9 ms·
Microsoft Edge – The Browser for Doing
- jbub 11y agoI dont understand, is this a new internet explorer or a successor to it ?
- braum 11y agosupposedly, from what I have heard, it is a new browser with no legacy code base. And possibly that old IE plugins still work (not entirely sure on this last part).
- kuschku 11y agoIt doesn’t support any old IE plugins, it contains none of the IE/7/8/9/10 codebase, but instead is based on only the newly written parts of IE11, and it supports Firefox and Chrome addons.
- egeozcan 11y agoWow. Why aren't they marketing this? Creating a browser from scratch, considering the current state of web technologies is a huge undertaking. I always thought it's just a re-skinned IE with some touch features.
- icebraining 11y agoNot really from scratch, they forked Trident, removed the crap and built from there.
- __Joker 11y agoNot sure about IE plugins but it supports the plugin's from Firefox and Chrome[1]. Technical details would be interesting, but migrating would be little frictionless, if anybody want to try the Edge. [1]. http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-browser-supports-chrome-and-firefox-extensions http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-br...
- quonn 11y agoIt's a fork of the underlying MSHTML engine, that adds some new standard support and more importantly throws out the old compatibility modes and other legacy. It will run in parallel to IE, which is here to stay for enterprise customers.
- Touche 11y ago> It's a fork of the underlying MSHTML engine, that adds some new standard support There's always new standards, so of course there is new standard support, just as IE is getting new standard support. Effectively it is a redesign and rebranding of IE. Nothing wrong with that, but let's call a spade a spade.
- fishfacemcgee 11y agoIt is IE12 with non of the legacy IE support. Their talk of update speed suggests it'll resemble Chrome and Firefox in terms of updates.
- manigandham 11y agoIt's not a redesign, it's a completely new browser built clean and based on EdgeHTML. IE will still be around as a separate browser that can be used in environments it's needed but Spartan/Edge is completely new and the way forward for the mainstream users. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/03/24/updates-from-the-project-spartan-developer-workshop.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/03/24/updates-from-t...
- icebraining 11y agoNo, it's not completely new from scratch: So we set about to create a new engine using IE11’s standards support as a baseline. I watched Justin Rogers, one of our engineers, press “Enter” on the commit that forked the engine—it took almost 45 minutes just to process it (just committing the changes, not building!). http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts-new-rendering-engine-project-spartan/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...
- dmak 11y agoWell, I dont know what I expected, but this is incredibly underwhelming.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fishfacemcgee 11y agoNot entirely. Metro IE browser was still using the base IE11 rendering engine at its core. Microsoft Edge has a new rendering engine without all of the legacy support nonsense. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts-new-rendering-engine-project-spartan/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...
- 0x006A 11y agodoes it support WebRTC?
- davidlago 11y agoAs per an article linked in one of the comments here (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts-new-rendering-engine-project-spartan/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...) it seems as if WebRTC 1.1 will be supported.
- mpalme 11y agoIt's in development according to https://status.modern.ie/webrtcobjectrtcapi?term=webrt https://status.modern.ie/webrtcobjectrtcapi?term=webrt
- lucid00 11y agoIt supports ORTC which is sort of like WebRTC 1.5 It's backwards compatible with WebRTC so it'll work with Chrome and Firefox, but it gives you more control of the protocols so you could build something that doesn't rely on SDP.
- valevk 11y agoMicrosoft is becoming the new Golang of HN. As soon as a story appears mentioning it, it's on the frontpage.
- bliker 11y agoIt’s almost like during Apple events
- tszming 11y agoIMO, Microsoft is becoming the new Google; Google is becoming the old Microsoft, how funny is it..
- Rainymood 11y agoWhy exactly? Mind elaborating some on that statement? Because I disagree.
- nabaraz 11y ago1.flooding market 2. stagnant platform 3. not proper direction 4. rushed release 5. longer and less transparent updates etc.
- icebraining 11y agoThat still sounds like Microsoft to me.
- vladiliescu 11y agoReally? With all the new things coming out of Redmond and with them open sourcing the full server side .NET stack[1], the description above still sounds like MS to you? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595905
- icebraining 11y ago
- FreakyT 11y agoI'm still hoping that they'll release this for Mac OS (more competition for cross platform browsers would be a good thing!) But so far it doesn't seem like that's on the table...
