10 ms·

Microsoft's Three Browsers

114 points by thibautg 7y ago

andrewstuart 7y ago
The world would have been a better place if Microsoft's latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem. Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft & Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla/Netscape - one of the biggest battles in technology history, which Microsoft won following a savage no-holds-barred battle. There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox - such a move would have been truly ironic.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  Linux is on Windows. A few people might have did a little chuckle, but I don't think anyone would be angry :) I'd bet the Chromium choice was more about Electron than Edge.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    I heard part of the Chromium choice was that Edge developers felt they were already spending too much time in the Chromium codebase to support Windows initiatives even before the decision was made. For instance, Microsoft wanted to make sure all the browsers to support ARM64 on Windows natively, Mozilla did the work themselves (and it was basically already in their build farm when Microsoft asked), and Google asked Microsoft to PR it (which they did).
    - contravariant 7y ago
      Not sure if this is accurate but when put like that it sounds like the worst possible reason.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        It's not a great reason, but it is an interesting failure [1] case of the open source model, when someone else's open source project becomes your own liability because so many of your own customers use it. [1] Arguably a success case in some viewpoints; it's sometimes why people promote open source.
        jdc 7y ago
        Beats having to maintain bug compatibility to keep popular proprietary code running though
        WorldMaker 7y ago
        Though at least when Microsoft was doing that they were documenting those bugs and bringing them all to web platform standards boards for review. Now they are more likely to contribute such bugs to the web platform again without documenting them, leaving probably poor Mozilla the only ones left to notice.
      - lloeki 7y ago
        Tech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When team W is tasked with X, and has the possibility to use tech Y, which they are seriously acquainted with, and tech Z, which they barely touched, it makes perfect sense to go with tech Y as it’s much more efficient to get to speed and evaluate risks. In fact, as long as risks are evaluated and cleared regarding Y, there is no reason not to go with Y. As for actual risks, remember, this is MS, not some random shop: at any point if they’re dissatisfied with Chromium in any way, they have enough firepower to fork Blink, just like Google forked WebKit from Apple, and like Apple forked WebKit from KHTML, and do whatever they want.
- gruez 7y ago
  >There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox Who? Shareholders? Open source advocates?
  - jraph 7y ago
    Google? :-) By the way, it occurs to me that Microsoft is now doing better what Google was doing with the Chrome Frame for IE extension a few years ago. 13 years ago, I asked myself, why Microsoft doesn't just embed WebKit instead of keeping using their annoying web engine. It turns out they are now doing a variant of that now, something that seemed impossible back then, and (amazingly) I am not too happy with this... I guess I did not predict the collapse of my favorite browser's market share at the time, and the dominance of Chrome, which did not exist. Google seemed good anyway. Google building a web browser was strange to me back then: why would Google do that when we already have Firefox, an excellent browser? But now, it is obvious. And Microsoft does not care that much apparently. They don't care about having an edge over this area anymore.
    - d1zzy 7y ago
      There were plenty of technical reasons at the time, remember Firefox/Mozilla devs were strongly against the multiple processes model that Chrome devs really wanted. Chrome has redefined what it means to build a secure browser and I'm happy this is getting adopted now. Ofc, in the meantime Chrome isn't just a better technical alternative to existing browsers anymore, it's a strategic asset with all that entails.
  - arexxbifs 7y ago
    As an avid Firefox user, privacy tinfoil hat and all-round Stallman-esque interjector, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft contributed to Gecko, Quantum and SpiderMonkey - provided it didn't interfere in any way with my abilities to do for example ad- and tracker blocking. As far as I understand it, the Chromium codebase is deeply intertwined with the Google ecosystem in a way that makes it hard to guarantee privacy the way Firefox does.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
  Chromium (and Edge) are using Blink, not Webkit. They have been developed separately since 2013.
- gsnedders 7y ago
  > The world would have been a better place if Microsoft's latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem. It would, but at the same time while there's been long-term work at making Gecko embeddable (though primarily on mobile, in the form of GeckoView), it's still the case that it's much easier to embed Chromium or WebKit into a larger product today. Arguably, one of Mozilla's biggest mistakes was never really caring about making Gecko embeddable. (Okay, GeckoView is now a thing.)
- kd913 7y ago
