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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.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Oh enough of this meme, please. It should be required that anyone who tries to be clever with it actually justify it with a full explanation on what they think the three matching steps are/will be.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary justification. EEE, astroturfing and similar bait and switch tactics has been so common for decades that some companies are guilty until proven innocent.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      I disagree that EEE has been "so common for decades". It's a tactic Microsoft employed for some time and, as far as I can see, hasn't used since (not as a common strategy at the very least). The only company I can think of that EEE-as-a-strategy might apply to is AWS, and I say this with huge reservations because their priority is still their customers.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  It's step 1: embracing the open standard. They'll extend it next. Another commenter already pointed out that could be as easy as just using Bing to send revenue to them using Google's tech. They'll come up with other ideas. Far as open-sourcing their stuff, I think they're holding off on that to preserve their profitable lock-in in legacy market. Harder to clone their key dependencies if the code isn't open. Even opening the data formats like for Office wasn't enough to make a copy that renders all existing documents perfectly. That was by design, too. I think it makes more financial sense for them to keep existing stuff closed followed by Embrace with Microsoft-oriented Extend on open stuff. I doubt they'll Extinguish since they don't have enough clout to do that in this market. Probably in most markets now.
Klathmon 8y ago
This is probably going to get a bit "rant-ey", it's not directed at you, but at the ecosystem at large (and kind of at myself). Everyone keeps saying this, but nobody is actually doing anything about it. People (myself included) talk about how a monoculture is bad, but we still don't use Edge. We talk about how more competition in the browser space is a good thing, but we still complain when the latest features or security benefits are missing from a browser. And then when the feature lands, nobody cares. We complain about how bloated and slow browsers are getting, but completely ignore those which are/were slimming that down. And we talk about how Chrome and V8 are taking over the world, but we won't use tech like node-chakracore[1] despite it being a very positive experience when I last used it. I'm assuming that Microsoft is spending a shitload of time and money on their browser engine, and it was still getting very little usage. They have great performance, some really cool security features, lots of great user-oriented features, and it very rarely gave me issues as a developer, but still nobody (again, myself included) used it. Can you blame them for not wanting to continue? I feel the same as you, this sucks. But I can't blame anyone but myself, because I don't use Edge (despite using Windows as my daily-driver), and I most likely won't switch to it, and it has very little to do with its capabilities as a browser, and more to do with network effects (i'm used to chrome, my information is in chrome, I'm used to the dev tools in chrome, and I personally and selfishly have no reason to switch to Edge, even if it's technically better) You can't blame the company for not wanting to continue pouring money into something which is getting very little usage or return on investment at all. At least by working with Chromium more people are going to get the benefits of their work. [1] https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore
- techsupporter 8y ago
  > (i'm used to chrome, my information is in chrome, I'm used to the dev tools in chrome, and I personally and selfishly have no reason to switch to Edge, even if it's technically better) Yep, the same can be said for Firefox. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds of comments on places like Hacker News and Reddit and Ars Technica, all grousing about how Google is the behemoth that is taking over, Chrome is bloated and slowing down and e-mails all of your personal bits to Google, oh woe shouldn't there be a equal competitor in the market, blah, blah... But too few people actually put their clicking where their talking is and switch to any other browser. People seem hardwired to say "yeah I know it sucks but I want to use Google and thus I want to use Chrome." Far fewer people with software development skills--that I sorely lack--bother to contribute to Firefox (or, heaven forbid, Thunderbird) development to fix those problems. Meanwhile, I hug Firefox just a little bit closer every year, wondering if this year is the year that the project fails or simply stops moving forward or whatever. I'm thrilled that companies like Privacy, Krypt.co, and even Capital One still make Firefox extensions and I use them daily. But for how long, when every technology-oriented person on the planet seems hell-bent on using Chrome, outcomes be damned?
tapoxi 8y ago
I don't think they can. EdgeHTML is a fork of Trident (MSHTML), and that originated from code licensed from Spyglass.
- gsnedders 8y ago
  Note they dropped the Spyglass licensing thing from the about prompt in IE7 (8? I don't quite remember), following an internal audit of the codebase. They certainly believe it to be free from Spyglass at this point.