- elinchrome 11y agoAfter the recent activity with Code and Roslyn, I was hoping for MacOS and Linux download links too. That would be sweet. I'd love to use IE on my macbook and my Mint box.
- Artemis2 11y agoThey probably want to not spread themselves out too thin just for a beta.
- btdollar 11y agoBrowser competition on OS X? Apple refuses. Only Safari is allowed to do the notifications. And, of course, their own shitty websites break constantly on non-Apple browsers. I develop iOS apps for a living so I cannot just avoid their shameful behavior, either. I would love to be able to do a boycott right now without ending my career.
- grub5000 11y agoI hadn't even considered this but I really like the idea! Since Microsoft are seemingly so keen on producing software for competing operating systems - and with Cortana purportedly among them - I actually consider it within the realms of possibility.
- tbrock 11y ago> Tell us what you think. I think it should be standards compliant in every conceivable way.
- megaman821 11y agoLooking at https://status.modern.ie/ https://status.modern.ie/ it appears Safari is the laggard of the group. Current versions of IE really haven't been that bad, the biggest problem is going to be getting people off IE8.
- codeulike 11y agoYeah IE has been fairly respectable since 9+
- streptomycin 11y agoWould be nice if it was more than "fairly respectable". Also, I wouldn't trust http://status.modern.ie http://status.modern.ie too much. For example, IE is missing some IndexedDB features https://github.com/InternetExplorer/Status.IE/issues/104 https://github.com/InternetExplorer/Status.IE/issues/104 but you'll see no mention of that on their status site. From there, it looks like everything is perfect.
- lucid00 11y agoIndexedDB support is horrible across all browsers. You'd be surprised at how much of the spec Chrome doesn't support.
- streptomycin 11y agoActually I wouldn't, because I've built a non-trivial app using IndexedDB :) But don't believe me, believe the results of the W3C test suite: http://w3c.github.io/test-results/IndexedDB/all.html http://w3c.github.io/test-results/IndexedDB/all.html And don't just look at the headline numbers, look at the tests that actually fail, because some are more important than others. The only test that fails in Chrome [1] is only marginally meaningful. It would be nice if they got it working, but all the tests that actually use IndexedDB pass in Chrome. 100%. Firefox is almost as good as Chrome, but it fails on tests of error handling for a few edge cases that are very unlikely to occur in the real world. IE and Safari have many failures for tests of core functionality (Safari is even worse than IE if you look at the individual tests that fail, rather than the overall %). [1] https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/blob/master/IndexedDB/interfaces.html https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/blob/master/Indexe...
- zhte415 11y agoICQ had a feature for writing on websites, and even chatting with others visiting the same webpage. That was around 1998. It didn't work out, despite the penetration of ICQ at the time.
- agumonkey 11y agoI wouldn't underestimate the power of time. Maybe at the time the web wasn't about information as much as today. Maybe MS implementation will be smoother and more integrated. Maybe people minds have changed. So many things died in the past only to be reincarnated slightly differently now they can but seen under the right light.
- davidgerard 11y agoWebsite annotating is a feature people keep reinventing every few years. (e.g. rbutr as the most recent example, but there have been several before.) It usually founders on (2) getting sued by people who don't like the annotations on their website (1) no way to actually monetise this.
- agumonkey 11y agoIt's an in-browser tool, not a product. Maybe MS plan to analyse cloud stored annotations but I don't think they want to make money out of it. And how legal is it for a website author to say anything about what I do when I'm visiting it ? I can store the URL and a little doodle in a file, can they sue me for doing this ?
- davidgerard 11y agoIt isn't (slam-dunk under CDA section 230), but that never stopped a pissed-off crank from bringing a harassing case. Yeah, that's unlikely to affect Microsoft.
- mkr-hn 11y agoThey don't have to win the suit. They only have to run the target out of money.
- snarfy 11y agoIf it has no legacy code base, is it still tied to the OS like IE was? Can I uninstall Microsoft Edge like any other app?
- larzang 11y agoYou can already do this with IE on Win8
- PauloManrique 11y agoYes, you can uninstall like any other universall app. Right click -> uninstall
- klunger 11y agoI think the annotations feature is really interesting! But how can they implement this without the permission of the original website providers?
- icebraining 11y agoWhy would they need it?
- klunger 11y agoI don't understand why the original comment is getting downvoted. How can they implement this without copying the website in some form? It would constitute basic copyright infringement.