  I really disagree with this perspective. Frankly Google needs a counter-balance in the browser market. Microsoft can easily act as Google's counter balance. Microsoft is one of the few companies that have the resources capable of maintaining a hostile fork of chromium (at a loss) and have it competitive enough that users will switch. Google has lost it's one advantage in the web-space too as now they can't exactly hamper the experience of edge without hampering chrome too. Chromium needed this counter-balance. If Microsoft chose a Gecko forked browser, they would dominate and take over. Like what Apple did with KHTML. This step is better.
  - keithnz 7y ago
    I agree, I think this is generally better. It feels like google needs some pressure to listen to people. Oddly enough Microsoft didn't do some things that would be instant wins, like support plugins on mobile so you can install things like ublock origin ( biggest reason why I use firefox on mobile ).
    - bla3 7y ago
      It's almost as if there are technical reasons for not supporting the current extension api on mobile! (Battery, performance, ...)
      - emodendroket 7y ago
        Forgive my skepticism that that is the reason Google doesn't make it available.
      - asiachick 7y ago
        And yet extensions work on ChromeOS on machines with no more power or memory than my phone. In fact my phone beats my ChromeOS machine at many benchmarks, has the same amount of ram, and more storage.
        spookthesunset 7y ago
        And you probably need to run a virus scanner and it eats batteries for breakfast. It’s all trade offs....
- overgard 7y ago
  Microsoft has never been shy about partnering with former enemies/competitors. We tend to forget Apple would probably be gone if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out in 97 (not out of altruism but because of antitrust). Linux is also first class on Azure. I don't think they would care about the Netscape thing.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    "if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out in 97" This is a myth. Apple always had massive amounts of cash even at their low point when people considered them worth barely more than their cash.
    - outworlder 7y ago
      Don't forget that the re-engineered Microsoft Office was made available on OSX not long afterwards. That move alone (plus Bill Gates' appearance at an Apple event) might have saved the platform, not only by making it more attractive to users, but also by giving the platform more credibility with larger enterprises.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Microsoft was one of the first developers for the Mac. Word, Excel and PowerPoint were on Macs since the 80s.
        alwillis 7y ago
        Excel 1.0 shipped on the Macintosh in 1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Apple_Macintosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Apple_Macintos...
        Narishma 7y ago
        They even started on the Mac before being ported to Windows. At least Excel did, not sure about the other two.
    - 7y ago
- ryuukk_ 7y ago
  why would anyone choose a slow and dated tech as foundation?
- basch 7y ago
  Microsoft moved to we kit cuz they own Electron and this way they can build web it into the os, and have electron call the os, instead of each app shipping with a copy of blink. It's a battery thing. Teams, their flagship Office app, is electron.
- fortran77 7y ago
  The world would have been a better place if Microsoft had doubled down on Edge. Then there would be three viable browser engines.
  - toastal 7y ago
    Did you mean 4? There are 3 now: Gecko (tangentially including Servo), Webkit, and Blink.
  - kienkien 7y ago
    webkit, blink, gecko. There still 3 guys
- alwillis 7y ago
  Short answer: the Gecko codebase wasn't very good back then and it certainly wasn't designed to be embedded elsewhere. Think about it—Nokia, Google, Blackberry, Samsung could have picked Gecko back in the day but they all chose WebKit instead. That should tell you something. Google forked WebKit to make Blink in 2013 and since then, Opera, Vivaldi and now Microsoft are using Blink. Not even the creator of Firefox and former head of Mozilla Brendan Eich, ended up using Firefox--Brave also is using Chromium/Blink.
  - cxr 7y ago
    This is a pretty uninformed comment. Gecko was absolutely originally designed to be embedded—it just never did a particularly stellar job of fulfilling those goals. Brendan also didn't create Firefox.
    - jannes 7y ago
      Technically Brendan Eich was part of the creation of "Firefox" in 1998-2002, because the browser was previously known as Netscape (closed source) and Mozilla (open source). Brendan Eich was a co-founder of Mozilla (although not of Netscape).
      - cxr 7y ago
        Brendan co-founded mozilla.org. Brendan is not the "creator of Firefox".
        BrendanEich 7y ago
        Your correspondent said that I was part of "the creation of Firefox" and that's true. Twisting his words to advance a straw man you knock down does nothing to erase my role in the creation of Firefox. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1210621157201727489?s=20 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1210621157201727489?s...
        cxr 7y ago
- Stierlitz 7y ago
  Firefox and lack of diveresity in the browser ecosystem? http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX0_4601.pdf http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX... “ Here is final copy of the memo we sent to BillG for think week about what we should do to get to 30% browser share. Pls do not distribute broadly.” “ Clone and Supernet Netscape. PSD needs to get serious about cloning Netscape. We must have a plan to clone all the features they have today, plus new ones they will add between now and our next release” “We will bind the shell to the Internet Explorer so that running any other browser is a jolting experience. Shell/Browser user model becomes the same.”