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.

scrollaway 8y ago
Oh enough of this meme, please. It should be required that anyone who tries to be clever with it actually justify it with a full explanation on what they think the three matching steps are/will be.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary justification. EEE, astroturfing and similar bait and switch tactics has been so common for decades that some companies are guilty until proven innocent.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    I disagree that EEE has been "so common for decades". It's a tactic Microsoft employed for some time and, as far as I can see, hasn't used since (not as a common strategy at the very least). The only company I can think of that EEE-as-a-strategy might apply to is AWS, and I say this with huge reservations because their priority is still their customers.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
It's step 1: embracing the open standard. They'll extend it next. Another commenter already pointed out that could be as easy as just using Bing to send revenue to them using Google's tech. They'll come up with other ideas. Far as open-sourcing their stuff, I think they're holding off on that to preserve their profitable lock-in in legacy market. Harder to clone their key dependencies if the code isn't open. Even opening the data formats like for Office wasn't enough to make a copy that renders all existing documents perfectly. That was by design, too. I think it makes more financial sense for them to keep existing stuff closed followed by Embrace with Microsoft-oriented Extend on open stuff. I doubt they'll Extinguish since they don't have enough clout to do that in this market. Probably in most markets now.

Klathmon 8y ago

This is probably going to get a bit "rant-ey", it's not directed at you, but at the ecosystem at large (and kind of at myself). Everyone keeps saying this, but nobody is actually doing anything about it. People (myself included) talk about how a monoculture is bad, but we still don't use Edge. We talk about how more competition in the browser space is a good thing, but we still complain when the latest features or security benefits are missing from a browser. And then when the feature lands, nobody cares. We complain about how bloated and slow browsers are getting, but completely ignore those which are/were slimming that down. And we talk about how Chrome and V8 are taking over the world, but we won't use tech like node-chakracore[1] despite it being a very positive experience when I last used it. I'm assuming that Microsoft is spending a shitload of time and money on their browser engine, and it was still getting very little usage. They have great performance, some really cool security features, lots of great user-oriented features, and it very rarely gave me issues as a developer, but still nobody (again, myself included) used it. Can you blame them for not wanting to continue? I feel the same as you, this sucks. But I can't blame anyone but myself, because I don't use Edge (despite using Windows as my daily-driver), and I most likely won't switch to it, and it has very little to do with its capabilities as a browser, and more to do with network effects (i'm used to chrome, my information is in chrome, I'm used to the dev tools in chrome, and I personally and selfishly have no reason to switch to Edge, even if it's technically better) You can't blame the company for not wanting to continue pouring money into something which is getting very little usage or return on investment at all. At least by working with Chromium more people are going to get the benefits of their work. [1] https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore

techsupporter 8y ago
> (i'm used to chrome, my information is in chrome, I'm used to the dev tools in chrome, and I personally and selfishly have no reason to switch to Edge, even if it's technically better) Yep, the same can be said for Firefox. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds of comments on places like Hacker News and Reddit and Ars Technica, all grousing about how Google is the behemoth that is taking over, Chrome is bloated and slowing down and e-mails all of your personal bits to Google, oh woe shouldn't there be a equal competitor in the market, blah, blah... But too few people actually put their clicking where their talking is and switch to any other browser. People seem hardwired to say "yeah I know it sucks but I want to use Google and thus I want to use Chrome." Far fewer people with software development skills--that I sorely lack--bother to contribute to Firefox (or, heaven forbid, Thunderbird) development to fix those problems. Meanwhile, I hug Firefox just a little bit closer every year, wondering if this year is the year that the project fails or simply stops moving forward or whatever. I'm thrilled that companies like Privacy, Krypt.co, and even Capital One still make Firefox extensions and I use them daily. But for how long, when every technology-oriented person on the planet seems hell-bent on using Chrome, outcomes be damned?

tapoxi 8y ago

I don't think they can. EdgeHTML is a fork of Trident (MSHTML), and that originated from code licensed from Spyglass.

gsnedders 8y ago
Note they dropped the Spyglass licensing thing from the about prompt in IE7 (8? I don't quite remember), following an internal audit of the codebase. They certainly believe it to be free from Spyglass at this point.