18 ms·

Microsoft Edge and open source collaboration

376 points by xPaw 8y ago

VoxPelli 8y ago
Will Microsoft use V8 as the javascript engine then as well or continue to use Chakra? If they won’t continue to use Chakra, what happens to that project then? It is open sourced and there’s work to make Node.js use it: https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore All the more important to support Servo and Gecko – we can’t have all browsers be of WebKit origin – we rather need more initiatives like Servo, that reinvents the engine from scratch, optimized for modern environments.
- VoxPelli 8y ago
  I opened an issue to ask: https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore/issues/611 https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore/issues/611
  - meandmycode 8y ago
    They will be using Chromium (blink+V8) but intend to continue the open source development of chakra, but I suppose edgehtml is dead. Source: https://twitter.com/bterlson/status/1070754781822574592 https://twitter.com/bterlson/status/1070754781822574592
breatheoften 8y ago
Are they gonna put chakra into chromium or use v8?
- laughingpine 8y ago
  yeah - I am also curious about this considering there are projects like ChakraCore and node-ChakraCore out there. Would seem like a shame to lose the work done on that project.
burtonator 8y ago
A lot of you guys are lamenting this decision. I'm insanely excited about it! I've been working on a new reader and documentation manager for PDF and cached web content: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's based on Electron and targets Chromium. What I'm hoping happens here is that this means more focus on Chromium and potentially more work on Electron + Carlo. Electron is amazing but it's pretty bloated per app. If it's made lighter weight and something like Carlo can just use the OS installed browser in an isolated process you'll have the best of both worlds. You can use web standards to build your apps and at the same time dock into native OS features without the massive bloat. Right now Polar is about 100MB to download and uses about 200MB of RAM. Not the end of the world but also not super fun. There's the issue of one central monoculture but there's still the opportunity to fork if chrome/edge gain too much market share.
- delfinom 8y ago
  The problem is versioning. Chromium jumps major versions in releases very very often. This often includes security updates. Microsoft isn't going to keep old versions of the browser around nor are apps totally not going to break when the chromium version gets a bump.
- Rudism 8y ago
  The fact that projects choose to target a specific rendering engine as opposed to just writing web standards compliant code and having it work in any browser that follows those standards is precisely the reason why people (me, at least) are lamenting this decision. With Edge, Blink, and Webkit competing for marketshare, app developers are forced to at least think about sticking to web standards or risk losing a chunk of potential users. In a world where only Blink exists and all developers care about is that things work in Blink, any new browser entering the market now not only has to worry about compliance with official web standards, they also need to worry about emulating the idiosyncratic behavior of Blink that developers have discovered and started abusing or taking advantage of. The actual standards essentially become moot and Blink becomes the real standard. And while, sure, Blink/Chromium is open source, with both Google and Microsoft heavily invested in its development and direction, who do you think is going to have all the power in making the important decisions?
halis 8y ago
This announcement is about 6 years late, but yeah, it makes sense! Now, there may be some point in the future where I open a Microsoft browser and do more than barf on myself and download Chrome.
wnevets 8y ago
If the UI is going to be just as terrible as it is now, I will still refuse to use it.
scotchio 8y ago
Some people are saying this is not good for competition. I see it as a positive for keeping Google in check. Chrome's marketshare is insane. Google could autoupdate Chrome overnight push out some wild update like requiring you to sign in to use their browser or something else like default rendering everything to AMP wrappers for example... who knows / tinfoil hat time. Now there's a solid and non-disruptive quick switch default that is already installed (sorry FF, Brave) on Windows machines similar to what Apple has with Safari.
MikusR 8y ago
In short. Edge engine is dead. Based on Chromium. Not an UWP. Will be on Windows 7 and Mac.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  And the updates won't be tied to Windows versions anymore.
- copperx 8y ago
  If Edge comes to Linux it will be the second ice age in hell.
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    Why? Other Microsoft software runs on Linux.
    - shaki-dora 8y ago
      In their defense, they did specify it being the second.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Once upon a time there was an IE version for Solaris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX
- mtgx 8y ago
  This is hilarious to me. When Edge was just a rumor and before Windows 10 was released, I said here that I hope Microsoft will not repeat the mistake of tying this new modern browser to Windows 10 like it has done in the past with Internet Explorer and prior Windows versions. Microsoft, in its short-sighted way, thought that tying the browser to Windows would be an "advantage," because of things like "better integration with the OS" and throwing the Edge updates in there with the Windows updates, without needing a different update channel. However, this was short-sighted was because of the following reasons: - Edge development would remain very sluggish compared to the development of Chrome and Firefox, as new major features would have to wait until Windows itself gets new major features (which happens every 6 months, rather than 6 weeks). - It would mean Edge would not be cross-platform, a huge strategic mistake on Microsoft's part. People want to use the same browser across devices. - The proprietary "features" Microsoft would build in Edge over time that only work with certain versions of Windows will come back to bite it in the ass in the future.
volandovengo 8y ago
This is HUGE! Microsoft throwing away the IE engine in favor of one more or less standard rendering engine is a huge win for web developers everywhere! It's also something that would have been unimaginable in the Steve Ballmer era. Thank you!
- copperx 8y ago
  > standard rendering engine This is a blessing for developers but a curse and threat for the web going forward.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- fabricexpert 8y ago
  > A huge win for web developers everywhere! And a huge loss for users everywhere. Now that Chrome is becoming the main web target, Google (an adtech company) basically controls the internet.
  - polskibus 8y ago
    It already controls the Internet. More importantly, Chromium will now also control the intranet.
  - dxf 8y ago
    The article says the MSFT will be a significant contributor to Chromium. If anything, this means that Google will have _less_ control, as a second major internet player will be involved.
    - pas 8y ago
      Who is the current Chromium project lead? What's the decision making process? How can MS employees participate? How can MS employees in the future go against the wishes of Google with regards to Chromium? Will we see revert wars?
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux/POSIX as well.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  There's still time to open source it. I'm confused why they don't, at this point. Well, not that confused, I guess it ties in to Windows quite a bit and it's probably not worth it for them. Still I hope they do it.
  - sebazzz 8y ago
    I do not think it is trivial to port EdgeHTML. Don't forget it is a fork of Trident with the legacy parts clipped away and some cogs polished, replaced or added. Not meant to run multi-plat, not even meant to run outside Windows 10.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      Wrong person to reply to :) I don't really think it's worth porting it to Linux either. Although I'm sure the Wine people would have a field day with it. But open sourcing it for the sake of practical domain knowledge, if not history, would be good.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    "There's still time to open source it. I'm confused why they don't, at this point." can't... it's really difficult to retroactively open source something. Only a few developers grok the code and they work for your company and are about to move on to another project. Tooling is usually proprietary and tied into some 3rd party infra.... Look at OpenJDK... Sun and Oracle dragged their feet FOREVER on this and the project still has problems because of it... Should have been OSSd in 2005 but Sun was insanely naive.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  This is step 2: Extend.
dazhbog 8y ago
I hope this move changes the hostile amount of google services that are baked into Chrome and Chromium. Not saying MS is any better, but at least there will be more choices for users and where before everything was hardcoded, now there will be an option to select and potentially expose more customization for us morals.
- ridiculous_fish 8y ago
  Which Google services are baked into Chromium?
  - dazhbog 8y ago
    There are several services and binaries. Some examples are Google host detector, Google URL tracker, Google cloud messaging, Google hotwording, Safe browsing, password saving feature naggs you to sign-in, translation etc. There are also a lot of binaries that are bundled, but im not really an expert on those.
  - mftrhu 8y ago
    The store comes to mind, but see, for example, the inox patchset[1], part of ungoogled-chromium[2], which tries to minimize what Chromium calls home for (e.g. a bunch of extensions, Google accounts, and a few services which sync data with/ping the Google servers). [1] https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset [2] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
sebazzz 8y ago
EdgeHTML is also used for embedding HTML into UWP, and controls have been released for WPF and Win32. I wonder what will be the story of that. Will that be transparently changed to Chrome, can it be changed to Chrome or will EdgeHTML be used only for that?
- vtesucks 8y ago
  On that note- what is the engine used by outlook, word et al.? I seem to recall outlook used something different from trident back when ie was the main browser.