  - jannes 7y ago
    That's an interesting document, but I think it says "superset" instead of "supernet" (purely because of the context).
- goto11 7y ago
  It is just more beneficial for MS to use webkit. They neuter Googles ability to use its dominance to give preference to its own services and interests. Having a minority browser engine (which Mozilla would still be) gives no strategic advantages at all. IE was only strategically useful when it was dominant. Now it is just a resource sink. MS supports linux now. They don't care about past rivalries, they just do what makes business sense to them. The lack of diversity might be bad for the web at large though.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I fail to follow, given that actual Microsoft is one of the major contributors to the Linux kernel, and they are now also contributing to OpenJDK (take that Google). So they could do that, but I guess Chrome VM has won. In a couple of years job boards will ask for Chrome developers instead of Web developers.
- nirui 7y ago
  > Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft & Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla/Netscape So, all that cakes was for nothing?
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    People romanticize a rivalry but in reality most browser vendors are friendly with each other. The cakes are a great example of that. They cooperate on standards and work towards common goals. The top-level comment is disappointing. Blink (not WebKit) was chosen because it was the better technical decision. That's all.
plopz 7y ago
When is IE gonna die? I'd really like to use flexbox/grid and other css/js niceties, but we still have 16% of users on IE. I know Microsoft is planning on supporting forever, but does anyone know if they are trying to move people off of it?
- frandroid 7y ago
  They are, it's IT departments and customer internal apps using IE-specific things like ActiveX which are keeping it alive.
  - gsnedders 7y ago
    Note that Chromium based Edge contains "IE mode" (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode) as an attempt to get enterprises away from using IE on the open web (essentially, they can set "all intranet sites use IE" or "these domains use IE", but Edge will use Chromium on all other websites).
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  At some point you have to determine your ROI on those 16% of users and determine if the extra effort to avoid modern tools is worth it. It's not Microsoft keeping IE on life support in 2020, it's all the vendors putting in a lot of work (or worse, putting in no work, as stagnancy is its own problem) to keep 16% (or less) of their users happy.
  - apatheticonion 7y ago
    How do we convince hospitals and medical clinics to use Chrome, Firefox or the latest edge browser?
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      The same way we convince any other industry? Don't provide new features to old browsers. Include the costs of doing business with older browsers accurately enough in your support contracts (especially don't undervalue your time, workarounds, polyfills, etc). Find ways to help your clients with upgrade assistance (are there IT contractors you can recommend to your clients that they might hire for short term upgrade projects, such as maybe helping them upgrade vendors who are possibly even your competitors?). And so forth, anything to better help your clients understand (and incentivize) not just the obvious security risks but the economic trade-offs in supporting older tools/languishing in the supposed "easy" status quo. I can't tell you where the magic ROI line is for you. Maybe you have to make the hard choices like "If we go this route [only evergreen browsers], we lose ~16% of our customers immediately, but we add X% feature/stability/maintenance improvements to our remaining ~84% customers, and hopefully one day we'll see at least some of those 16% come back to us the next time they get a chance to upgrade, likely in Y years." It's a business decision, and you don't always have to meet customers where "they are", you can make the tough calls and ask your customers to meet you in the middle. How angry that might make them, and how much business you might lose, is always going to be something you have to determine with your market in mind.
TsomArp 7y ago
Crazy thing is my home country bank website only works with IE. The incompetent f*cks have re-done the website 3 times in the last 4 or 5 years. They still require IE.
- 6nf 7y ago
  link?
butz 7y ago
Silly question, but is there any sense in testing websites in new Edge in addition to Chrome? I presume, that if website works on Chrome, it will work on Edge the same. Are there any gotchas in new Edge to watch out for?
- gsnedders 7y ago
  https://textslashplain.com/2019/05/01/edge-76-vs-edge-18-vs-chrome/ https://textslashplain.com/2019/05/01/edge-76-vs-edge-18-vs-... documents many of the differences between EdgeHTML v. Edgium v. Chrome, though it's not really that obvious skimming through what the differences between Edgium v. Chrome are (but there's a bunch, though probably things you don't need to worry about?).
- jayflux 7y ago
  I don’t think this question is silly at all, they are using literally the same rendering engine (it’s not a fork), it even seems to get the chromium update the same time as chrome (version numbers always match so far), so probably not, however who knows what may happen in future. The upside is that it should be easier to test with tools such as Selenium, so the lower cost of testing it may be a factor