- icebraining 11y agoWhat do you mean? They simply add a layer of annotations over the site's HTML. You don't need to copy the website to do that.
- nfoz 11y agoYou can't view a website without copying it; the copy is downloading it to your computer in the first place.
- delinka 11y agoAssuming you're making annotations for yourself, the copy of the annotated page in your cache is referenced, and bookmarks for where you annotated are stored in some other local file. If they're sharing all annotations with other users of the browser, the bookmarks get stored on Microsoft servers and reference, perhaps, a digest of the annotated page. No copyright infringement required.
- drdaeman 11y agoIANAL, but printing the page - the function every browser out there has had since forever - is, technically, creaton of a copy. Taking a pencil and drawing over that page is creating a derivative work. Passing that document to others is distribution. Guess that goes under "fair use". Or something like that.
- arihant 11y agoI don't know why comments here think it is Metro IE repackaged. It doesn't look anything like it (it looks more like Chrome than Metro IE), doesn't have the same rendering engine, supports crazy amount of new functionality: 1. Google Now styled contextual cards appear as soon as you start typing in address bar to search. 2. It does have support for Hubs, probably the best feature of Windows 8. 3. Annotations, so many ways of annotations. Not only it is natural, there is actually no easy way to annotate the web in any browser today. 4. Reading lists - not new, but new in MS realm. 5. Lastly, the hidden weapon - Cortana. It is integrated every-freakin-where in the browser. It is like Siri had sex with Google Now.
- bane 11y agoThis is really exciting. I think it can be better when companies like Microsoft demonstrate tight top-to-bottom integration. But it's also hard to forget previous behavior when they used that same integration to screw people over. Let's hope they follow a more benign path this time.
- WorldWideWayne 11y agoHow did Microsoft screw you over by integrating something into Windows?
- jamie_ca 11y agoPretty sure he's talking about bundled IE and OEM licensing terms prohibiting preinstall of a competing browser, which probably stalled the development of web standards by a few years.
- throwawaykf05 11y agoThat's not what stalled the development of web standards. That's what helped them win the browser wars, during which, mind you, nobody was really trying to follow any standards. Everyone was racing to introduce proprietary features. Microsoft won partly by strong-arming OEMs into not pre-installing other browsers, and partly by simply building a better browser. But just as they won, they got sued big for antitrust, and they let IE languish, which may or may not be due to the lawsuit. This was what slowed adoption of new features because sites were overwhelmingly designed for IE, and IE was not improving at all.
- emilsedgh 11y agoWill it feature automatic [and silent] updates like Chrome does? Or we will have to maintain websites for each version for several years, like IE?
- arenaninja 11y agoThis question needs answering for those of us not in the know. Otherwise, somebody will be supporting this version of a browser 11 years from now
- MLR 11y agoIt's going to be a Windows store application, so yes.
- PauloManrique 11y agoYou can't turn off Windows Update on Windows 10, so yes.
- streptomycin 11y agoHm, nice hype. But what about standards support? For instance, IE since IE10 has been missing some parts of the IndexedDB API. Last I heard, they weren't planning to fix it any time soon https://twitter.com/IEDevChat/status/533338659555008512 https://twitter.com/IEDevChat/status/533338659555008512 This is stuff that a single engineer could easily implement in a couple weeks. Firefox and Chrome have open source implementations and open source unit tests (the W3C has open unit tests too), which makes things even easier. Guess it's too much to ask of a company with the meager resources of MS, though...
- manojlds 11y ago> This is stuff that a single engineer could easily implement in a couple weeks. Just because it can be done by 1 person, doesn't mean there are resources to do so. How many other one person for couple of weeks features are there, you think?
- streptomycin 11y agoI know. It's not realistic to expect tiny non-profits like Microsoft to have the engineering resources of huge corporations like Mozilla. A man can dream, though... If resources are such an issue, maybe Microsoft should go the Netscape path and consider making their browser open source? I'm sure many people would be interested in donating their time to help them support some of these tricky standards. I would love to help them get IndexedDB right! I know some other similarly minded people too.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Coding_Cat 11y agoAlternative link:http://www.browserfordong.com/ http://www.browserfordong.com/ Oddly enough, running a whois on the above returns a different company/person then microsoft. I suppose Microsoft paid them to forward this, or they're much nicer people then I am... Missed opportunity for a prank.