  - sebazzz 8y ago
    Yes, and was ironically more standards compatible than WordHTML they use now. AFAIK they changed to WordHTML with or after Outlook 2007 [0] [0]: https://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/wordhtml.htm https://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/wordhtml.htm
- wvenable 8y ago
  I suspect the rise of Electron apps, including Microsoft's own applications like Visual Studio Code, are actually driving this decision. Effectively within Microsoft, Chromium has already won over EdgeHTML for desktop applications.
  - robbick 8y ago
    This is so important to consider, chromium is more than a browser these days
- mrpippy 8y ago
  I'm doubtful they would/can change the controls over transparently. My guess is that once the Chromium engine is ready, binaries built against new Windows SDKs will use Chromium, and existing binaries will continue to use EdgeHTML.
- mrpippy 8y ago
  Tweet from journalist Simon Le Gros Bisson: EdgeHTML and Chakra will still be maintained; I was told that the transition to Chromium for web views in UWP and the like is a longer term plan. https://twitter.com/sbisson/status/1070726583445409792 https://twitter.com/sbisson/status/1070726583445409792
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
alanfranzoni 8y ago
What I find a bit curious is that's a fully Chromium based browser, it's not simply based on the Blink rendering engine. So, it will be much closer (probably) to Chromium/Chrome than other blink-based browsers like Brave or Opera. I'd really like to understand the rationale behind this choice. What they'd like to leverage from Chromium that Blink alone wouldn't have?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- wvenable 8y ago
  It's likely because of Electron. Microsoft already creates applications for Electron (which is Chromium) so maintaining that compatibility is likely a high priority.
- mrpippy 8y ago
  It's hard to glean technical details from the post, but "We will move to a Chromium-compatible web platform for Microsoft Edge on the desktop" indicates to me that this will be Edge based on Blink, not the full Chromium shell renamed/rewritten to be Edge. Hard to tell though
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Or it could be the other way around: a Chromium shell still calling EdgeHTML render processes? It's really not clear in this blog post. What does "Chromium-compatible web platform" mean? Which part of Chromium is the "platform" in question? This blog post doesn't have enough answers.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      Pointed out in other threads, the GitHub README has more details: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge I still feel like I've got a ton of questions left unanswered, but the README helps.
- 8y ago
egeozcan 8y ago
If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it? I mean there was this "startup growth hacking" kind of craziness from a corporation and sudden admittance of defeat... It's very confusing. Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don't we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It's not like they stopped the aggressive marketing for a few years and now saying that they can no longer keep up. They probably are doing it now still and implying that Edge is better. Is the marketing really so uninformed about such big decisions?
- oconnor663 8y ago
  Big companies have lots of stakeholders. The person whose job it is to grow Edge's user numbers isn't the person whose job it is to make the call on the rendering engine. I don't know if their interests really conflict in this case, but in general it wouldn't be surprising if those two people/orgs sent mixed messages sometimes.
- wvenable 8y ago
  Microsoft is trying to drive traffic to Bing (and their other services). The rendering engine doesn't actually matter. Microsoft could just bundle Chrome with Windows but instead they are specifically taking the Chromium engine and putting it in an Edge shell. The only reason for that is to maintain control over the user to drive them to Microsoft properties.
  - dlojudice 8y ago
    > The rendering engine doesn't actually matter. It does matter. From the comment above "browser vendors taking the lead over standards committees" means influence on where the technology is heading, specially for rendering engines. Remember how long it took IE to implement canvas? This was a way to avoid a new "OS" over a OS (Windows)
    - wvenable 8y ago
      This decision is perfectly in line with Microsoft's shift in focus -- Windows is no longer the hill they want to die on. Microsoft is all about services. Also I suspect Microsoft will have far more actual influence by driving development of Chromium than with their own rendering engine. It's pretty hard to drive new standards when you are barely achieving the current ones. Microsoft's focus on Electron for cross-platform development kind of informs this move as well.
lwansbrough 8y ago
Really wish Microsoft would open source the Edge renderer.
tombert 8y ago
I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible. It's still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we're going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).
- simonsarris 8y ago
  > instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible The browser vendors taking the lead over standards committees is how we got this far into HTML5, especially including Apple's/Safari's decision to ditch flash, and the WHATWG actually moving us forward vs the W3C. Unless Blink has a history or an expectation of deprecating serious functionality in the future, is it really so bad if websites follow what's Chrome-compatible instead of 'a web standard'?
  - pas 8y ago
    W3C might be too slow, but eschewing at least a rough consensus and instead just ramming through whatever you feel like is the other extreme end of the spectrum. And Google is no saint, so if it benefits them and only them, who cares, Chrome will support it, the community be damned. And this - of course - applies to depreciation of functionality. (Think about any web feature/standard as another Google property, like G+ ... scary? But that's where we're headed with the Blink hegemony.)
  - detaro 8y ago
    I don't think you can conclude from "things got better when browser vendors took over" that it'd be the same if there was one vendor dominating. They keep each other honest at least to a degree, forcing that issues are discussed and things thought out instead of someone in a browser team coming up with an idea and shipping it the first way they can come up with.
  - mcgannon2007 8y ago
    Because then any pull request introducing something into Chromium essentially becomes the web standard. For example, Google has a ton of influence on the project. If they want to, they can introduce something that benefits their services but eschews the web standard.
Retroity 8y ago
On one hand, this creates a platform that is more or less the standard of the web. On the other hand, this only gives Google more control of the web. I really wish that instead of doing this Microsoft would just stick with EdgeHTML and maybe open-source it.
- VoxPelli 8y ago
  The monoculture is the main issue here. Google should not be happy about this. Makes it harder for them and everyone else to push web standards forward.
_nickwhite 8y ago
Could this be a bad thing for Firefox? Seems like Microsoft + Google is quite a rival to go against?
- zbraniecki 8y ago
  Firefox (by that I hope you mean Mozilla Project) cares about diversity and choice. Our Mozilla Manifesto [0] describes our vision of the balance between corporate and civic value of the Internet. I speak for myself - I believe that decrease in diversity of implementations of the Web standard and drift toward a monopoly is harmful to our vision of the Internet and ultimately will hurt the Open Web. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
  - tcd 8y ago
    I mean, in all honesty, EdgeHTML wasn't ever really an engine that had much hope. IE has always been loathed, Edge just continued that trend. Their marketshare wasn't great, and tying browser updates to the OS as they did with IE was irresponsible for how browsers are shipped these days. If Edge had 35% marketshare I'd be more concerned, but nobody was using it, and web developers hated trying to make their sites compatible. Good riddance to IE/Edge of old :)
- sebazzz 8y ago
  Microsoft is not an active rival - at least not from a technical perspective. It is probably up for Mozilla to make a choice: will we implement the standard or will we mimic the behavior of Blink for compatibility reasons (which may be incorrect in some cases).
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    I understand adding bug compatibility in the days of IE6, but in the days of Chromium, why not just fix the bug in Chromium source?
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Having more chefs in the kitchen is not necessarily a better thing.
crazy_monkey 8y ago
Open-source is good! The less of it written by Microsoft, the better!
jpangs88 8y ago
I feel like I should be happy as a web dev to hear that I no longer have to support a browser engine made by Microsoft (which has been a huge pain and despite this will be a huge pain for a while due to people still using old browsers) but this feels bittersweet. It feels like we're taking the engineering out of everything because companies can make more money by not innovating.
- VoxPelli 8y ago
  They want short term wins and gives away long term ones. I guess the Chrome team itself aren’t happy about this. Will make standards work harder for them. Better to have the Edge team build alternative implementations of standards in their own engines than to implement even more stuff in Chromium. Chrome already has a hard time not running ahead of the rest of the web, they don’t need more people to speed it up even further.
ridiculous_fish 8y ago
Honest question: what is the population of committers (not contributors) on Chromium? Is there any significant number outside of Google? Is Chromium de-facto controlled by Google, or more community driven?
- VoxPelli 8y ago
  Considering that Samsung Internet, Brave, Opera, Electron etc is based on Chromium and at least Samsung Internet adding new features of their own to it, there are at least many other people working on the code base. I would guess that Microsoft would keep using Chorus rather than adopting V8, but if they aren’t, then V8 has contributions from eg. Node.js And as states in the article: Edge on Android and on ARM seems to already be Chromium based
