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> For the Edge browser Microsoft has again decided to develop their own rendering engine, instead of relying on open source alternatives (Blink, Gecko, WebKit).

> For the Edge browser Microsoft has again decided to develop their own rendering engine, instead of relying on open source alternatives (Blink, Gecko, WebKit). I have to doubt their decision as a browser engine is a big development effort and they need to be updating it from now to eternity. Um, why would they move when they already have an engine? Sure you can argue they should have moved to WebKit or Gecko or even Opera's rendering engine years ago but Trident has been improved significantly over the years. Don't forget Edge is based on Trident (so it's not entirely new or anything as implied in the post; it provided a good base to rip legacy support out of and to improve other things). Beyond that though it seemed fine just kinda felt like the author had a bias against Microsoft from that first statement where he / she questioned their rendering engine decisions. I'm also not entirely convinced they tuned explicitly for the benchmarks they called out; sure they may have but I don't know that I believe they necessarily would have had to.

Klathmon 11y ago
I sincerely hope they NEVER use another engine. Diversity is our friend, and having multiple engines all on similar terms means that bugs won't end up as "correct" and it helps push everyone forward.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  If they used an open source engine, I would hope it would be that they would open source their own engine. That would be nice to see. Considering Microsoft open sourcing other projects, and this particular product they give out somewhat freely already. Would also allow a community to build up around it, and report as well as possibly contribute bug fixes.
noinsight 11y ago
> Um, why would they move when they already have an engine? Yeah obviously they didn't start from scratch, the new engine is just a forked Trident where they removed all the legacy cruft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML
cwyers 11y ago
I thought the complaining that Microsoft wasn't using WebKit to be hilarious in light of Google's forking WebKit -- if Google and Apple couldn't collaborate on WebKit development, there's no reason to suspect that Microsoft and Apple (or Microsoft and Google, in the case of Blink) would be able to collaborate any better. Meanwhile, Mozilla no longer allows embedded Gecko, and warns that doing so will mean not getting the latest security fixes: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Gecko/Embedding_Moz... And now that Edge is close to release, we see that it already surpasses WebKit in HTML5 support: http://html5test.com/compare/browser/chrome-43/firefox-38/ie-Edge/safari-8.0.html http://html5test.com/compare/browser/chrome-43/firefox-38/ie... On the JavaScript side of things, Edge is tied for Firefox as the leading implementer of ES6 features: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ For a long time, Microsoft made a strategic decision to ignore the web, and that hurt a lot of things. And Microsoft has privileged archaic Intranet sites over progress on the web ever since, which hasn't been great either (unless you run one of those Intranet sites). But the idea that Microsoft doesn't have the resources to maintain a browser engine is ludicrous -- they're Microsoft. And they're already ahead of one of the suggested alternatives, WebKit. (And WebKit is probably the one of the three that's least tied to a specific browser implementation, so it's the one most amenable to having been picked in place of their Trident revamp.)

Klathmon 11y ago

I sincerely hope they NEVER use another engine. Diversity is our friend, and having multiple engines all on similar terms means that bugs won't end up as "correct" and it helps push everyone forward.

giancarlostoro 11y ago
If they used an open source engine, I would hope it would be that they would open source their own engine. That would be nice to see. Considering Microsoft open sourcing other projects, and this particular product they give out somewhat freely already. Would also allow a community to build up around it, and report as well as possibly contribute bug fixes.

noinsight 11y ago

> Um, why would they move when they already have an engine? Yeah obviously they didn't start from scratch, the new engine is just a forked Trident where they removed all the legacy cruft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML

cwyers 11y ago

I thought the complaining that Microsoft wasn't using WebKit to be hilarious in light of Google's forking WebKit -- if Google and Apple couldn't collaborate on WebKit development, there's no reason to suspect that Microsoft and Apple (or Microsoft and Google, in the case of Blink) would be able to collaborate any better. Meanwhile, Mozilla no longer allows embedded Gecko, and warns that doing so will mean not getting the latest security fixes: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Gecko/Embedding_Moz... And now that Edge is close to release, we see that it already surpasses WebKit in HTML5 support: http://html5test.com/compare/browser/chrome-43/firefox-38/ie-Edge/safari-8.0.html http://html5test.com/compare/browser/chrome-43/firefox-38/ie... On the JavaScript side of things, Edge is tied for Firefox as the leading implementer of ES6 features: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ For a long time, Microsoft made a strategic decision to ignore the web, and that hurt a lot of things. And Microsoft has privileged archaic Intranet sites over progress on the web ever since, which hasn't been great either (unless you run one of those Intranet sites). But the idea that Microsoft doesn't have the resources to maintain a browser engine is ludicrous -- they're Microsoft. And they're already ahead of one of the suggested alternatives, WebKit. (And WebKit is probably the one of the three that's least tied to a specific browser implementation, so it's the one most amenable to having been picked in place of their Trident revamp.)