- jjeaff 7y ago
  I'm sure there may be some small differences that may require some testing, but I am already starting to phase out some of my edge browser testing and looking forward to no longer supporting pre-chromium edge. We already don't support IE and haven't for 5 years. Just testing for Firefox and chrome/edge will be nice.
  - eitland 7y ago
    > Just testing for Firefox and chrome/edge will be nice. Thanks! Most thinks just work on Firefox but I also see a number of things not working because certain people just can't be bothered to: a) learn to not use Chrome-specific hacks instead of the normal way b) just test their sites with the second most used browser engine
lostgame 7y ago
Edge, as-is, seems to offer me no reason to prefer it over Chrome, beyond privacy concerns with Google - and I’m unfortunately just not knowledgeable enough to know if MS is any better. I personally use Safari. Because I’m on MacOS, I find Safari to certainly be the most immediately responsive, UI/UX-wise, and that’s pretty much what matters to be, since it’s all WebKit under the hood. I don’t see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box.
- ThalesX 7y ago
  > I don’t see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box. You hit the nail on the head, and it's great, having a good default.
- eshyong 7y ago
  > I don’t see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box. That's a huge benefit, considering > 75% of the world still uses Windows.
- sahaskatta 7y ago
  I switched from Chrome to Edge because: * No Google tracking. * Blocks 3rd party trackers. * Zoom/Scroll is smoother. * Better optimized for touch screens. * Longer battery life. * Seems to use less RAM. * All my Chrome extensions are compatible. * I can watch Netflix in 4K. Can't do that on Chrome or on a Mac.
  - gjhr 7y ago
    The battery performance of old Spartan edge was amazing, great for laptops/tablets. Have they managed to keep that kind of performance with their new chromium version? (I haven't updated yet)
  - cmer 7y ago
    Have you compared Edge to Brave? It got really good recently. I was going to start using Edge but 1password wasn't working and that was a deal breaker for me.
mappu 7y ago
Is Microsoft Edge Legacy still being maintained? I was under the impression Edgium is the maintenance per se, and would just be deployed through Windows Update to all Edge users. If we're including unmaintained Microsoft browsers there's also the old Tasman-based IE for Mac. The Expression Web product also had an independent HTML rendering engine.
gfiorav 7y ago
The new Edge is excellent. Windows is evermore becoming a great digital home.
- spectramax 7y ago
  Quite the contrary - Windows is becoming a dystopian operating system uploading telemetry data left and right, user privacy is next to zero with kernel level advertisment incentives marked with 70% marketshare. Fuck advertisement. It has ruined the world and continues to pillage everything.
  - gfiorav 7y ago
    I thought they had dialed back on telemetry?
    - raxxorrax 7y ago
      They certainly did not. Just recently had to get property rights of a file and delete it because it ate all my CPU. I mean it is unacceptable to steal data without permission, but even failing at implementing the services responsible? Windows compatibility telemetry or something like that. This OS become more and more a heap of trash in my opinion. I have a very different perception to the parent comment. Strong regulation is needed here that user consent actually matters again. In my corporate land edge was already replaced and I doubt that will change again. I don't really see the appeal of using Edge, if I can use Chrome or even better FF. Windows is becoming waste pretty fast. If they weren't embedded in entertainment and corporate environments due to familiarity, the OS would quickly fade away.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
I don’t see why they need a browser at all. Kill IE and Edge and be done with it. The integration was a ploy to fool regulators.
- smartsystems 7y ago
  That sounds totally radical when you first hear it but it actually makes total sense to me. I guess they're just trying to avoid technological domination by Google. Right now they still have a player in the game thanks to Edge. If they were to lose that player Google would be able to make technological choices that might be harmful to Microsoft?
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Good point, maybe they aren’t ready to rip off the bandaid and/or don’t have enough confidence in Mozilla to prevent the domination you mention.
  - Stierlitz 7y ago
    @smartsystems The browser was about garnering mind-share™, making sure you see ‘Microsoft Internet Explorer’ when you boot up the computer. That why some people used talk about getting on to the ‘Microsoft Internet’ presumably using the Microsoft TCP/IP © :]
- peterclary 7y ago
  That ignores that - for at least the last 16 years - Windows has exposed a WebBrowser control which developers can use in their applications. MS could potentially remove the IE icon and some of the UI, but removing the core browser component and rendering code would break third-party applications, and Microsoft has historically been extremely unwilling to do that.
  - unnouinceput 7y ago
    Unwillingly is an understatement. They are adamant on doing backward compatibility. Just ask Raymond Chen
zerr 7y ago
I wonder why they (also Opera) couldn't keep up with the development of in-house engines.
limeblack 7y ago
There is a fourth WebKit Safari for iOS. Marketed as Edge has bugs all it's own although more Safari then a separate browser.