  - ridiculous_fish 8y ago
    There's a crucial difference between "working on the code base" and having commit access. The committers are the gatekeepers and the steamrollers. What I'm effectively asking is this: 1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it? 2. If the community opts to steer Chromium in a way that Google finds objectionable, could Google stop it?
    - VoxPelli 8y ago
      Yeah, but if many people are working on the browser code and those people don’t like what Google is doing anymore, then they individually or collectively could fork the code, just like Google forked their engine from WebKit when they wanted to move in a different direction than apple
    - bad_user 8y ago
      > "1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it?" The answer to that is obvious. Of course not. Google owns Chromium's repository. Even if the "community" decides to fork Chromium, Google owns Chrome, so any fork of Chromium is completely irrelevant. That's because people download and install Chrome and not obscure Chromium forks. And that is why web standards are important ;-)
smoser 8y ago
Wow a new Microsoft web browser for the Mac! Haven't seen one of those in 15 years.
croddin 8y ago
Wasn't an original idea of Edge that it would have several different quirks modes where it would use the old IE renderer to work with old corporate websites and such to be extremely backwards compatible? Could this break things for some companies with old IE-only internal websites etc? (Not that I don't think these should have all been made to work with chrome long ago.) If they are going to try to maintain some kind of quirks mode, would that be open sourced?
- sebazzz 8y ago
  IE only websites are added to the Enterprise Site List[0] by the sysadmin and will be opened in IE11, just like now. Edge has never dynamically switched engines, it just opened IE. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-to-improve-compatibility https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-...
Scarbutt 8y ago
I always though Mozilla should be the one doing this, let google do all the hard work and focus their resources in increasing market share and having better privacy, if they have the resources to maintain firefox then they have the resources to maintain a chromium fork.
Vinnl 8y ago
Aww man... I can't help but reminisce about how it would've been if they'd decided to become significant contributors to Gecko.
explodingcamera 8y ago
It's funny that when you go to select your country, depending on the privacy laws in said country you have to agree to their terms of service using a checkmark/no checkmark.
ucaetano 8y ago
This is actually great for the web. Having two competitors like Google and MS contributing to a single rendering engine, and competing on the actual browsers means less fragmentation without the single-entity-control problem.
Adutude 8y ago
The name.... reminds me of <blink>Annoying Text</blink>
sctb 8y ago
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595069.
sprash 8y ago
Funny that minor side project of KDE is now responsible for the vast majority of today's Internet traffic. Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work?
- mevile 8y ago
  > Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work? Why would they? That's not how open source works. If the KDE devs that made Konqueror wanted to capture value or do it for monetary gain they would have made a closed source browser and I doubt Apple would have then picked it to build WebKit. Apple is what made WebKit predominant, the KDE devs simply did a great job and should be very proud of what they've done, but it doesn't make sense for there to be policy change around open source for recompensating devs when their projects take off.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > Why would they? That's not how open source works. If the KDE devs that made Konqueror wanted to capture value or do it for monetary gain they would have made a closed source browser Making something open-source does not mean you don't want to make money off it.
- Gaelan 8y ago
  I wonder how much of KHTML is even left in WebKit/blink.
- mda 8y ago
  There is almost nothing left of it for years.
- gsnedders 8y ago
  > Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work? Many, AIUI, were employees of Trolltech, and I assume Trolltech paid its employees.
- adontz 8y ago
  That's common story. SQLite began as TCL extension. And who uses TCL these days compared to SQLite?
ezoe 8y ago
So, Microsoft finally realized that they can't develop the web browser inside the single company. I wonder what they realize the next. A Compiler?
projectramo 8y ago
Recipe for success: Take chromium and make it super private. Put a moat up for identity, add a VPN (if that makes some people feel better), encrypt traffic etc. You could even charge people for the heavy duty version that might use some Azure services. The only issue with this is charging people requires tying their browser to the payment method.
slartibardfast0 8y ago
WebKit Scrollbars by attrition rather than specification is an odd way to go about things, but I for one will take it!
no_wizard 8y ago
I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it: stick it to Google [0] I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum) or WebKit (https://webkit.org https://webkit.org), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have sufficed as an Electron replacement that they could drive forward, but I suppose they own Electron now with Github acquired) For its not Apple anymore and certainly not Mozilla that is the prime competitor nowadays to Microsoft, its Google (With Chromebooks in the schools, and their small business and cloud offerings) and Amazon's Web Services division that are their main competitors now. While I don't know how all the business logic went into this and ultimately came up with this being the best calculation at hand, I think this would have played better in the media too (especially if they leaned on Mozilla) [0] I know Chromium != Google, but its pretty hard not to see that most of Chromium's development is downstream from Google and Google employs and/or otherwise has had some direct influence over the core team
- mirkules 8y ago
  One thing that’s worse than Microsoft not adopting a technology is Microsoft adopting a technology. Historically, they’ve used the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy quite often, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. But maybe I’m being overly skeptical/borderline cynical...
  - justcool393 8y ago
    This would be the situation where EEE would be a good thing for the community. Now if you were talking about Firefox, then I'd agree that that would be bad.
  - ziftface 8y ago
    The opposite is happening. They have such a small market share that developers didn't have enough incentive to actually support/test on their browser so all their work was just trying to get edge to be chrome-compatible. Turns out making your browser a chrome clone is an easier way to do that.
TheWiseOne 8y ago
So the web is now going to be even more Chrome-centric than it is... I wonder if they thought about picking Gecko instead.
boshomi 8y ago
Will Mircosoft use V8 or Charka Core?
rinchik 8y ago
> As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge — but other browsers as well — better on both PCs and other devices. "Embrace, extend, and extinguish"? At this point, with google, I'm not even sure if it's a bad thing, if true.
ausjke 8y ago
Another "if you can't beat them just join them"? In fact Edge is 99.9999% irrelevant at least to me, all my time with Edge added up to be less than 5 minutes over the years, I only need it to download chrome(or firefox).
Kjeldahl 8y ago
Excellent news. Google mostly does not have their own desktop OS to "protect", so they are probably incentivised to make the browser and the apps running in it feel as "native" as possible, with proper access to important local resources when relevant. Considering how Apple is dragging their feet with service worker and offline support on Safari (where they have a monopoly on iOS), this is probably a good thing overall. Fingers crossed!
- bad_user 8y ago
  > "Google mostly does not have their own desktop OS to "protect"" But they do and they are actually Microsoft's biggest competitor on the desktop: https://www.google.com/chromebook/ https://www.google.com/chromebook/
shmerl 8y ago
Good development. Now we need more open source collaboration in MS gaming branch. Let MS back Vulkan instead of continuing DX12 lock-in.
garysahota93 8y ago
It's crazy! This is not the Microsoft from ~5 years ago. They have really changed! Opening up to linux, cross-platform apps, open sourcing tech, open sourcing their patents(!), and now using open source chromium for MS Edge? Dam. I never thought I'd see the day...
- krylon 8y ago
  It is an interesting time to be alive, that is for sure.
  - garysahota93 8y ago
    Agreed!
niputi 8y ago
it seems like a lot of people don't know this but the current Edge engine is Open Source. look here https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore
- krylon 8y ago
  Chakra is "just" the Javascript engine, the HTML render engine used by Edge is not open source.
MrZipf 8y ago
Hey Joe, can't you just stop nagging users to use your browser and stop overriding the users choice of browser? No need to repackage anything, just move on.
partiallypro 8y ago
I'm wondering why they decided to keep the Edge brand. It seems dropping it and the "e" logo all together would be ideal. The logo beit IE or Edge has negative emotions for many users. I am excited for this though, because I will probably make the Microsoft browser my default once it launches since it will finally have access to the vast Chrome extension library. But, I still think they will struggle with adoption just from a branding standpoint.
- abrowne 8y ago
  There was a blog post I can't find now when they announced Edge that they had to pick a E- name and an E logo otherwise literally millions of people would no longer know how to access "the internet".
fbelzile 8y ago
Does anyone know what the extension ecosystem of this new Edge will look like?
kopite 8y ago
I would rather not install Chrome at all on my windows machine. I use Brave (a chromium based browser) and with right extensions, I can see myself using the new Chromium based Edge. I bet that will be the thought process for a lot of general people using browsers. Chrome will loose its market share to Edge for sure.
vezycash 8y ago
