE days. Can't expect a small rag-tag group like Microsoft to compete with a rich corporate behemoth like Mozilla, I guess :)

akira2501 8y ago
> every time a new version is released. Exactly, which was 2 updates in 2017 and 2 updates in 2018; Microsoft isn't even attempting to play in the same ballpark as their competitors.. which is doubly frustrating every time Windows 10 tries to convince me that edge is better and that I should give it a try.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > Exactly, which was 2 updates in 2017 and 2 updates in 2018; Microsoft isn't even attempting to play in the same ballpark as their competitors.. I actually like this kind of stability that Edge offers.

cletus 8y ago

Microsoft only releases it on one OS. so if you happen to use a Mac or Linux you need another browser. Chrome and Firefox are the only viable options. Also Microsoft are victims of their own legacy, namely what they did with Internet Explorer. Changing the box model, not adopting standards, not fixing bugs, causing no end of headaches for people having to support IE and so on. Trust needs to be earned. Apple had the same problem and briefly tried to have Safari on Windows but that didn't work out well and honestly I don't think they were ever that committed. Firefox is a viable alternative bit they still do stupid shit. My favorite is prompting me to restart to install an update when I open it. Well I just opened the app to do something but sure I'll interior what I'm doing so you can install an update that you could've done when I wasn't using it (ie like chrome). It's 2018. The era is office like updates is over.

qmarchi 8y ago
Few things to note: - Edge is (kindof) available on Android. It uses the Chromium engine, but includes bookmark and password syncing with the desktop version. - Firefox will (depending on platform support) update in the background and notify you to restart (Windows), or it will apply the update at app start (macOS).
- toyg 8y ago
  They should apply it when the last window is closed (checking the OS is not shutting down).
michaelmrose 8y ago
In 2018 in a real OS (linux) it shows up along with all the other updates in a central gui for updating your OS that depending on your flavor may notify you of available updates for example by incriminating the number in a tray icon but never forces you to install except when it is convenient for you. If you install locally. Example downloading the nightly build to a local dir or installing in windows you may receive notifications of a new version when you open it but you can safely dismiss them with one click and update next Thursday if you like. At no point will it decide that its time whether you like it or not like windows update.

Abishek_Muthian 8y ago

Seeing what they did to the electron on VSCode, I'm really hopeful about their version of Chromium.

tracker1 8y ago
This is actually what gives me hope they create a UWP like platform that runs well in windows based on Node-style interfaces and maybe React Native for Windows.

swalladge 8y ago

No, I tell my friends and family to use Firefox. There is more than one decent browser out there. I don't like the idea of everything using the Chromium engine; monoculture _is_ bad and we shouldn't put our eggs in the one basket. That said, IE and Edge have historically been terrible both compatibility and performance-wise. It's not just websites that aren't tested in Edge - my experience with Edge is that all aspects of performance (initial load time, ui responsiveness, web site responsiveness) are terribly slow. I applaud the death of IE and Edge. One thing I'm worried about though is that Chromium may take over the market and we end up with websites working only in Chromium based browsers and other important browsers like Firefox and Safari get left in the dirt.

headmelted 8y ago
It's not really better though - having only two real browsers is not good for open standards or the open web. This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too. Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).
- vijaybritto 8y ago
  The main reason developers prefer chrome over firefox is the devtools hands down. When firebug was amazing in the jquery era, we used firefox but now chrome's devtools is simple, fast and full featured to use. If firefox's devtools is as good as or better than chrome's maybe things can change!
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Agreed, the Chrome Devtools are amazing for development and the pace of new features helps in testing new standards.
  - sunaurus 8y ago

meuk 8y ago

Well, Opera is a good browser that no-one uses, so it can't be just that. Tbh UX just isn't Microsofts strong suite (although I really like Windows 10).

Piskvorrr 8y ago
Sorry, Opera is dead, and has been for years. It's now also frankenChrome, and none of the old, infinitely customizable options from the actual Opera has remained. The only thing left alive from Opera is the name.
- meuk 8y ago
  At least it adheres to most standards, unlike many browsers. Many people don't care about customization.
  - AlexandrB 8y ago
    That’s because it’s just re-skinned Chromium: “In 2013, Opera changed its layout engine to Blink, the layout engine of its competitor Google Chrome.”[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)
Markoff 8y ago
i would not trust any Chinese browser with my data
- glenneroo 8y ago
  Are you not concerned with NSA or other five-eyes countries (or Israel, which had unfettered access to raw data from the US[0])? I mean, it's downright dystopian what the Chinese are doing lately in regards to privacy, but what advantage will they have over you as an individual if they have all your data? If I had to (or was able to) choose which government had my data, the NSA or the Chinese government, I might (perhaps naively) choose the Chinese. On a related note, Microsoft gave the NSA complete backdoor access to Skype years ago[0], not to mention Outlook.com and who knows what else the NSA "needed" to build Prism and other tools, which remote contractors in Bahamas apparently have access to (thanks Snowden!). [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-israel-documents https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

I test in Edge, and then I get shit cause it doesn't work in IE11. The only family member I tell anything about what tech to use is my wife, and she uses FF like me, which is irritating because then she logs in and out of my services and I have to do double the work.