114 points by thibautg 7y ago

The world would have been a better place if Microsoft's latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem. Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft & Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla/Netscape - one of the biggest battles in technology history, which Microsoft won following a savage no-holds-barred battle. There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox - such a move would have been truly ironic.

kgwxd 7y ago
Linux is on Windows. A few people might have did a little chuckle, but I don't think anyone would be angry :) I'd bet the Chromium choice was more about Electron than Edge.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  I heard part of the Chromium choice was that Edge developers felt they were already spending too much time in the Chromium codebase to support Windows initiatives even before the decision was made. For instance, Microsoft wanted to make sure all the browsers to support ARM64 on Windows natively, Mozilla did the work themselves (and it was basically already in their build farm when Microsoft asked), and Google asked Microsoft to PR it (which they did).
  - contravariant 7y ago
    Not sure if this is accurate but when put like that it sounds like the worst possible reason.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      It's not a great reason, but it is an interesting failure [1] case of the open source model, when someone else's open source project becomes your own liability because so many of your own customers use it. [1] Arguably a success case in some viewpoints; it's sometimes why people promote open source.
      - jdc 7y ago
        Beats having to maintain bug compatibility to keep popular proprietary code running though
        WorldMaker 7y ago
        Though at least when Microsoft was doing that they were documenting those bugs and bringing them all to web platform standards boards for review. Now they are more likely to contribute such bugs to the web platform again without documenting them, leaving probably poor Mozilla the only ones left to notice.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      Tech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When team W is tasked with X, and has the possibility to use tech Y, which they are seriously acquainted with, and tech Z, which they barely touched, it makes perfect sense to go with tech Y as it’s much more efficient to get to speed and evaluate risks. In fact, as long as risks are evaluated and cleared regarding Y, there is no reason not to go with Y. As for actual risks, remember, this is MS, not some random shop: at any point if they’re dissatisfied with Chromium in any way, they have enough firepower to fork Blink, just like Google forked WebKit from Apple, and like Apple forked WebKit from KHTML, and do whatever they want.
gruez 7y ago
>There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox Who? Shareholders? Open source advocates?
- jraph 7y ago
  Google? :-) By the way, it occurs to me that Microsoft is now doing better what Google was doing with the Chrome Frame for IE extension a few years ago. 13 years ago, I asked myself, why Microsoft doesn't just embed WebKit instead of keeping using their annoying web engine. It turns out they are now doing a variant of that now, something that seemed impossible back then, and (amazingly) I am not too happy with this... I guess I did not predict the collapse of my favorite browser's market share at the time, and the dominance of Chrome, which did not exist. Google seemed good anyway. Google building a web browser was strange to me back then: why would Google do that when we already have Firefox, an excellent browser? But now, it is obvious. And Microsoft does not care that much apparently. They don't care about having an edge over this area anymore.
  - d1zzy 7y ago
    There were plenty of technical reasons at the time, remember Firefox/Mozilla devs were strongly against the multiple processes model that Chrome devs really wanted. Chrome has redefined what it means to build a secure browser and I'm happy this is getting adopted now. Ofc, in the meantime Chrome isn't just a better technical alternative to existing browsers anymore, it's a strategic asset with all that entails.
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  As an avid Firefox user, privacy tinfoil hat and all-round Stallman-esque interjector, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft contributed to Gecko, Quantum and SpiderMonkey - provided it didn't interfere in any way with my abilities to do for example ad- and tracker blocking. As far as I understand it, the Chromium codebase is deeply intertwined with the Google ecosystem in a way that makes it hard to guarantee privacy the way Firefox does.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
Chromium (and Edge) are using Blink, not Webkit. They have been developed separately since 2013.
gsnedders 7y ago
> The world would have been a better place if Microsoft's latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem. It would, but at the same time while there's been long-term work at making Gecko embeddable (though primarily on mobile, in the form of GeckoView), it's still the case that it's much easier to embed Chromium or WebKit into a larger product today. Arguably, one of Mozilla's biggest mistakes was never really caring about making Gecko embeddable. (Okay, GeckoView is now a thing.)
kd913 7y ago
I really disagree with this perspective. Frankly Google needs a counter-balance in the browser market. Microsoft can easily act as Google's counter balance. Microsoft is one of the few companies that have the resources capable of maintaining a hostile fork of chromium (at a loss) and have it competitive enough that users will switch. Google has lost it's one advantage in the web-space too as now they can't exactly hamper the experience of edge without hampering chrome too. Chromium needed this counter-balance. If Microsoft chose a Gecko forked browser, they would dominate and take over. Like what Apple did with KHTML. This step is better.
- keithnz 7y ago
  I agree, I think this is generally better. It feels like google needs some pressure to listen to people. Oddly enough Microsoft didn't do some things that would be instant wins, like support plugins on mobile so you can install things like ublock origin ( biggest reason why I use firefox on mobile ).
