4 ms·

I have this strange hypocritical mental model which simultaneously dismisses improvements to Edge as irrelevant while also wishing and rooting for more browser

I have this strange hypocritical mental model which simultaneously dismisses improvements to Edge as irrelevant while also wishing and rooting for more browser competition elsewhere.

solardev 1y ago
Edge was never going to be that once Microsoft gave up on their own renderer. It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now. On the other hand, it's exciting that Kagi is working on Orion. Ladybird will be interesting too. Maybe manifestv2 deprecation will start another browser war...
- userbinator 1y ago
  It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now. Microsoft could've made it look like IE and attracted a lot of that crowd with "same familiar UI, better rendering", but instead they decided to take the dumbed-down UI that Chrome had and add more MS-specific yet largely-useless or hostile features.
franga2000 1y ago
We aren't rooting for browser competition, but browser engine competition. Microsoft is clearly not interested in maintaining their own engine, so any users that switch to Edge are ultimately still giving market share and consequently power over the web standards to Google.
- refulgentis 1y ago
  I find it a very funny meme that Google controls web standards. Well I used to find it abstractly okay to worry about, then funny, and now annoying because it's used as a thought-terminating cliche.
  - Vinnl 1y ago
    It effectively decides how most people experience the web, and that doesn't change when people use Edge.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
      This really depends on how much effort Microsoft puts into working on Blink itself vs. its skin. And, since Microsoft and Google are similarly sized companies, Microsoft is in a better position to fork Blink if the shared engine becomes a problem (the way Google forked WebKit).
  - benterix 1y ago
    They do have an enormous amount of control over them, but the bigger issue is that standards are not that relevant given that all developers will test their stuff on Chrome and basically it (slower Firefox on Google sheets? Pause when opening YT documents? Who cares!). It's not a cliche, it's sad reality. It doesn't have to be thought-terminating, though - some people try to do something about it.
    - vladvasiliu 1y ago
      Don't know what YT documents are, but FWIW my experience with Firefox on Linux is much better when using Google's products than Edge on Windows. Maps, in particular, is an unbelievable dumpster fire. It lags like crazy and has extremely weird behavior. Think the map's labels showing up in the search box for a second. When panning, it seems to reload pretty much everything byte by byte. The only thing which works on Edge but doesn't on Firefox is casting from YouTube to my TV, but since this ignores my adblocker I never use it anyway. The comparison is done on the same physical machine, with the default Edge config (I don't use windows that often, so don't bother to change settings).
- egeozcan 1y ago
  IMHO, 2.5 good engines are enough (webkit, blink, gecko - in the sense that webkit and blink are very similar). We just need more really good browsers which use gecko.
  - rafram 1y ago
    WebKit and Blink aren’t very similar. There’s only a small amount of WebKit code left in Blink, and their architectures are completely different now.
    - egeozcan 1y ago
      Oh, thanks for the update. I assumed it'd be an incremental departure and that things couldn't have changed so much in 12 years (given the complexity of the browser engines). Now that I've read more about the fork, I learned that the codebases were already significantly different at the time they declared it officially as a fork. Interesting, because it feels like they are very compatible when I'm testing stuff as a developer (apart from their support of new stuff obviously).
  - berkes 1y ago
    We certainly need more really good browsers which use gecko. But for that to happen, Mozilla needs to up their effort to pull apart the components, decouple them from their own integration (firefox, thunderbird) and treat them as first-class projects, whose sole focus is to provide browser-builders and such with the components and tools to integrate the pieces. Purely technical, it's still easier to build around "chrome" components. Which is why everything from electron, via "webviews" to the oculus browser or that webview-thing in your fridge, uses chrome tech and not mozilla. Edit: in an ideal world, it would be a no-brainer for e.g. Meta to pick Mozilla components to build a browser for their VR headset. Or for VW when they develop an in-car screen. Or for an app-builder to add some web-rendering of their in-app help. But IMO this stems from a fundamental problem with Mozilla. Their cash-cow is firefox. So if they spend time and money making tech that then makes competing with firefox easier, they lose twice. So they will never truly commit to this. Even if that would, IMO, be one of the most impactful things for Mozillas' manifesto of a "free internet".
- coolgoose 1y ago
  And when they had EdgeHTML which wasn't even that bad, people pissed on it and said it's worse than Blink, idk man, this is an impossible case of getting the monopoly out of Google's hands.
  - olyjohn 1y ago
    People are going to piss on Microsoft either way because of how they handled IE for so long. And they deserve every ounce of piss they get.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
xattt 1y ago
It was nice when KHTML was forked for WebKit. It seriously seemed that open-source was taking root (pun intended). However, the situation has unfortunately evolved into a “not like that!” scenario.
hnthrow90348765 1y ago
Very few people are going to want to go up against Google and do it for nothing. At the end of this monumental quest, you only have just another browser. If it doesn't even make sense for Microsoft when they have an entire, ubiquitous operating system to take advantage of, I don't see how we do anything except declare Google's engine the winner that takes all.