When Microsoft released Edge, they claimed bugs plagued IE because they couldn't update IE without OS updates. Edge as a "store app" would receive frequent updates, independent of Windows OS updates. They ended up tying Edge to Windows. And kept promising but never delivered. Instead of small frequent browser updates, we got large frequent OS updates. Maybe now that Edge's dead, they'll slow down the frequency of Windows update a bit. In the beginning, IE was speedier than Edge. Had more features too. Edge was fragile and froze often. Updates fixed some of the speed issues. I froze my windows update so, I don't know how it stacks up right now. To increase Windows store usage, MS also decided to tie Edge extension to the Windows store. This wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, I like the idea of getting all my stuff in one place. However, MS decided to create the annoying store app. I'm on a desktop, a real computer. Why on earth can't I open the store on a browser and have the installer do its work in the background? This is where I drew the line with Edge. I'm not surprised that Edge's marketshare declined with increased Windows 10 marketshare. Edge is Microsoft's second Windows 8. They are both PC software designed to please mobile users and infuriate PC or touch-less users. And both hide settings - make it a chore to change minor settings. I believe throwing Windows Phone under the bus has come back to bite Microsoft in the ass and Edge is just a trailer. Microsoft is still gutting Windows 10 - turning it into a phone OS for desktop users, replacing working software with incomplete toys. As far as I'm concerned, Google didn't beat MS in the browser game. MS simply frustrated IE users over to Chrome by forcing Edge on them. Windows is the next software MS will abandon for Google's alternative. All Google has to do is not mess up android. If you remember Nokia/MS's failed fork of Android you'll feel the chill. Microsoft now sells android smartphones in both its online and retail stores. I predict MS is not done with Edge. At the end, they'll abandon that too for Chrome. And all they'll do is change the default search engine to Bing.
- fbelzile 8y ago
  > MS also decided to tie Edge extension to the Windows store. I think this was a big mistake. I hope they mirror what Google is doing with the Chrome store. As a developer, I had to: 1) Port my Chrome extension into a UWP app 2) Embed another win32 exe to read/write SQLite databases because UWP don't do that. 3) Pay $100 to open a developer account 4) After compiling the extension, reading blogs to figure out how to even upload the correct files 5) Have Microsoft deny my extension because it required special permissions (the win32 exe) 6) Still no extension uploaded.
hexmiles 8y ago
I'm a bit sad by the announcement. I quite like edge, and now the browser ecosystem is getting narrower. What should Mozilla do now? Should they just give up? Now that everywhere except ios/macos is blink (and v8 i think, i'm not sure after reading the announcement) why should anyone care for firefox? Should also Mozilla start using chromium as a base? Mozilla will still be able to add quite the value in term of functionality, and with a bigger focus on privacy than google. I'm honestly not sure anymore. Maintaining a browser is a hard work and it's getting harder, so it's (i think) unlikely a new player will ever enter the game, and having one engine where to test thing will make the job of creating websites and webapps simpler, on the other hand a monopoly can be a very bad thing for the web. I like firefox a lot, and it's my daily driver, but if tomorrow they change the engine, i probably won't even notice, and not having to maintain the entire stack may allow them to better focus on other area, like decentralization, privacy, addons and services (firefox send is amazing), and may even allow a easier experimentation with new webapi. I'm really not sure how to feel about this... On a side note: I really do hope they make chromium and especialy CEF more modular. it's amazing to embed a web browser inside a app, but it's very hard to override some of his behavior, for example: while it's easy to have a custom cookie management system, there are no api to override localstorage or the chronology, only some workaround. In a past work project we needed to build a thin client for a intranet and one of the requirement was, basically, an encrypted browser profile, custom CA management, client certificate and some other things, doing that using cef was very hard and it used a lot of hacks. edit: correct some grammar
outside1234 8y ago
The most exciting thing here is that, hopefully, we will get a version of Chromium on Mac without spyware.
- krylon 8y ago
  Can't you just run vanilla Chromium without the Google stuff on macOS? Honest question, I don't think I ever looked, and now I am back on GNU/Linux. On Windows, there is no build of vanilla Chromium, as far as I could find out. Then again, I did not try very hard, because I started using Firefox back when it was still called Firebird; the only incentive I had to check out Chromium on Linux were some web sites that did not work very well with Firefox (VPS console on Vultr, Netflix).
vatueil 8y ago
There's a new GitHub repository for Microsoft Edge: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge The readme goes into more detail than the blog post announcement, including emphasis on Windows on ARM, information about WebRTC for UWP, and explicit confirmation that they plan to bring Edge to Windows 7 and 8 as well as macOS. Also, looks like they're using the MIT license.
dzonga 8y ago
They could've chosen to go with Safari webkit. Since on the desktop it's pretty standards compliant. & it's pretty fast & power efficient too. But they chose Chromium, because they now own Electron. Also fuxk apple for having Safari on iOS being shitty, but good at protecting privacy
mythz 8y ago
Whilst this basically declares the Browser wars over and crystalizes Chromium as the Web's browser engine it's reassuring it's in the hands of the company with infinite resources, talent and a vested interest in seeing the web platform succeed with Google benefiting when more people spend more time on the Web (essentially the business case in starting Chrome to push the web forward, quicker). The only rendering engine that stands a chance at competing against Chrome is Safari/WebKit (thanks to iOS) and Apple would rather see native iOS Apps succeed to re-enforce their walled garden they have complete control over. So whilst it's a dark day for browser engine diversity, I don't see it as a blow against the Web overall (i.e. as a popular platform to develop for) as Google/Chrome is the driving force behind making Chromium more powerful to close the experience vs native Apps with initiatives like PWAs of which a side-effect is we'll be able to use new APIs sooner and increase web developer velocity by having 1 less browser engine we need to test against. A lot of people see browser wars as a gauge for the health of the Web but I consider the biggest threat to the "open web" is native mobile Apps which needs to become more capable in order to be able to deliver the same integrated experiences. In that light I don't see the competition of more browser engines making the Web better. Chrome wasn't created in reaction to competition, it was created because there was none left with MS leaving IE6 (and the main interface into the Web) to wither and die. IMO competing browser engines are holding the Web back with not being able to use new APIs as they're available, needing to cater for the lowest common denominator and having to test and support against a matrix of different browser engines and versions. It would be a different story if I thought Google would pull back investment in Chrome after they achieve total dominance, but I don't see that, their current strategy is winning where they benefit in a faster, stronger more popular Web and have been lifting the state of the art browser development since Chrome/V8's inception. Of course we now have to worry about Google thwarting the direction of Chromium to their benefit to the detriment of their users, the best way to minimize that is to have multiple collaborators committing to the Chromium project like MS Announces suggests they're doing. IMO it would be in Firefox's best interest to also switch to and collaborate on Chromium as well. Their market share is fading into irrelevance and after Edge/Chromium I see less developers investing their time to test on FF. I believe their efforts would be best spent on innovating on the browser's UI and function as I don't see how maintaining an alternative browser engine is a competitive advantage, IMO it's one of the reasons for their decline in market share. They should still be able to achieve their objectives the same way Vivaldi and Brave are doing with their added privacy protections in their Blink forks.
bovermyer 8y ago
This bit is probably the most interesting to me: > We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS.
zabil 8y ago
I am super excited about this. I work on an open source tool to automate chromium browser https://github.com/getgauge/taiko https://github.com/getgauge/taiko and the Chrome Devtools protocol makes it really easy to do so. With edge using chromium Cross browser testing will suck less.
antaviana 8y ago
Any chances that with this move, Windows adopts Chromium instead of Internet Explorer as embedded browser for Windows applications? That will remove plenty of IE rendering issues and also the need to link a whole CEF to get Chromium rendering in your application.
godelmachine 8y ago
No offense meant to anyone, but don't engineers at Microsoft feel humiliated over the fact that their employer chose an open source project that was started by their rival viz. Google? I am just curious how competitiveness works in FAANG.
fetbaffe 8y ago
My problem with Edge is not the rendering engine, it is the application it self, it is clunky & buggy, after a while with multiple application windows with multiple tabs, shortcut keys just stop working in some windows & some windows just freezes for a while.
oaiey 8y ago
I think Microsoft made already a deal with Google about the control of chromium. It would be endless naive otherwise. Do not forget that this is a full development stack within Windows. UWP has a JavaScript/HTML runtime and Microsoft's recent pwa visions both need to earn money. My bet is that Google will announce in the next weeks or at the next io a foundation for dealing with chromium. The only thing which itches me with that a bit is ChromeOS. But maybe that is more a plugin thingy.