  - bla3 7y ago
    It's almost as if there are technical reasons for not supporting the current extension api on mobile! (Battery, performance, ...)
    - emodendroket 7y ago
      Forgive my skepticism that that is the reason Google doesn't make it available.
    - asiachick 7y ago
      And yet extensions work on ChromeOS on machines with no more power or memory than my phone. In fact my phone beats my ChromeOS machine at many benchmarks, has the same amount of ram, and more storage.
      - spookthesunset 7y ago
        And you probably need to run a virus scanner and it eats batteries for breakfast. It’s all trade offs....
overgard 7y ago
Microsoft has never been shy about partnering with former enemies/competitors. We tend to forget Apple would probably be gone if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out in 97 (not out of altruism but because of antitrust). Linux is also first class on Azure. I don't think they would care about the Netscape thing.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out in 97" This is a myth. Apple always had massive amounts of cash even at their low point when people considered them worth barely more than their cash.
  - outworlder 7y ago
    Don't forget that the re-engineered Microsoft Office was made available on OSX not long afterwards. That move alone (plus Bill Gates' appearance at an Apple event) might have saved the platform, not only by making it more attractive to users, but also by giving the platform more credibility with larger enterprises.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Microsoft was one of the first developers for the Mac. Word, Excel and PowerPoint were on Macs since the 80s.
      - alwillis 7y ago
        Excel 1.0 shipped on the Macintosh in 1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Apple_Macintosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Apple_Macintos...
      - Narishma 7y ago
        They even started on the Mac before being ported to Windows. At least Excel did, not sure about the other two.
  - 7y ago
ryuukk_ 7y ago
why would anyone choose a slow and dated tech as foundation?
basch 7y ago
Microsoft moved to we kit cuz they own Electron and this way they can build web it into the os, and have electron call the os, instead of each app shipping with a copy of blink. It's a battery thing. Teams, their flagship Office app, is electron.
fortran77 7y ago
The world would have been a better place if Microsoft had doubled down on Edge. Then there would be three viable browser engines.
- toastal 7y ago
  Did you mean 4? There are 3 now: Gecko (tangentially including Servo), Webkit, and Blink.
- kienkien 7y ago
  webkit, blink, gecko. There still 3 guys
alwillis 7y ago
Short answer: the Gecko codebase wasn't very good back then and it certainly wasn't designed to be embedded elsewhere. Think about it—Nokia, Google, Blackberry, Samsung could have picked Gecko back in the day but they all chose WebKit instead. That should tell you something. Google forked WebKit to make Blink in 2013 and since then, Opera, Vivaldi and now Microsoft are using Blink. Not even the creator of Firefox and former head of Mozilla Brendan Eich, ended up using Firefox--Brave also is using Chromium/Blink.
- cxr 7y ago
  This is a pretty uninformed comment. Gecko was absolutely originally designed to be embedded—it just never did a particularly stellar job of fulfilling those goals. Brendan also didn't create Firefox.
  - jannes 7y ago
    Technically Brendan Eich was part of the creation of "Firefox" in 1998-2002, because the browser was previously known as Netscape (closed source) and Mozilla (open source). Brendan Eich was a co-founder of Mozilla (although not of Netscape).
    - cxr 7y ago
      Brendan co-founded mozilla.org. Brendan is not the "creator of Firefox".
      - BrendanEich 7y ago
        Your correspondent said that I was part of "the creation of Firefox" and that's true. Twisting his words to advance a straw man you knock down does nothing to erase my role in the creation of Firefox. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1210621157201727489?s=20 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1210621157201727489?s...
        cxr 7y ago
Stierlitz 7y ago
Firefox and lack of diveresity in the browser ecosystem? http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX0_4601.pdf http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX... “ Here is final copy of the memo we sent to BillG for think week about what we should do to get to 30% browser share. Pls do not distribute broadly.” “ Clone and Supernet Netscape. PSD needs to get serious about cloning Netscape. We must have a plan to clone all the features they have today, plus new ones they will add between now and our next release” “We will bind the shell to the Internet Explorer so that running any other browser is a jolting experience. Shell/Browser user model becomes the same.”
- jannes 7y ago
  That's an interesting document, but I think it says "superset" instead of "supernet" (purely because of the context).
goto11 7y ago
It is just more beneficial for MS to use webkit. They neuter Googles ability to use its dominance to give preference to its own services and interests. Having a minority browser engine (which Mozilla would still be) gives no strategic advantages at all. IE was only strategically useful when it was dominant. Now it is just a resource sink. MS supports linux now. They don't care about past rivalries, they just do what makes business sense to them. The lack of diversity might be bad for the web at large though.
pjmlp 7y ago
I fail to follow, given that actual Microsoft is one of the major contributors to the Linux kernel, and they are now also contributing to OpenJDK (take that Google). So they could do that, but I guess Chrome VM has won. In a couple of years job boards will ask for Chrome developers instead of Web developers.
nirui 7y ago
> Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft & Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla/Netscape So, all that cakes was for nothing?
- SquareWheel 7y ago
  People romanticize a rivalry but in reality most browser vendors are friendly with each other. The cakes are a great example of that. They cooperate on standards and work towards common goals. The top-level comment is disappointing. Blink (not WebKit) was chosen because it was the better technical decision. That's all.

