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Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. Nothing like the crazy

Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. Nothing like the crazy 90+% it had at its height but certainly not a browser you can ignore. Now they're at about 10% and it seems like they have to use every manipulation tactic in the book to get it. But I agree, that third browser engine kept things interesting even if I didn't use it. Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there. I don't use Apple products personally but benefit from the diversity of ecosystem it provides.

cptskippy 3y ago
> Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. The only reason IE retained any marketshare was because it was required for legacy enterprise and government applications. For security this was bad all around and Microsoft was right to kill it off even to their own detriment.
deleted 3y ago
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mywittyname 3y ago
I think the problem with Edge was two-fold: - People were trained to automatically install a new browser on their computers when they got it. - Edge is a never ending nagfest and that became another prompt to go and download Chrome. Less is more was probably the better strategy to take with Edge.
- softfalcon 3y ago
  > Less is more... You hit the nail right on the money. Every time I accidentally open Edge through the Windows search, it never ceases to shut up about itself. There is fanfare, there are notifications for details I don't care about, popups showing me all the features that are standard in any web browser. You know what would make me use your browser Microsoft? Getting the hell out of my way. I do not care that it's Edge, I don't care that it's new, I don't care that it has 7 ways to input and take pictures and who knows what else. Just show me the search result. Contrast this to how Safari behaves when it pops up to show you something. It just gives you the web page. That's it.
n0tinventedhere 3y ago
I can tell you from doing testing on Edge back when it represented a potential third engine to support: that browser crashed a lot. It was very unreliable prior to switching to becoming another chromium fork. It is clear the dev team was either underfunded or plain incompetent and Microsoft was in dire need of a default browser that didn't make people wince, ASAP, they could not afford to wait [insert X years to get a mature engine] so they went the obvious route and chose to make a chromium fork. Making a reliable engine that supports all of the modern web is a monstrous undertaking. Not just "support", it needs to be reliable. Microsoft missed the boat when they allowed IE to rot and it was too late to catch up now. Every year spent without a reliable browser preinstalled on your OS is detrimental.
afavour 3y ago
> Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. It had been on the decline for years. Statscounter shows 26% in January 2013, 17% January 2014, 13% in January 2015, then Edge was introduced in July of that year. If anything Edge was a recognition of that reality: the investment in maintaining their own browser engine wasn't worth it when compared to the resulting market share. IMO the failure of Windows Phone was the death knell of Trident (the IE engine): desktop share overall is smaller and they have no footprint in the mobile OS space. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2013 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2014 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2015 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...
- temac 3y ago
  You are confusing the old Edge that had an engine forked from IE and that MS exclusively maintained, with the new Edge that is a fork of Chromium. Maybe that the old Edge was not of stellar quality was simply because the age of the codebase of its engine.
  - afavour 3y ago
    I'm simply replying to the OP's assertion that "Edge seems like a blunder in general". IE market share was declining before Edge was introduced, and it continued to decline after Edge was introduced. Since the browser engine switch their market share has actually increased a small amount! So all in all I don't think there's any evidence that Edge was a blunder.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  Yeah, this does seem to line up more with the Windows8/Windows phone failure more than anything. Despite people having a better opinion about Edge Chromium it didn't seem to stem the decline.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  > death knell of Trident (the IE engine) Nitpick, but the Edge name signaled the switch to the ground up rewrite Spartan engine. Trident is still sort of alive in its zombie corporate state in the Windows backwards compatibility swamp. Trident was still maintained for backward compatibility (and still exists in IE Mode in Chromium Edge), but Edge was always Spartan and it is Spartan that is dead (RIP).
ajross 3y ago
> Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there. It's so weird these days seeing people literally cheering for the success of a proprietary product on a completely closed platform over an open source engine. Firefox, sure. I can get behind that even if my professional life technically argues against it. I see the draw there and won't argue about benefits. But Safari? Seriously? Even discounting the existence of Firefox, the "monoculture" argument falls down in the face of products like Edge and Opera (and countless others -- Linux distros ship Chromium, Teslas all have a build installed, etc...), which are *successful forks* of Chromium. If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted and can continue to ship their unadulterated products. Because that's what they're doing today. Really? Safari?
- afavour 3y ago
  > If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted I suspect that's not OP's fear. Google is powerful enough that they can do whatever they want with Chrome. They could even close source the thing and implement a load of proprietary APIs if they wanted and the bulk of users would continue to use it. One of the things holding them back from doing so is the fact that Chromium can't run on the most popular mobile platform in the US. I'm no defender of Safari but I can see the logic at work.
  - ajross 3y ago
    > They could even close source the thing and implement a load of proprietary APIs Right, but that capability is exactly what the upthread comment is cheering for Apple having. Apple goes even farther and straight up denies competitors access to its platform entirely. It's the asymmetry I don't understand: why is proprietary control good for one side but not for the other? Is the goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or is it just to Beat Google?
    - afavour 3y ago
      > why is proprietary control good for one side and not the other? It isn’t for either, this is a “least worst” scenario. Both sides have the capability to push proprietary APIs but largely fail at doing so because they don’t have a monopoly over the market. They are forced to compromise on a middle ground (supporting the open web), which is better than one side being able to entirely dominate the market and do whatever they want. > Is the goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or is it just to Beat Google? In this specific scenario they are one and the same but the aim is the former. Google controls the desktop browser market already, one of the only reasons they haven’t done the same on mobile is because Apple won’t allow it. The argument is not that Apple should control everything, it’s that stalemate is the best we’ve got.