376 points by xPaw 8y ago

Will Microsoft use V8 as the javascript engine then as well or continue to use Chakra? If they won’t continue to use Chakra, what happens to that project then? It is open sourced and there’s work to make Node.js use it: https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore All the more important to support Servo and Gecko – we can’t have all browsers be of WebKit origin – we rather need more initiatives like Servo, that reinvents the engine from scratch, optimized for modern environments.

VoxPelli 8y ago
I opened an issue to ask: https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore/issues/611 https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore/issues/611
- meandmycode 8y ago
  They will be using Chromium (blink+V8) but intend to continue the open source development of chakra, but I suppose edgehtml is dead. Source: https://twitter.com/bterlson/status/1070754781822574592 https://twitter.com/bterlson/status/1070754781822574592

breatheoften 8y ago

Are they gonna put chakra into chromium or use v8?

laughingpine 8y ago
yeah - I am also curious about this considering there are projects like ChakraCore and node-ChakraCore out there. Would seem like a shame to lose the work done on that project.

burtonator 8y ago

A lot of you guys are lamenting this decision. I'm insanely excited about it! I've been working on a new reader and documentation manager for PDF and cached web content: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's based on Electron and targets Chromium. What I'm hoping happens here is that this means more focus on Chromium and potentially more work on Electron + Carlo. Electron is amazing but it's pretty bloated per app. If it's made lighter weight and something like Carlo can just use the OS installed browser in an isolated process you'll have the best of both worlds. You can use web standards to build your apps and at the same time dock into native OS features without the massive bloat. Right now Polar is about 100MB to download and uses about 200MB of RAM. Not the end of the world but also not super fun. There's the issue of one central monoculture but there's still the opportunity to fork if chrome/edge gain too much market share.

delfinom 8y ago
The problem is versioning. Chromium jumps major versions in releases very very often. This often includes security updates. Microsoft isn't going to keep old versions of the browser around nor are apps totally not going to break when the chromium version gets a bump.
Rudism 8y ago
The fact that projects choose to target a specific rendering engine as opposed to just writing web standards compliant code and having it work in any browser that follows those standards is precisely the reason why people (me, at least) are lamenting this decision. With Edge, Blink, and Webkit competing for marketshare, app developers are forced to at least think about sticking to web standards or risk losing a chunk of potential users. In a world where only Blink exists and all developers care about is that things work in Blink, any new browser entering the market now not only has to worry about compliance with official web standards, they also need to worry about emulating the idiosyncratic behavior of Blink that developers have discovered and started abusing or taking advantage of. The actual standards essentially become moot and Blink becomes the real standard. And while, sure, Blink/Chromium is open source, with both Google and Microsoft heavily invested in its development and direction, who do you think is going to have all the power in making the important decisions?

halis 8y ago

This announcement is about 6 years late, but yeah, it makes sense! Now, there may be some point in the future where I open a Microsoft browser and do more than barf on myself and download Chrome.

wnevets 8y ago

If the UI is going to be just as terrible as it is now, I will still refuse to use it.

scotchio 8y ago

Some people are saying this is not good for competition. I see it as a positive for keeping Google in check. Chrome's marketshare is insane. Google could autoupdate Chrome overnight push out some wild update like requiring you to sign in to use their browser or something else like default rendering everything to AMP wrappers for example... who knows / tinfoil hat time. Now there's a solid and non-disruptive quick switch default that is already installed (sorry FF, Brave) on Windows machines similar to what Apple has with Safari.

MikusR 8y ago

In short. Edge engine is dead. Based on Chromium. Not an UWP. Will be on Windows 7 and Mac.

sebazzz 8y ago
And the updates won't be tied to Windows versions anymore.
copperx 8y ago
If Edge comes to Linux it will be the second ice age in hell.
- bdcravens 8y ago
  Why? Other Microsoft software runs on Linux.
  - shaki-dora 8y ago
    In their defense, they did specify it being the second.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Once upon a time there was an IE version for Solaris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX
mtgx 8y ago
This is hilarious to me. When Edge was just a rumor and before Windows 10 was released, I said here that I hope Microsoft will not repeat the mistake of tying this new modern browser to Windows 10 like it has done in the past with Internet Explorer and prior Windows versions. Microsoft, in its short-sighted way, thought that tying the browser to Windows would be an "advantage," because of things like "better integration with the OS" and throwing the Edge updates in there with the Windows updates, without needing a different update channel. However, this was short-sighted was because of the following reasons: - Edge development would remain very sluggish compared to the development of Chrome and Firefox, as new major features would have to wait until Windows itself gets new major features (which happens every 6 months, rather than 6 weeks). - It would mean Edge would not be cross-platform, a huge strategic mistake on Microsoft's part. People want to use the same browser across devices. - The proprietary "features" Microsoft would build in Edge over time that only work with certain versions of Windows will come back to bite it in the ass in the future.

volandovengo 8y ago

This is HUGE! Microsoft throwing away the IE engine in favor of one more or less standard rendering engine is a huge win for web developers everywhere! It's also something that would have been unimaginable in the Steve Ballmer era. Thank you!

copperx 8y ago
> standard rendering engine This is a blessing for developers but a curse and threat for the web going forward.
deleted 8y ago
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fabricexpert 8y ago
> A huge win for web developers everywhere! And a huge loss for users everywhere. Now that Chrome is becoming the main web target, Google (an adtech company) basically controls the internet.
- polskibus 8y ago
  It already controls the Internet. More importantly, Chromium will now also control the intranet.
- dxf 8y ago
  The article says the MSFT will be a significant contributor to Chromium. If anything, this means that Google will have _less_ control, as a second major internet player will be involved.
  - pas 8y ago
    Who is the current Chromium project lead? What's the decision making process? How can MS employees participate? How can MS employees in the future go against the wishes of Google with regards to Chromium? Will we see revert wars?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux/POSIX as well.

scrollaway 8y ago
There's still time to open source it. I'm confused why they don't, at this point. Well, not that confused, I guess it ties in to Windows quite a bit and it's probably not worth it for them. Still I hope they do it.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  I do not think it is trivial to port EdgeHTML. Don't forget it is a fork of Trident with the legacy parts clipped away and some cogs polished, replaced or added. Not meant to run multi-plat, not even meant to run outside Windows 10.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    Wrong person to reply to :) I don't really think it's worth porting it to Linux either. Although I'm sure the Wine people would have a field day with it. But open sourcing it for the sake of practical domain knowledge, if not history, would be good.
- burtonator 8y ago
  "There's still time to open source it. I'm confused why they don't, at this point." can't... it's really difficult to retroactively open source something. Only a few developers grok the code and they work for your company and are about to move on to another project. Tooling is usually proprietary and tied into some 3rd party infra.... Look at OpenJDK... Sun and Oracle dragged their feet FOREVER on this and the project still has problems because of it... Should have been OSSd in 2005 but Sun was insanely naive.
craftyguy 8y ago
This is step 2: Extend.

dazhbog 8y ago

I hope this move changes the hostile amount of google services that are baked into Chrome and Chromium. Not saying MS is any better, but at least there will be more choices for users and where before everything was hardcoded, now there will be an option to select and potentially expose more customization for us morals.

ridiculous_fish 8y ago
Which Google services are baked into Chromium?
- dazhbog 8y ago
  There are several services and binaries. Some examples are Google host detector, Google URL tracker, Google cloud messaging, Google hotwording, Safe browsing, password saving feature naggs you to sign-in, translation etc. There are also a lot of binaries that are bundled, but im not really an expert on those.
- mftrhu 8y ago
  The store comes to mind, but see, for example, the inox patchset[1], part of ungoogled-chromium[2], which tries to minimize what Chromium calls home for (e.g. a bunch of extensions, Google accounts, and a few services which sync data with/ping the Google servers). [1] https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset [2] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

sebazzz 8y ago

EdgeHTML is also used for embedding HTML into UWP, and controls have been released for WPF and Win32. I wonder what will be the story of that. Will that be transparently changed to Chrome, can it be changed to Chrome or will EdgeHTML be used only for that?