Nullabillity 8y ago
> which is irritating because then she logs in and out of my services and I have to do double the work. Multi-Account Containers let you keep multiple sessions, to avoid that problem: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  Or the good old Firefox Profiles. Because Multi-account containers are still not 'that' separate when it comes to browser settings and add-ons etc.

__m 8y ago

i don’t think some css layout bug or js script will crash windows. The people complaining about monoculture probably don’t install or recommend Chrome

kowdermeister 8y ago

Because Edge might have a good rendering engine, but it sucks as a browser. You can't even drag and drop files (images, html files, pdf) to it. Totally useless for daily work. Just 1 example, why would I recommend a sub-par alternative? I also test in Edge, always looks good and then I close it.

zmw 8y ago
> You can't even drag and drop files (images, html files, pdf) to it. Worse, you can’t even save from it. IIRC my first interaction with Edge was trying to grab one of my scripts or config files off GitHub. Opened the raw text file and couldn’t save it. Searched frantically for “how to save from Edge”, got joke answers like “you can print it”. What a disaster.

jcbrand 8y ago

Actually, Microsoft's insistence that IE or Edge only run on Windows has been the main reason why I don't test either. You can get free virtual machines for testing, but it's still a slow, annoying and irritating experience to test in a Windows virtual machine. That and the fact that IE has always had terrible developer tools.

dsego 8y ago
When you spin up an IE11 on Win 10 virtual machine to test something and windows decides to run updates. Ain't nobody got time for that man.
jamaicahest 8y ago
> Actually, Microsoft's insistence that IE or Edge only run on Windows has been the main reason why I don't test either. I'm sorry, are you developing for your own personal pleasure or for a business? If it is the latter, keep your opinions to yourself and do what is in the best interest of your employer/clients.

sjellis 8y ago

> Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. This is at least partly self-inflicted damage by Microsoft. Edge only works on Windows 10, which not only excludes all of the regular Win 7 and 8 desktops that haven't been push upgraded, but also kiosk-type devices and at least some VDI (which use Windows Server with a "Desktop Experience" that does not include Edge). So Microsoft ended up with IE11, which is supported but frozen, Edge that doesn't even run on all Microsoft platforms, and no browser for Macs (because IE for Macs is long dead). So if you are trying to deliver or support a Web application, Microsoft aren't helping, hence "just download Chrome". Firefox didn't support enterprise Windows deployment as well as they could have (though they now seem to picked that up), and can't match the market power of Google. I would like to see a grass-roots move back to Firefox, but it's going to be up-hill work.

lozenge 8y ago
You can test against IE and Edge for free with VM images from Microsoft.
- sjellis 8y ago
  You can, but all of those issues apply to user desktops, and they won't run VMs. There's no advantage to anybody apart from Windows-only corporate system administrators to even try to work with Microsoft browsers right now.

unixhero 8y ago

After 20 years of cluster fuck after cluster fuck release, I am never ever going to consider supporting Internet Explorer with any of my work. It doesn't matter how good Edge would be. The damage is done. It's like the old adage: You cannot un-kick someone in the face.

criddell 8y ago
Was your problem with IE or Microsoft? If it's the former, then you shouldn't have a big problem with Edge because it's an entirely different browser.
- unixhero 8y ago
  Yeah. I don't trust MS with my browser needs any longer. Call me difficult, I can go with that :)

jchw 8y ago

Is there anything to complain about here really? I'm a lot more upset over Firefox market share slipping than this. Edge sucks, and it's not because people don't test on it. It's because it sucks. It sucks in ways that Microsoft can literally only blame themselves for. Me not testing software in Edge didn't cause the design catastrophe that is UWP to be used for Edge. It's not very developer friendly anyways, it doesn't even like to connect to local servers or display local pages. I think everyone wants healthy competition in the web browser space, but I didn't want a closed-source browser that didn't run on Mac or Linux with a UI I can't agree with and an already disappointing track record. It only hurts worse that I humored Microsoft once when they forced my browser back to Edge only to discover that practically I still couldn't stand it. Maybe we should feel bad here, but I don't. If I feel bad for anything it's for the good people at Microsoft that brought us this great piece of engineering delivered in such a disappointing fashion.