- Fastidious 11y agoAnyone knows how this relates to "Spartan?" I have Windows 10 preview installed, subscribed to "fast" (nighties) and Spartan looks like Edge.
- mtarnovan 11y agoDoes this work on Windows <10 ?
- PauloManrique 11y agoNo, it's a Windows Universal app running on Win10 only.
- Mahn 11y agoAnyone else noticed the favicon? Looks like the settled for an "e" for it's icon.
- maaaats 11y agoYou made me realize why Edge may be a better name than Spartan, as they now can partially reuse the logo.
- quonn 11y agoRight. Actually it's pretty close to the IE 11 and even to the IE 4 logo: http://www.browserfordoing.com/en-us/favicon.ico http://www.browserfordoing.com/en-us/favicon.ico https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/a/a1/Internet_Explorer_4_logo.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/a/a1/Internet_Expl...
- wantab 11y agocaniuse.com already lists Edge for standards support and, just like IE, it falls short in many areas despite what Microsoft claims and in far more areas of compliance than any other browser.
- fleeno 11y agoI love how advertising shows people drawing annotations. It always looks so pointless. Why did they circle that boat? Who is going to see it? What is the circled date on the other example? Did it get added to a calendar, or did it just go nowhere? Can't they at least show cool young people working in a beach shop circling pictures of surfboards for no reason, like actual stylus users? Unrelated to making fun of advertising... What happens to these examples when the site gets updated? Does it store a local copy? What if you want to update it later, but your local copy is now out of date? I did just download Windows 10 to try in a VM, so I guess I'll find out!
- arthurfm 11y agoThe notes can be shared via email, social networks or added to OneNote. http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/30/introducing-project-spartan-the-new-browser-built-for-windows-10/ http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/30/introduc... "Inking and sharing so you can capture and communicate your thoughts: Everyone uses the Web routinely to share questions, thoughts, info and comments with friends and colleagues. Now with new inking capabilities, Project Spartan enables you to write or type directly on the page, comment on what’s interesting or clip what you want – then easily share this “Web Note” via mail, or a social network. Researching and collecting information from the Web is just as easy, as you can save your notes directly to OneNote."
- tropin 11y agoNo, seriously, what's the point in annotating a web page? Even years ago with pure static html webs made little sense.
- robotresearcher 11y agoA small niche, but since you asked: web developers and content editors. I often have to give critical feedback on web pages and I don't even do that for a living.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- yulaow 11y agoQuestion, am I the only one that right now see an abnormal usage of ram by spartan(edge) compared even to chrome? I mean for the same exact page spartan requires about +120% more ram than chrome, and chrome is not really a memory-light browser.
- rottyguy 11y agoAnyone else get the feeling that .net is being groomed to be the "runtime" of the internet (I'll stop short of calling it "OS" as that would seem presumptuous :-)? To the extent where you could run any .net supported language on any OS as well as your browser (C#/F#/VB/Managed C++/etc). Granted the browser version would need to be well sand-boxed but penetrating the Javascript market would be huge. I'm predicting Edge will eventually explore this path.
- rottyguy 11y agobtw- anyone know who the father of .net would be? wikipedia states that .net was created in the late 90's under the next generation windows services umbrella. 1999 is the date that is given when Anders started to assemble the C# team (again wikipedia). Timing seems roughly right but guessing .net preceeded his work on C#. tx
- mkr-hn 11y agoPossibly informative, if not a complete answer: http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/thechannel9team/anders-hejlsberg-what-brought-about-the-birth-of-the-clr http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/thechannel9team/anders-hejlsb...
- lucid00 11y agoI doubt Edge will do this only because of one feature I was surprised to see Microsoft add support for... ASM.js. ASM.js lets supporting browsers run optimized JavaScript code at near native speed and is backwards compatible with all browsers (just running the code slower). With ASM.js Microsoft could bring .NET to all browsers without even needing to update the browsers themselves (just running faster when in a browser that supports ASM.js). So far only Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox support it, I'm waiting for Google Chrome to jump on the bandwagon honestly as it's genius. Also if you want an idea of how powerful it is, it helped Mozilla run the Unreal 4 Engine in Firefox at 1080p in 60FPS without lag.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Grue3 11y agoDoes it support managing dozens (up to 100) tabs like Firefox does with its Tab Groups feature? I'd find it very hard to use a browser that doesn't have a way to deal with tab explosion. Both Chrome and IE are virtually unusable with lots of tabs opened.