cptskippy 3y ago

> Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. The only reason IE retained any marketshare was because it was required for legacy enterprise and government applications. For security this was bad all around and Microsoft was right to kill it off even to their own detriment.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mywittyname 3y ago

I think the problem with Edge was two-fold: - People were trained to automatically install a new browser on their computers when they got it. - Edge is a never ending nagfest and that became another prompt to go and download Chrome. Less is more was probably the better strategy to take with Edge.

softfalcon 3y ago
> Less is more... You hit the nail right on the money. Every time I accidentally open Edge through the Windows search, it never ceases to shut up about itself. There is fanfare, there are notifications for details I don't care about, popups showing me all the features that are standard in any web browser. You know what would make me use your browser Microsoft? Getting the hell out of my way. I do not care that it's Edge, I don't care that it's new, I don't care that it has 7 ways to input and take pictures and who knows what else. Just show me the search result. Contrast this to how Safari behaves when it pops up to show you something. It just gives you the web page. That's it.

n0tinventedhere 3y ago

I can tell you from doing testing on Edge back when it represented a potential third engine to support: that browser crashed a lot. It was very unreliable prior to switching to becoming another chromium fork. It is clear the dev team was either underfunded or plain incompetent and Microsoft was in dire need of a default browser that didn't make people wince, ASAP, they could not afford to wait [insert X years to get a mature engine] so they went the obvious route and chose to make a chromium fork. Making a reliable engine that supports all of the modern web is a monstrous undertaking. Not just "support", it needs to be reliable. Microsoft missed the boat when they allowed IE to rot and it was too late to catch up now. Every year spent without a reliable browser preinstalled on your OS is detrimental.

afavour 3y ago

> Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. It had been on the decline for years. Statscounter shows 26% in January 2013, 17% January 2014, 13% in January 2015, then Edge was introduced in July of that year. If anything Edge was a recognition of that reality: the investment in maintaining their own browser engine wasn't worth it when compared to the resulting market share. IMO the failure of Windows Phone was the death knell of Trident (the IE engine): desktop share overall is smaller and they have no footprint in the mobile OS space. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2013 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2014 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2015 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

temac 3y ago
You are confusing the old Edge that had an engine forked from IE and that MS exclusively maintained, with the new Edge that is a fork of Chromium. Maybe that the old Edge was not of stellar quality was simply because the age of the codebase of its engine.
- afavour 3y ago
  I'm simply replying to the OP's assertion that "Edge seems like a blunder in general". IE market share was declining before Edge was introduced, and it continued to decline after Edge was introduced. Since the browser engine switch their market share has actually increased a small amount! So all in all I don't think there's any evidence that Edge was a blunder.
yomlica8 3y ago
Yeah, this does seem to line up more with the Windows8/Windows phone failure more than anything. Despite people having a better opinion about Edge Chromium it didn't seem to stem the decline.
WorldMaker 3y ago
> death knell of Trident (the IE engine) Nitpick, but the Edge name signaled the switch to the ground up rewrite Spartan engine. Trident is still sort of alive in its zombie corporate state in the Windows backwards compatibility swamp. Trident was still maintained for backward compatibility (and still exists in IE Mode in Chromium Edge), but Edge was always Spartan and it is Spartan that is dead (RIP).

ajross 3y ago

> Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there. It's so weird these days seeing people literally cheering for the success of a proprietary product on a completely closed platform over an open source engine. Firefox, sure. I can get behind that even if my professional life technically argues against it. I see the draw there and won't argue about benefits. But Safari? Seriously? Even discounting the existence of Firefox, the "monoculture" argument falls down in the face of products like Edge and Opera (and countless others -- Linux distros ship Chromium, Teslas all have a build installed, etc...), which are *successful forks* of Chromium. If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted and can continue to ship their unadulterated products. Because that's what they're doing today. Really? Safari?

afavour 3y ago
> If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted I suspect that's not OP's fear. Google is powerful enough that they can do whatever they want with Chrome. They could even close source the thing and implement a load of proprietary APIs if they wanted and the bulk of users would continue to use it. One of the things holding them back from doing so is the fact that Chromium can't run on the most popular mobile platform in the US. I'm no defender of Safari but I can see the logic at work.
- ajross 3y ago
  > They could even close source the thing and implement a load of proprietary APIs Right, but that capability is exactly what the upthread comment is cheering for Apple having. Apple goes even farther and straight up denies competitors access to its platform entirely. It's the asymmetry I don't understand: why is proprietary control good for one side but not for the other? Is the goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or is it just to Beat Google?
  - afavour 3y ago
    > why is proprietary control good for one side and not the other? It isn’t for either, this is a “least worst” scenario. Both sides have the capability to push proprietary APIs but largely fail at doing so because they don’t have a monopoly over the market. They are forced to compromise on a middle ground (supporting the open web), which is better than one side being able to entirely dominate the market and do whatever they want. > Is the goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or is it just to Beat Google? In this specific scenario they are one and the same but the aim is the former. Google controls the desktop browser market already, one of the only reasons they haven’t done the same on mobile is because Apple won’t allow it. The argument is not that Apple should control everything, it’s that stalemate is the best we’ve got.