tracker1 8y ago

If Edge had a shorter development/release cycle and even came close to catching up to Chrome on features, I'd be happy to suggest it to people. I have time and again seen one feature or another just not work right when I have tested with Edge. Right now, I'm just happy that I am able to put IE behind me at work. TBH, I like having some competition. I think the single bigest miss with Edge is the fact that people search for "Internet Explorer" and many wind up running that in windows out of habit, and those that know better prefer Chrome or Firefox. Beyond that, the fact that it's shoved in your face at every other turn. Chrome syncs my settings cross platform. And I just haven't liked IE/Edge UI any time I've tried either. Despite issues I have with Chrome, it just works more like I want it to than the alternatives. Frankly, I'm happy to see MS making a shift. A lot of tools have been made using Electron from MS at this point, with more in the works. So it makes sense that they'd make a shift. For that matter, I'd like to see better platform support with Node style APIs for application development in general, which may be the final target for these changes.

cm2187 8y ago

I actually install firefox through chocolatey and chocolatey through a powershell command, so I get to never open Edge even once!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mschuetz 8y ago

> YOU don't test your work in Egde and because I already know the results of my tests. It won't work so I won't even bother testing. Because Edge doesn't support WebGL2.

jcelerier 8y ago

> YOU don't test your work in Egde and because YOU tell all friends and family to use Chrome instead of edge. my last interaction with edge was that it crashed twice on the path to downloading chrome - as in, clicking the "X" to quit it wouldn't work and I had to kill it in the process manager. This was on a pristine Windows 10 that was just installed. Very often when I had to use it (or didn't notice that windows opened it for some reason) I also could not close any tab.

kakarot 8y ago

Uh, no? I tell my friends and family that Chrome is the new IE and they should get Firefox or a different Chromium-based browser. Stop projecting.

timrichard 8y ago

> YOU don't test your work in Egde Yup, because it doesn't have the market share to justify it. Plus, for many years, IE compatibility was an extremely unpleasant aspect of my job, and I'm certainly not alone there. Mainly because they didn't really care about improving it or keeping track with browser standards after "conquest accomplished". Some people get what they deserve.

raxxorrax 8y ago

Nonsense, I tell my friends and family to download firefox. I also tell them horror stories about Google and how they eat children to reinforce brand loyalty. But to be serious, they are just the better browsers. Maybe the trident engine or whatever it is called right now does perform very well and I see no issues. I just cannot understand how anyone opening the settings of Edge would not get an instant aneurysm. I can't believe that people think this to be the "the new way" of structuring settings. It is just horrible and unusable. But changing just the engine probably means the horrible things about Edge are here to stay. I am no web developer, but if I have an application on the web, I do test compatibility with Edge. Win10 does have serious issues, the engine of Edge was one of the things not relevant to the topic at hand.

ivanhoe 8y ago

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

Jnr 8y ago

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

blablabla123 8y ago

Well to be fair, at many places developers are pushed towards deadlines and leads don't care if stuff works on <insert semi-exotic browser>. Oftentimes it's just a semicolon or one extra css rule to accomplish browser compatibility. Nobody says thanks for extra compatibility.

wolfgke 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. At least in Germany the perception of Chrome is "Google spyware". That is also the reason why in Germany (and I think in many other EU countries, too) Firefox has a much larger marketshare than in the USA. Since Windows 10 already has its spyware image in Germany, this just reinforces the impression (right or wrong) that Microsoft wants to become an even more spyware company. P.S.: Of course I test my work in Edge.

dyukqu 8y ago

Great comment. Thank you. I see a lot of people (developers mostly?) here complaining about browser monopoly, Google Chrome and still saying "yeahh..well..I tried Firefox..but..yeah..dev tools..why bother to test for FF? Chrome is faster blah blah...". Almost everybody talks how a laptop with 16 gb ram is so "meh" for them, they need/have computers which got 32 gb of ram at least and somehow it's still not enough for Firefox. Back in the days, I didn't ditch Firefox even on a machine running fucking Vista with 3 gb of ram; because I cared about them, I cared about their mission - the open web. I thought "even only one person is a plus". I think I did my best as an end user. Vista + 3 gb ram + maybe worst years (circa 2009) of FF, how much can a system get worse? I've never really understand these whiners, couldn't stop seeing them as hypocritics. I'm not able to agree with them even a slightest and I don't think they have really good reasons, haven't seen one.

devit 8y ago

Well, if Edge was open source and worked on non-Microsoft OSes, then maybe people would test on it.

plq 8y ago

> Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. I'd have loved to if it'd work on my development environment (! Windows) They should be focusing on porting IE to other operating systems and not leaving the control of a core component of their offering to somebody else. They've been doing some good stuff lately, and I'm sure this is another honest attempt towards doing good to developers, but they got this one completely backwards.

