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.
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.
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 ).
Ublock Origin/uMatrix on mobile significantly increase website performance and battery life on the average site, by blocking a a lot of advertising and tracking content.
Potential problems could be mitigated pretty easily by warning about or throttling extensions that use too much CPU/memory on mobile.
Not allowing extensions on Chrome for Android might have been an acceptable excuse in the early days of Android, with very weak single core CPUs. But not for years.
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.
Larger laptop form factor provides better sustained performance due to better cooling, as well as larger batteries.
Also, even though you can run Android apps and Linux containers these days, Chrome OS is still built around using the browser in a way Android is not. Your phone has to balance the needs of the browser against other demands and apps.
> 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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
What “saved” Apple was the iMac in 1998, not Microsoft.
Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock in Apple as a show of good faith. Apple made Internet Explorer the default browser for the Mac and Microsoft committed to Office for the Mac. At the time, Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac was the best browser on any platform.
After the 5 year period, Microsoft sold those shares, making a huge profit.
At the end of the 5-year agreement, Apple shipped Safari 1.0, based on the KHTML codebase and the rest, as they say, is history.
Ironically, Microsoft's browser is now based on a fork of the engine of the browser that replaced IE on the Mac back in the day.
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.
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.
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).
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.
You're implicitly reading my comment as some sort attempt to diminish your involvement, and explicitly claiming that I'm the one twisting words. You're wrong about both.
"Part of the creation of Firefox" is the second iteration of the wording in play here, which means it's you and jannes who are twisting words here. I know that moving the goalposts is one of HN's favorite pastimes, but it's a stupid one.
The point where I joined this conversation was to correct someone who referred to you as "the creator of Firefox". I was right to do so. (More than that, it's something you should have been glad to see...) If you want to see this as an insult despite it not being one and then move in to attack me over it with ironic accusations of strawmanning, you can go piss up a flagpole.
We agree I’m not “the” or even “a” creator of Firefox, but the iteration I saw was from “part of” to implied “none”. That is the impression left in Mozilla and other wiki sources unless you check web.archive.org, and it is a bigger wtf for me than my misreading of your intent here. I hope so, anyway! There is an effort to erase me, by others (not you), which is not only dishonest — it won’t work. Sorry for misreading you.
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.
“ 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
I worked on an enterprise product in the 2010-2014 timeframe. We were a huge enterprise company that got acquired by an even larger one; all of our customers were on the Fortune 500.
Our product supported IE7 at the time and let me tell you kids... that is trouble you've not known.
I got so fed up I just said I wasn't going to look at IE7 bugs anymore and wasn't going to invest any time in it. My decision snowballed and eventually that snowball led to dropping IE7 support across the whole organization. It turns out everyone hated it.
Sometimes you've just got to push for it and tell customers that's what you are doing whether they like it or not. We just told our Fortune 500 customer base IE7 support was dead, get over it. And they did.
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.
Its not just YOUR product though - its the entire suite of products that medical institutions use. Be it the EHR, the patient management, the radiology, the cardiology system - each one deals in IE11 instead of a more modern tech stack. So if you end up being the outlier your product is more than likely going to end up being cut in preference for something with fewer features even.
It's certainly not an easy bootstrap problem (by way of a mexican standoff). It's possible many of those projects individually are just waiting for the first to take the first risk and move forward so the rest can just claim to be following someone else's lead. To badly mix metaphors: a rising tide floats all boats, it's just sometimes you have to be the first to remove your finger from the dyke to raise the tide.
Like I said, it's always going to be a calculated risk, and I mentioned that losing customers is certainly a risk involved. Sometimes a small loss of customers is an acceptable risk.
There are mitigations for such risks such as making sure that "fewer features" alternative is your own (at the right maintenance costs), but also including taking things to standards/regulatory boards. Using out-of-date software is a HIPAA risk and an ethics risk. There are ways to convince HIPAA enforcement auditors and/or groups like the AMA that it is too much of a risk, or too unethical a risk and that some sort of upgrade horizon should be spread across the industry. That's not easy either, but it's not impossible, and it's probably a good idea in general in the long run (the regularity with which Day-0 vulnerabilities are disclosed would give a lot of weight to the risks of falling behind on software upgrades, for instance).
I'm working on a product that's directly targeting these customers. Just last week implementation had a call with a customer/potential customer about IE support. We just said no. They backed down.
Probably not very fun, but if the product wont work on IE, hospitals and medical clinics will be forced to move to the latest browsers i.e. purposefully hamper products on IE.
Note that Chromium based Edge contains "IE mode" (see 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).
Where I work, we have about 5-10 million unique daily user sessions accessing our SaaS application. About 40-45% of them use IE11. We have absolutely no choice in the matter and it has been made clear several times by our customers: IE11 support is paramount because upgrading their machines is an extremely expensive task.
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?
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.
Hello. Can you please give some examples of Chrome-specific hacks instead of the normal way, or some web references. I'm helping on development of a web UI framework and it would help. Thank you.
Chrome treats the numeric box as text and accepts a postcode starting with 0. Firefox correctly implements the numeric type, which unfortunately makes the site unusable for all Firefox users in Oslo.
They get none of my business because I'm not willing to switch to Chrome just to order from them.
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?).
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
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.
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.
Considering that the web platform is also an offline application platform an major operation system vendor (MS, Apple, Google) cannot afford to stay out of that game.
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.
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?
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.