plopz 7y ago

When is IE gonna die? I'd really like to use flexbox/grid and other css/js niceties, but we still have 16% of users on IE. I know Microsoft is planning on supporting forever, but does anyone know if they are trying to move people off of it?

frandroid 7y ago
They are, it's IT departments and customer internal apps using IE-specific things like ActiveX which are keeping it alive.
- gsnedders 7y ago
  Note that Chromium based Edge contains "IE mode" (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode) as an attempt to get enterprises away from using IE on the open web (essentially, they can set "all intranet sites use IE" or "these domains use IE", but Edge will use Chromium on all other websites).
WorldMaker 7y ago
At some point you have to determine your ROI on those 16% of users and determine if the extra effort to avoid modern tools is worth it. It's not Microsoft keeping IE on life support in 2020, it's all the vendors putting in a lot of work (or worse, putting in no work, as stagnancy is its own problem) to keep 16% (or less) of their users happy.
- apatheticonion 7y ago
  How do we convince hospitals and medical clinics to use Chrome, Firefox or the latest edge browser?
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    The same way we convince any other industry? Don't provide new features to old browsers. Include the costs of doing business with older browsers accurately enough in your support contracts (especially don't undervalue your time, workarounds, polyfills, etc). Find ways to help your clients with upgrade assistance (are there IT contractors you can recommend to your clients that they might hire for short term upgrade projects, such as maybe helping them upgrade vendors who are possibly even your competitors?). And so forth, anything to better help your clients understand (and incentivize) not just the obvious security risks but the economic trade-offs in supporting older tools/languishing in the supposed "easy" status quo. I can't tell you where the magic ROI line is for you. Maybe you have to make the hard choices like "If we go this route [only evergreen browsers], we lose ~16% of our customers immediately, but we add X% feature/stability/maintenance improvements to our remaining ~84% customers, and hopefully one day we'll see at least some of those 16% come back to us the next time they get a chance to upgrade, likely in Y years." It's a business decision, and you don't always have to meet customers where "they are", you can make the tough calls and ask your customers to meet you in the middle. How angry that might make them, and how much business you might lose, is always going to be something you have to determine with your market in mind.

TsomArp 7y ago

Crazy thing is my home country bank website only works with IE. The incompetent f*cks have re-done the website 3 times in the last 4 or 5 years. They still require IE.

6nf 7y ago
link?

butz 7y ago

Silly question, but is there any sense in testing websites in new Edge in addition to Chrome? I presume, that if website works on Chrome, it will work on Edge the same. Are there any gotchas in new Edge to watch out for?

gsnedders 7y ago
https://textslashplain.com/2019/05/01/edge-76-vs-edge-18-vs-chrome/ https://textslashplain.com/2019/05/01/edge-76-vs-edge-18-vs-... documents many of the differences between EdgeHTML v. Edgium v. Chrome, though it's not really that obvious skimming through what the differences between Edgium v. Chrome are (but there's a bunch, though probably things you don't need to worry about?).
jayflux 7y ago
I don’t think this question is silly at all, they are using literally the same rendering engine (it’s not a fork), it even seems to get the chromium update the same time as chrome (version numbers always match so far), so probably not, however who knows what may happen in future. The upside is that it should be easier to test with tools such as Selenium, so the lower cost of testing it may be a factor
jjeaff 7y ago
I'm sure there may be some small differences that may require some testing, but I am already starting to phase out some of my edge browser testing and looking forward to no longer supporting pre-chromium edge. We already don't support IE and haven't for 5 years. Just testing for Firefox and chrome/edge will be nice.
- eitland 7y ago
  > Just testing for Firefox and chrome/edge will be nice. Thanks! Most thinks just work on Firefox but I also see a number of things not working because certain people just can't be bothered to: a) learn to not use Chrome-specific hacks instead of the normal way b) just test their sites with the second most used browser engine