vtesucks 8y ago
On that note- what is the engine used by outlook, word et al.? I seem to recall outlook used something different from trident back when ie was the main browser.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  Yes, and was ironically more standards compatible than WordHTML they use now. AFAIK they changed to WordHTML with or after Outlook 2007 [0] [0]: https://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/wordhtml.htm https://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/wordhtml.htm
wvenable 8y ago
I suspect the rise of Electron apps, including Microsoft's own applications like Visual Studio Code, are actually driving this decision. Effectively within Microsoft, Chromium has already won over EdgeHTML for desktop applications.
- robbick 8y ago
  This is so important to consider, chromium is more than a browser these days
mrpippy 8y ago
I'm doubtful they would/can change the controls over transparently. My guess is that once the Chromium engine is ready, binaries built against new Windows SDKs will use Chromium, and existing binaries will continue to use EdgeHTML.
mrpippy 8y ago
Tweet from journalist Simon Le Gros Bisson: EdgeHTML and Chakra will still be maintained; I was told that the transition to Chromium for web views in UWP and the like is a longer term plan. https://twitter.com/sbisson/status/1070726583445409792 https://twitter.com/sbisson/status/1070726583445409792

deleted 8y ago

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alanfranzoni 8y ago

What I find a bit curious is that's a fully Chromium based browser, it's not simply based on the Blink rendering engine. So, it will be much closer (probably) to Chromium/Chrome than other blink-based browsers like Brave or Opera. I'd really like to understand the rationale behind this choice. What they'd like to leverage from Chromium that Blink alone wouldn't have?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wvenable 8y ago
It's likely because of Electron. Microsoft already creates applications for Electron (which is Chromium) so maintaining that compatibility is likely a high priority.
mrpippy 8y ago
It's hard to glean technical details from the post, but "We will move to a Chromium-compatible web platform for Microsoft Edge on the desktop" indicates to me that this will be Edge based on Blink, not the full Chromium shell renamed/rewritten to be Edge. Hard to tell though
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Or it could be the other way around: a Chromium shell still calling EdgeHTML render processes? It's really not clear in this blog post. What does "Chromium-compatible web platform" mean? Which part of Chromium is the "platform" in question? This blog post doesn't have enough answers.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Pointed out in other threads, the GitHub README has more details: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge I still feel like I've got a ton of questions left unanswered, but the README helps.
8y ago

egeozcan 8y ago

If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it? I mean there was this "startup growth hacking" kind of craziness from a corporation and sudden admittance of defeat... It's very confusing. Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don't we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It's not like they stopped the aggressive marketing for a few years and now saying that they can no longer keep up. They probably are doing it now still and implying that Edge is better. Is the marketing really so uninformed about such big decisions?

oconnor663 8y ago
Big companies have lots of stakeholders. The person whose job it is to grow Edge's user numbers isn't the person whose job it is to make the call on the rendering engine. I don't know if their interests really conflict in this case, but in general it wouldn't be surprising if those two people/orgs sent mixed messages sometimes.
wvenable 8y ago
Microsoft is trying to drive traffic to Bing (and their other services). The rendering engine doesn't actually matter. Microsoft could just bundle Chrome with Windows but instead they are specifically taking the Chromium engine and putting it in an Edge shell. The only reason for that is to maintain control over the user to drive them to Microsoft properties.
- dlojudice 8y ago
  > The rendering engine doesn't actually matter. It does matter. From the comment above "browser vendors taking the lead over standards committees" means influence on where the technology is heading, specially for rendering engines. Remember how long it took IE to implement canvas? This was a way to avoid a new "OS" over a OS (Windows)
  - wvenable 8y ago
    This decision is perfectly in line with Microsoft's shift in focus -- Windows is no longer the hill they want to die on. Microsoft is all about services. Also I suspect Microsoft will have far more actual influence by driving development of Chromium than with their own rendering engine. It's pretty hard to drive new standards when you are barely achieving the current ones. Microsoft's focus on Electron for cross-platform development kind of informs this move as well.

lwansbrough 8y ago

Really wish Microsoft would open source the Edge renderer.

tombert 8y ago

I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's afraid of Blink becoming the new Internet Explorer; instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible. It's still better because Chromium is open-source, but I do worry that we're going to have a problem in the future with a lot of broken sites (YTMND-style).

simonsarris 8y ago
> instead of people following a web standard, they'll follow what's Chrome-compatible The browser vendors taking the lead over standards committees is how we got this far into HTML5, especially including Apple's/Safari's decision to ditch flash, and the WHATWG actually moving us forward vs the W3C. Unless Blink has a history or an expectation of deprecating serious functionality in the future, is it really so bad if websites follow what's Chrome-compatible instead of 'a web standard'?
- pas 8y ago
  W3C might be too slow, but eschewing at least a rough consensus and instead just ramming through whatever you feel like is the other extreme end of the spectrum. And Google is no saint, so if it benefits them and only them, who cares, Chrome will support it, the community be damned. And this - of course - applies to depreciation of functionality. (Think about any web feature/standard as another Google property, like G+ ... scary? But that's where we're headed with the Blink hegemony.)
- detaro 8y ago
  I don't think you can conclude from "things got better when browser vendors took over" that it'd be the same if there was one vendor dominating. They keep each other honest at least to a degree, forcing that issues are discussed and things thought out instead of someone in a browser team coming up with an idea and shipping it the first way they can come up with.
- mcgannon2007 8y ago
  Because then any pull request introducing something into Chromium essentially becomes the web standard. For example, Google has a ton of influence on the project. If they want to, they can introduce something that benefits their services but eschews the web standard.

Retroity 8y ago

On one hand, this creates a platform that is more or less the standard of the web. On the other hand, this only gives Google more control of the web. I really wish that instead of doing this Microsoft would just stick with EdgeHTML and maybe open-source it.

VoxPelli 8y ago
The monoculture is the main issue here. Google should not be happy about this. Makes it harder for them and everyone else to push web standards forward.

_nickwhite 8y ago

Could this be a bad thing for Firefox? Seems like Microsoft + Google is quite a rival to go against?

zbraniecki 8y ago
Firefox (by that I hope you mean Mozilla Project) cares about diversity and choice. Our Mozilla Manifesto [0] describes our vision of the balance between corporate and civic value of the Internet. I speak for myself - I believe that decrease in diversity of implementations of the Web standard and drift toward a monopoly is harmful to our vision of the Internet and ultimately will hurt the Open Web. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
- tcd 8y ago
  I mean, in all honesty, EdgeHTML wasn't ever really an engine that had much hope. IE has always been loathed, Edge just continued that trend. Their marketshare wasn't great, and tying browser updates to the OS as they did with IE was irresponsible for how browsers are shipped these days. If Edge had 35% marketshare I'd be more concerned, but nobody was using it, and web developers hated trying to make their sites compatible. Good riddance to IE/Edge of old :)
sebazzz 8y ago
Microsoft is not an active rival - at least not from a technical perspective. It is probably up for Mozilla to make a choice: will we implement the standard or will we mimic the behavior of Blink for compatibility reasons (which may be incorrect in some cases).
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  I understand adding bug compatibility in the days of IE6, but in the days of Chromium, why not just fix the bug in Chromium source?
craftyguy 8y ago
Having more chefs in the kitchen is not necessarily a better thing.

crazy_monkey 8y ago

Open-source is good! The less of it written by Microsoft, the better!

jpangs88 8y ago

I feel like I should be happy as a web dev to hear that I no longer have to support a browser engine made by Microsoft (which has been a huge pain and despite this will be a huge pain for a while due to people still using old browsers) but this feels bittersweet. It feels like we're taking the engineering out of everything because companies can make more money by not innovating.

VoxPelli 8y ago
They want short term wins and gives away long term ones. I guess the Chrome team itself aren’t happy about this. Will make standards work harder for them. Better to have the Edge team build alternative implementations of standards in their own engines than to implement even more stuff in Chromium. Chrome already has a hard time not running ahead of the rest of the web, they don’t need more people to speed it up even further.

ridiculous_fish 8y ago

Honest question: what is the population of committers (not contributors) on Chromium? Is there any significant number outside of Google? Is Chromium de-facto controlled by Google, or more community driven?