mesaframe 8y ago

>Changing the browser engine is a big step in that direction I doubt Browser's engine has much to do with application UI, which was the main issue of edge.

rohan1024 8y ago

Gonna play devil's advocate here. Monoculture, is it really that bad? What if all these browsers start contributing to the chromium project so that we have one solid core. Chromium being open source won't end up as another IE as many seem to suggest here. Besides, we have already settled on Google, Linux in Cloud, Windows on consumer and corporate computers. Its simple process of elimination. Market is deciding what should get eliminated. Anything that doesn't have a steady or abundant flow of resources behind it will die eventually. Of course ethics and morals don't stand chance when it is survival of the fittest but that has been the case for billions of years.

j45 8y ago

Before using ie to download Chrome, IE was used to download Firefox. Chrome out-innovated Firefox for a lot of years and won the demand for a web browser (and now sell to it). The new Firefox, is similar to the new ground breaking features of a Chrome when it had come out. A few years of recommending Firefox will have an effect. Today I use Chrome, Chromium and Firefox. Firefox is my daily driver and it is no slower than Chroumium

bionoid 8y ago

> Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable Sorry for going off-topic on rant here, but yesterday I had a 3 months old win10 workstation refuse to start the built-in calculator app. It worked fine the evening before, and no updates were installed in between... This is apparantly a common problem for many users. I found lots of possible solutions, but of course, none of them worked for me. I took ownership of install dirs, redeployed the appx, every hack I could find... Eventually I gave up and copied calc.exe from a win7 computer -- of course it doesn't run on win10, that would be too easy. So I installed a third-party calculator and apologized to the user on behalf of Microsoft... > Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 Nothing will change my perception of win10.

sodosopa 8y ago

We don’t test with Edge because it’s less than 2% of our traffic. Same reason we don’t test Opera or the browser on the old Blackberry phones.

Bird2920 8y ago

Developers just need to do their due diligence to ensure their sites and products work on the entire spectrum. Including Opera, Safari, Chromium, Firefox, ie/edge, etc. Does it really add that much development time to just open a site and compare across multiple browsers?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

decebalus1 8y ago

> What other options do they have? Especially after Mariani left almost 2 years ago to join Facebook. I assume everything went to shit shortly before he left.

filomeno 8y ago

Well, it's not my fault that I can't use Edge on my operating system of choice. It's not "YOU don't test your work in Egde" but "YOU don't test your work in Edge but you wouldn't be able to". So please, do not blame the users, but Microsoft.

h1d 8y ago
It's not so hard to run it in virtualization to test.
- filomeno 8y ago
  It's the same effort it takes to run Linux in virtualization to test your software on it yet nobody does.

cannedslime 8y ago

I test my stuff in IE, and honestly its not worth the extra time. So many inconsistencies with firefox & chrome, at least firefox behavior is well documented, but IE is not.

TheKarateKid 8y ago

Surprisingly, casual Windows users have been "trained" to use Chrome and Firefox instead of IE/Edge, and Edge has the same logo so they know not to use it. So there's not much casual usage of Edge to begin with even though it's the default OS browser out of the box. If Edge were multi-platform, then I'd consider it worth my time. But as Mac, Chrome OS, and Linux users continue to grow, I'm not going to waste my time making sure it works for a small amount of Windows users who barely even use the browser to begin with. Not to mention I'd need to dual-boot or run a VM just to test my work.

godot 8y ago

Is it really as bad as you say? Microsoft is not giving up on making a browser, they are switching rendering engine. I see this as a good thing overall -- one less rendering engine to worry about during dev, but still have a different browser maintained by a prominent company (that comes with the most used OS in the world, even). The net effect is that, stuff that Google tries to pull (like auto logging in accounts in Chrome based on your gmail) will still be negative for Google and still cause people to switch; because you have options. On the other hand, devs can expect code behavior to match more closely now even in MS Anaheim because its underlying rendering engine is now the same as Chrome. It's not monoculture of product choice, it's monoculture of underlying rendering engine, which seems like a good thing to me.

blue4 8y ago

Maybe this is just my opinion and not a fact but I have created tests and have found that Edge has the best quality of all three (Chrome, Firefox) when watching videos on Netflix. Can anyone explain this?

JohnBooty 8y ago

Market share isn't decided by power users like us. We influence it, sure, but most of the world just uses whatever's preinstalled on their OS.

daveheq 8y ago

Edge's browser engine is fine; people don't use it because it's not the defualt and Microsoft won't deprecate IE or just make it a not-so-prominent app. They can't keep IE alive forever yet businesses are not dropping it. They have to kill it at some point. The problem with Edge is it's missing features other browsers have had for years, including IE. Microsoft just needs to add those features, not reinvent their browser again.