lostgame 7y ago

Edge, as-is, seems to offer me no reason to prefer it over Chrome, beyond privacy concerns with Google - and I’m unfortunately just not knowledgeable enough to know if MS is any better. I personally use Safari. Because I’m on MacOS, I find Safari to certainly be the most immediately responsive, UI/UX-wise, and that’s pretty much what matters to be, since it’s all WebKit under the hood. I don’t see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box.

ThalesX 7y ago
> I don’t see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box. You hit the nail on the head, and it's great, having a good default.
eshyong 7y ago
> I don’t see the benefit of Edge beyond Windows users dealing with a less shitty browser out of the box. That's a huge benefit, considering > 75% of the world still uses Windows.
sahaskatta 7y ago
I switched from Chrome to Edge because: * No Google tracking. * Blocks 3rd party trackers. * Zoom/Scroll is smoother. * Better optimized for touch screens. * Longer battery life. * Seems to use less RAM. * All my Chrome extensions are compatible. * I can watch Netflix in 4K. Can't do that on Chrome or on a Mac.
- gjhr 7y ago
  The battery performance of old Spartan edge was amazing, great for laptops/tablets. Have they managed to keep that kind of performance with their new chromium version? (I haven't updated yet)
- cmer 7y ago
  Have you compared Edge to Brave? It got really good recently. I was going to start using Edge but 1password wasn't working and that was a deal breaker for me.

mappu 7y ago

Is Microsoft Edge Legacy still being maintained? I was under the impression Edgium is the maintenance per se, and would just be deployed through Windows Update to all Edge users. If we're including unmaintained Microsoft browsers there's also the old Tasman-based IE for Mac. The Expression Web product also had an independent HTML rendering engine.

gfiorav 7y ago

The new Edge is excellent. Windows is evermore becoming a great digital home.

spectramax 7y ago
Quite the contrary - Windows is becoming a dystopian operating system uploading telemetry data left and right, user privacy is next to zero with kernel level advertisment incentives marked with 70% marketshare. Fuck advertisement. It has ruined the world and continues to pillage everything.
- gfiorav 7y ago
  I thought they had dialed back on telemetry?
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    They certainly did not. Just recently had to get property rights of a file and delete it because it ate all my CPU. I mean it is unacceptable to steal data without permission, but even failing at implementing the services responsible? Windows compatibility telemetry or something like that. This OS become more and more a heap of trash in my opinion. I have a very different perception to the parent comment. Strong regulation is needed here that user consent actually matters again. In my corporate land edge was already replaced and I doubt that will change again. I don't really see the appeal of using Edge, if I can use Chrome or even better FF. Windows is becoming waste pretty fast. If they weren't embedded in entertainment and corporate environments due to familiarity, the OS would quickly fade away.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

I don’t see why they need a browser at all. Kill IE and Edge and be done with it. The integration was a ploy to fool regulators.

smartsystems 7y ago
That sounds totally radical when you first hear it but it actually makes total sense to me. I guess they're just trying to avoid technological domination by Google. Right now they still have a player in the game thanks to Edge. If they were to lose that player Google would be able to make technological choices that might be harmful to Microsoft?
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Good point, maybe they aren’t ready to rip off the bandaid and/or don’t have enough confidence in Mozilla to prevent the domination you mention.
- Stierlitz 7y ago
  @smartsystems The browser was about garnering mind-share™, making sure you see ‘Microsoft Internet Explorer’ when you boot up the computer. That why some people used talk about getting on to the ‘Microsoft Internet’ presumably using the Microsoft TCP/IP © :]
peterclary 7y ago
That ignores that - for at least the last 16 years - Windows has exposed a WebBrowser control which developers can use in their applications. MS could potentially remove the IE icon and some of the UI, but removing the core browser component and rendering code would break third-party applications, and Microsoft has historically been extremely unwilling to do that.
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  Unwillingly is an understatement. They are adamant on doing backward compatibility. Just ask Raymond Chen

zerr 7y ago

I wonder why they (also Opera) couldn't keep up with the development of in-house engines.

limeblack 7y ago

There is a fourth WebKit Safari for iOS. Marketed as Edge has bugs all it's own although more Safari then a separate browser.