VoxPelli 8y ago
Considering that Samsung Internet, Brave, Opera, Electron etc is based on Chromium and at least Samsung Internet adding new features of their own to it, there are at least many other people working on the code base. I would guess that Microsoft would keep using Chorus rather than adopting V8, but if they aren’t, then V8 has contributions from eg. Node.js And as states in the article: Edge on Android and on ARM seems to already be Chromium based
- ridiculous_fish 8y ago
  There's a crucial difference between "working on the code base" and having commit access. The committers are the gatekeepers and the steamrollers. What I'm effectively asking is this: 1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it? 2. If the community opts to steer Chromium in a way that Google finds objectionable, could Google stop it?
  - VoxPelli 8y ago
    Yeah, but if many people are working on the browser code and those people don’t like what Google is doing anymore, then they individually or collectively could fork the code, just like Google forked their engine from WebKit when they wanted to move in a different direction than apple
  - bad_user 8y ago
    > "1. If Google opts to steer Chromium in a way that the community finds objectionable, could the community stop it?" The answer to that is obvious. Of course not. Google owns Chromium's repository. Even if the "community" decides to fork Chromium, Google owns Chrome, so any fork of Chromium is completely irrelevant. That's because people download and install Chrome and not obscure Chromium forks. And that is why web standards are important ;-)

smoser 8y ago

Wow a new Microsoft web browser for the Mac! Haven't seen one of those in 15 years.

croddin 8y ago

Wasn't an original idea of Edge that it would have several different quirks modes where it would use the old IE renderer to work with old corporate websites and such to be extremely backwards compatible? Could this break things for some companies with old IE-only internal websites etc? (Not that I don't think these should have all been made to work with chrome long ago.) If they are going to try to maintain some kind of quirks mode, would that be open sourced?

sebazzz 8y ago
IE only websites are added to the Enterprise Site List[0] by the sysadmin and will be opened in IE11, just like now. Edge has never dynamically switched engines, it just opened IE. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-to-improve-compatibility https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-...

Scarbutt 8y ago

I always though Mozilla should be the one doing this, let google do all the hard work and focus their resources in increasing market share and having better privacy, if they have the resources to maintain firefox then they have the resources to maintain a chromium fork.

Vinnl 8y ago

Aww man... I can't help but reminisce about how it would've been if they'd decided to become significant contributors to Gecko.

explodingcamera 8y ago

It's funny that when you go to select your country, depending on the privacy laws in said country you have to agree to their terms of service using a checkmark/no checkmark.

ucaetano 8y ago

This is actually great for the web. Having two competitors like Google and MS contributing to a single rendering engine, and competing on the actual browsers means less fragmentation without the single-entity-control problem.

Adutude 8y ago

The name.... reminds me of <blink>Annoying Text</blink>

sctb 8y ago

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595069.

sprash 8y ago

Funny that minor side project of KDE is now responsible for the vast majority of today's Internet traffic. Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work?

mevile 8y ago
> Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work? Why would they? That's not how open source works. If the KDE devs that made Konqueror wanted to capture value or do it for monetary gain they would have made a closed source browser and I doubt Apple would have then picked it to build WebKit. Apple is what made WebKit predominant, the KDE devs simply did a great job and should be very proud of what they've done, but it doesn't make sense for there to be policy change around open source for recompensating devs when their projects take off.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > Why would they? That's not how open source works. If the KDE devs that made Konqueror wanted to capture value or do it for monetary gain they would have made a closed source browser Making something open-source does not mean you don't want to make money off it.
Gaelan 8y ago
I wonder how much of KHTML is even left in WebKit/blink.
mda 8y ago
There is almost nothing left of it for years.
gsnedders 8y ago
> Did the original authors of KHTML ever receive a single dime for their work? Many, AIUI, were employees of Trolltech, and I assume Trolltech paid its employees.
adontz 8y ago
That's common story. SQLite began as TCL extension. And who uses TCL these days compared to SQLite?

ezoe 8y ago

So, Microsoft finally realized that they can't develop the web browser inside the single company. I wonder what they realize the next. A Compiler?

projectramo 8y ago

Recipe for success: Take chromium and make it super private. Put a moat up for identity, add a VPN (if that makes some people feel better), encrypt traffic etc. You could even charge people for the heavy duty version that might use some Azure services. The only issue with this is charging people requires tying their browser to the payment method.

slartibardfast0 8y ago

WebKit Scrollbars by attrition rather than specification is an odd way to go about things, but I for one will take it!

no_wizard 8y ago

I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it: stick it to Google [0] I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum) or WebKit (https://webkit.org https://webkit.org), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have sufficed as an Electron replacement that they could drive forward, but I suppose they own Electron now with Github acquired) For its not Apple anymore and certainly not Mozilla that is the prime competitor nowadays to Microsoft, its Google (With Chromebooks in the schools, and their small business and cloud offerings) and Amazon's Web Services division that are their main competitors now. While I don't know how all the business logic went into this and ultimately came up with this being the best calculation at hand, I think this would have played better in the media too (especially if they leaned on Mozilla) [0] I know Chromium != Google, but its pretty hard not to see that most of Chromium's development is downstream from Google and Google employs and/or otherwise has had some direct influence over the core team

mirkules 8y ago
One thing that’s worse than Microsoft not adopting a technology is Microsoft adopting a technology. Historically, they’ve used the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy quite often, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. But maybe I’m being overly skeptical/borderline cynical...
- justcool393 8y ago
  This would be the situation where EEE would be a good thing for the community. Now if you were talking about Firefox, then I'd agree that that would be bad.
- ziftface 8y ago
  The opposite is happening. They have such a small market share that developers didn't have enough incentive to actually support/test on their browser so all their work was just trying to get edge to be chrome-compatible. Turns out making your browser a chrome clone is an easier way to do that.

TheWiseOne 8y ago

So the web is now going to be even more Chrome-centric than it is... I wonder if they thought about picking Gecko instead.

boshomi 8y ago

Will Mircosoft use V8 or Charka Core?

rinchik 8y ago

> As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge — but other browsers as well — better on both PCs and other devices. "Embrace, extend, and extinguish"? At this point, with google, I'm not even sure if it's a bad thing, if true.

ausjke 8y ago

Another "if you can't beat them just join them"? In fact Edge is 99.9999% irrelevant at least to me, all my time with Edge added up to be less than 5 minutes over the years, I only need it to download chrome(or firefox).

Kjeldahl 8y ago

Excellent news. Google mostly does not have their own desktop OS to "protect", so they are probably incentivised to make the browser and the apps running in it feel as "native" as possible, with proper access to important local resources when relevant. Considering how Apple is dragging their feet with service worker and offline support on Safari (where they have a monopoly on iOS), this is probably a good thing overall. Fingers crossed!

bad_user 8y ago
> "Google mostly does not have their own desktop OS to "protect"" But they do and they are actually Microsoft's biggest competitor on the desktop: https://www.google.com/chromebook/ https://www.google.com/chromebook/

shmerl 8y ago

Good development. Now we need more open source collaboration in MS gaming branch. Let MS back Vulkan instead of continuing DX12 lock-in.

garysahota93 8y ago

It's crazy! This is not the Microsoft from ~5 years ago. They have really changed! Opening up to linux, cross-platform apps, open sourcing tech, open sourcing their patents(!), and now using open source chromium for MS Edge? Dam. I never thought I'd see the day...

krylon 8y ago
It is an interesting time to be alive, that is for sure.
- garysahota93 8y ago
  Agreed!

niputi 8y ago

it seems like a lot of people don't know this but the current Edge engine is Open Source. look here https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore

krylon 8y ago
Chakra is "just" the Javascript engine, the HTML render engine used by Edge is not open source.