I have this strange hypocritical mental model which simultaneously dismisses improvements to Edge as irrelevant while also wishing and rooting for more browser competition elsewhere.

solardev 1y ago

Edge was never going to be that once Microsoft gave up on their own renderer. It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now. On the other hand, it's exciting that Kagi is working on Orion. Ladybird will be interesting too. Maybe manifestv2 deprecation will start another browser war...

userbinator 1y ago
It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now. Microsoft could've made it look like IE and attracted a lot of that crowd with "same familiar UI, better rendering", but instead they decided to take the dumbed-down UI that Chrome had and add more MS-specific yet largely-useless or hostile features.

franga2000 1y ago

We aren't rooting for browser competition, but browser engine competition. Microsoft is clearly not interested in maintaining their own engine, so any users that switch to Edge are ultimately still giving market share and consequently power over the web standards to Google.

refulgentis 1y ago
I find it a very funny meme that Google controls web standards. Well I used to find it abstractly okay to worry about, then funny, and now annoying because it's used as a thought-terminating cliche.
- Vinnl 1y ago
  It effectively decides how most people experience the web, and that doesn't change when people use Edge.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
    This really depends on how much effort Microsoft puts into working on Blink itself vs. its skin. And, since Microsoft and Google are similarly sized companies, Microsoft is in a better position to fork Blink if the shared engine becomes a problem (the way Google forked WebKit).
- benterix 1y ago
  They do have an enormous amount of control over them, but the bigger issue is that standards are not that relevant given that all developers will test their stuff on Chrome and basically it (slower Firefox on Google sheets? Pause when opening YT documents? Who cares!). It's not a cliche, it's sad reality. It doesn't have to be thought-terminating, though - some people try to do something about it.
  - vladvasiliu 1y ago
    Don't know what YT documents are, but FWIW my experience with Firefox on Linux is much better when using Google's products than Edge on Windows. Maps, in particular, is an unbelievable dumpster fire. It lags like crazy and has extremely weird behavior. Think the map's labels showing up in the search box for a second. When panning, it seems to reload pretty much everything byte by byte. The only thing which works on Edge but doesn't on Firefox is casting from YouTube to my TV, but since this ignores my adblocker I never use it anyway. The comparison is done on the same physical machine, with the default Edge config (I don't use windows that often, so don't bother to change settings).
egeozcan 1y ago
IMHO, 2.5 good engines are enough (webkit, blink, gecko - in the sense that webkit and blink are very similar). We just need more really good browsers which use gecko.
- rafram 1y ago
  WebKit and Blink aren’t very similar. There’s only a small amount of WebKit code left in Blink, and their architectures are completely different now.
  - egeozcan 1y ago
    Oh, thanks for the update. I assumed it'd be an incremental departure and that things couldn't have changed so much in 12 years (given the complexity of the browser engines). Now that I've read more about the fork, I learned that the codebases were already significantly different at the time they declared it officially as a fork. Interesting, because it feels like they are very compatible when I'm testing stuff as a developer (apart from their support of new stuff obviously).
- berkes 1y ago
  We certainly need more really good browsers which use gecko. But for that to happen, Mozilla needs to up their effort to pull apart the components, decouple them from their own integration (firefox, thunderbird) and treat them as first-class projects, whose sole focus is to provide browser-builders and such with the components and tools to integrate the pieces. Purely technical, it's still easier to build around "chrome" components. Which is why everything from electron, via "webviews" to the oculus browser or that webview-thing in your fridge, uses chrome tech and not mozilla. Edit: in an ideal world, it would be a no-brainer for e.g. Meta to pick Mozilla components to build a browser for their VR headset. Or for VW when they develop an in-car screen. Or for an app-builder to add some web-rendering of their in-app help. But IMO this stems from a fundamental problem with Mozilla. Their cash-cow is firefox. So if they spend time and money making tech that then makes competing with firefox easier, they lose twice. So they will never truly commit to this. Even if that would, IMO, be one of the most impactful things for Mozillas' manifesto of a "free internet".
coolgoose 1y ago
And when they had EdgeHTML which wasn't even that bad, people pissed on it and said it's worse than Blink, idk man, this is an impossible case of getting the monopoly out of Google's hands.
- olyjohn 1y ago
  People are going to piss on Microsoft either way because of how they handled IE for so long. And they deserve every ounce of piss they get.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

xattt 1y ago

It was nice when KHTML was forked for WebKit. It seriously seemed that open-source was taking root (pun intended). However, the situation has unfortunately evolved into a “not like that!” scenario.

hnthrow90348765 1y ago

Very few people are going to want to go up against Google and do it for nothing. At the end of this monumental quest, you only have just another browser. If it doesn't even make sense for Microsoft when they have an entire, ubiquitous operating system to take advantage of, I don't see how we do anything except declare Google's engine the winner that takes all.