MrZipf 8y ago

Hey Joe, can't you just stop nagging users to use your browser and stop overriding the users choice of browser? No need to repackage anything, just move on.

partiallypro 8y ago

I'm wondering why they decided to keep the Edge brand. It seems dropping it and the "e" logo all together would be ideal. The logo beit IE or Edge has negative emotions for many users. I am excited for this though, because I will probably make the Microsoft browser my default once it launches since it will finally have access to the vast Chrome extension library. But, I still think they will struggle with adoption just from a branding standpoint.

abrowne 8y ago
There was a blog post I can't find now when they announced Edge that they had to pick a E- name and an E logo otherwise literally millions of people would no longer know how to access "the internet".

fbelzile 8y ago

Does anyone know what the extension ecosystem of this new Edge will look like?

kopite 8y ago

I would rather not install Chrome at all on my windows machine. I use Brave (a chromium based browser) and with right extensions, I can see myself using the new Chromium based Edge. I bet that will be the thought process for a lot of general people using browsers. Chrome will loose its market share to Edge for sure.

vezycash 8y ago

When Microsoft released Edge, they claimed bugs plagued IE because they couldn't update IE without OS updates. Edge as a "store app" would receive frequent updates, independent of Windows OS updates. They ended up tying Edge to Windows. And kept promising but never delivered. Instead of small frequent browser updates, we got large frequent OS updates. Maybe now that Edge's dead, they'll slow down the frequency of Windows update a bit. In the beginning, IE was speedier than Edge. Had more features too. Edge was fragile and froze often. Updates fixed some of the speed issues. I froze my windows update so, I don't know how it stacks up right now. To increase Windows store usage, MS also decided to tie Edge extension to the Windows store. This wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, I like the idea of getting all my stuff in one place. However, MS decided to create the annoying store app. I'm on a desktop, a real computer. Why on earth can't I open the store on a browser and have the installer do its work in the background? This is where I drew the line with Edge. I'm not surprised that Edge's marketshare declined with increased Windows 10 marketshare. Edge is Microsoft's second Windows 8. They are both PC software designed to please mobile users and infuriate PC or touch-less users. And both hide settings - make it a chore to change minor settings. I believe throwing Windows Phone under the bus has come back to bite Microsoft in the ass and Edge is just a trailer. Microsoft is still gutting Windows 10 - turning it into a phone OS for desktop users, replacing working software with incomplete toys. As far as I'm concerned, Google didn't beat MS in the browser game. MS simply frustrated IE users over to Chrome by forcing Edge on them. Windows is the next software MS will abandon for Google's alternative. All Google has to do is not mess up android. If you remember Nokia/MS's failed fork of Android you'll feel the chill. Microsoft now sells android smartphones in both its online and retail stores. I predict MS is not done with Edge. At the end, they'll abandon that too for Chrome. And all they'll do is change the default search engine to Bing.

fbelzile 8y ago
> MS also decided to tie Edge extension to the Windows store. I think this was a big mistake. I hope they mirror what Google is doing with the Chrome store. As a developer, I had to: 1) Port my Chrome extension into a UWP app 2) Embed another win32 exe to read/write SQLite databases because UWP don't do that. 3) Pay $100 to open a developer account 4) After compiling the extension, reading blogs to figure out how to even upload the correct files 5) Have Microsoft deny my extension because it required special permissions (the win32 exe) 6) Still no extension uploaded.

hexmiles 8y ago

I'm a bit sad by the announcement. I quite like edge, and now the browser ecosystem is getting narrower. What should Mozilla do now? Should they just give up? Now that everywhere except ios/macos is blink (and v8 i think, i'm not sure after reading the announcement) why should anyone care for firefox? Should also Mozilla start using chromium as a base? Mozilla will still be able to add quite the value in term of functionality, and with a bigger focus on privacy than google. I'm honestly not sure anymore. Maintaining a browser is a hard work and it's getting harder, so it's (i think) unlikely a new player will ever enter the game, and having one engine where to test thing will make the job of creating websites and webapps simpler, on the other hand a monopoly can be a very bad thing for the web. I like firefox a lot, and it's my daily driver, but if tomorrow they change the engine, i probably won't even notice, and not having to maintain the entire stack may allow them to better focus on other area, like decentralization, privacy, addons and services (firefox send is amazing), and may even allow a easier experimentation with new webapi. I'm really not sure how to feel about this... On a side note: I really do hope they make chromium and especialy CEF more modular. it's amazing to embed a web browser inside a app, but it's very hard to override some of his behavior, for example: while it's easy to have a custom cookie management system, there are no api to override localstorage or the chronology, only some workaround. In a past work project we needed to build a thin client for a intranet and one of the requirement was, basically, an encrypted browser profile, custom CA management, client certificate and some other things, doing that using cef was very hard and it used a lot of hacks. edit: correct some grammar

outside1234 8y ago

The most exciting thing here is that, hopefully, we will get a version of Chromium on Mac without spyware.

krylon 8y ago
Can't you just run vanilla Chromium without the Google stuff on macOS? Honest question, I don't think I ever looked, and now I am back on GNU/Linux. On Windows, there is no build of vanilla Chromium, as far as I could find out. Then again, I did not try very hard, because I started using Firefox back when it was still called Firebird; the only incentive I had to check out Chromium on Linux were some web sites that did not work very well with Firefox (VPS console on Vultr, Netflix).

vatueil 8y ago

There's a new GitHub repository for Microsoft Edge: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge The readme goes into more detail than the blog post announcement, including emphasis on Windows on ARM, information about WebRTC for UWP, and explicit confirmation that they plan to bring Edge to Windows 7 and 8 as well as macOS. Also, looks like they're using the MIT license.

dzonga 8y ago

They could've chosen to go with Safari webkit. Since on the desktop it's pretty standards compliant. & it's pretty fast & power efficient too. But they chose Chromium, because they now own Electron. Also fuxk apple for having Safari on iOS being shitty, but good at protecting privacy

mythz 8y ago

Whilst this basically declares the Browser wars over and crystalizes Chromium as the Web's browser engine it's reassuring it's in the hands of the company with infinite resources, talent and a vested interest in seeing the web platform succeed with Google benefiting when more people spend more time on the Web (essentially the business case in starting Chrome to push the web forward, quicker). The only rendering engine that stands a chance at competing against Chrome is Safari/WebKit (thanks to iOS) and Apple would rather see native iOS Apps succeed to re-enforce their walled garden they have complete control over. So whilst it's a dark day for browser engine diversity, I don't see it as a blow against the Web overall (i.e. as a popular platform to develop for) as Google/Chrome is the driving force behind making Chromium more powerful to close the experience vs native Apps with initiatives like PWAs of which a side-effect is we'll be able to use new APIs sooner and increase web developer velocity by having 1 less browser engine we need to test against. A lot of people see browser wars as a gauge for the health of the Web but I consider the biggest threat to the "open web" is native mobile Apps which needs to become more capable in order to be able to deliver the same integrated experiences. In that light I don't see the competition of more browser engines making the Web better. Chrome wasn't created in reaction to competition, it was created because there was none left with MS leaving IE6 (and the main interface into the Web) to wither and die. IMO competing browser engines are holding the Web back with not being able to use new APIs as they're available, needing to cater for the lowest common denominator and having to test and support against a matrix of different browser engines and versions. It would be a different story if I thought Google would pull back investment in Chrome after they achieve total dominance, but I don't see that, their current strategy is winning where they benefit in a faster, stronger more popular Web and have been lifting the state of the art browser development since Chrome/V8's inception. Of course we now have to worry about Google thwarting the direction of Chromium to their benefit to the detriment of their users, the best way to minimize that is to have multiple collaborators committing to the Chromium project like MS Announces suggests they're doing. IMO it would be in Firefox's best interest to also switch to and collaborate on Chromium as well. Their market share is fading into irrelevance and after Edge/Chromium I see less developers investing their time to test on FF. I believe their efforts would be best spent on innovating on the browser's UI and function as I don't see how maintaining an alternative browser engine is a competitive advantage, IMO it's one of the reasons for their decline in market share. They should still be able to achieve their objectives the same way Vivaldi and Brave are doing with their added privacy protections in their Blink forks.

bovermyer 8y ago

This bit is probably the most interesting to me: > We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS.

zabil 8y ago

I am super excited about this. I work on an open source tool to automate chromium browser https://github.com/getgauge/taiko https://github.com/getgauge/taiko and the Chrome Devtools protocol makes it really easy to do so. With edge using chromium Cross browser testing will suck less.

antaviana 8y ago

Any chances that with this move, Windows adopts Chromium instead of Internet Explorer as embedded browser for Windows applications? That will remove plenty of IE rendering issues and also the need to link a whole CEF to get Chromium rendering in your application.

godelmachine 8y ago

No offense meant to anyone, but don't engineers at Microsoft feel humiliated over the fact that their employer chose an open source project that was started by their rival viz. Google? I am just curious how competitiveness works in FAANG.

fetbaffe 8y ago

My problem with Edge is not the rendering engine, it is the application it self, it is clunky & buggy, after a while with multiple application windows with multiple tabs, shortcut keys just stop working in some windows & some windows just freezes for a while.

oaiey 8y ago

I think Microsoft made already a deal with Google about the control of chromium. It would be endless naive otherwise. Do not forget that this is a full development stack within Windows. UWP has a JavaScript/HTML runtime and Microsoft's recent pwa visions both need to earn money. My bet is that Google will announce in the next weeks or at the next io a foundation for dealing with chromium. The only thing which itches me with that a bit is ChromeOS. But maybe that is more a plugin thingy.