
Microsoft is rebuilding its Edge browser on Chrome and bringing it to the Mac - benaadams
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128648/microsoft-edge-chrome-chromium-browser-changes
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trebor
As a professional web developer I don't know how I feel about this.

1\. Edge is terrible, in my experience, and has strange edge-case bugs to work
around on complicated sites. Also, the fixes don't fix what might break in IE.

2\. Chromium can _easily_ account for ~70% of all browser traffic. This helps,
but also locks us into stagnation. It puts all Chromium-based browsers into
the IE6-of-the-interwebs category.

I think I fall on the "this is bad" side, though. Edge wasn't much in the way
of an innovator, so we aren't losing much. We're just losing as chromium
browsers continue to gain market share and make competition difficult.

~~~
pilif
_> into the IE6-of-the-interwebs category_

Does it though? Chromium or rather the Blink engine is very different from
IE6: It's in active development, it's available for multiple platforms, it's
open source and it follows web standards as they developed.

The old days of IE6 were very different in that the web standards were stuck
in a limbo (remember XHTML?), IE6 had features that were specific to Windows
and could not be ported to other OSes without bringing half of Windows with it
(ActiveX) and IE6 was full of quirks and bugs that directly contradicted the
standards.

If you made a site to work correctly in IE and using all of its features it
was very unlikely that it could work unaltered on any other platform and,
again, IE itself was inherently non-portable.

Conversely, if you made a site targeting standards, you would a) lose out on
features the market wanted and other sites provided (back then, even AJAX was
an IE-only feature for a while) and b) the site would not work _at all_ on the
browser with 90% market share.

Today the standards move fast enough and are implemented quickly enough by
browser vendors that your standards-compliant site will not be at a
competitive disadvantage. And even if Google decided to stop being standards
compliant and removing features they don't like or adding features we don't
like, Chromium is open source and Microsoft is powerful enough to keep the
eventual fork alive.

As somebody who lived through the bad old IE6 days, I see this current
situation as a much more positive thing than what the IE-of-old situation ever
was.

To the contrary: The way how the siutation looks like right now, we are
finally at the position where every OS with any significant market share will
now come with a default browser that supports the majority of the current web
standards and that will be updated often enough to stay up do date with the
standards as they evolve.

While Edge was much better than IE in that regard, have a look at caniuse.com
and compare what's offered to-date by the default browser shipping with
Windows to what's offered by any other OSes default browser.

Edge was still based on Trident, no matter what MS was saying. The decades of
technical dept remained and by being tied to the OS, Edge could only ever be
updated every 6 months anyways.

~~~
forgot-my-pw
> While Edge was much better than IE in that regard, have a look at
> caniuse.com and compare what's offered to-date by the default browser
> shipping with Windows to what's offered by any other OSes default browser.

Edge and Safari are a bit behind:
[https://caniuse.com/#compare=edge+18,firefox+63,chrome+70,sa...](https://caniuse.com/#compare=edge+18,firefox+63,chrome+70,safari+12)

------
quandary82
Finally ! +1 Belfiore Now merge Chakra and V8 into V9, and there you go.
Change the default-search engine to Bing, change the logo on the new-tab page
from google to Microsoft/Azure/Bing, and add a bug that prevents search-engine
switching - and voilà, finished is Microsoft Chrome ;) Bonus: Now you can lay-
off most of the IE engineers, and cash in on a bonus, while google bankrolls
your new browser. Everyone who wants a memory-efficient browser- Firefox to
the rescue. Also, if you run chrome with --no-sandbox, it will use much less
RAM - at the expense of security ;) Less is more, so to say, or maybe not.
Anyway, to deliver us from IE11 is very much appreciated. Let's hit the nails
into the coffin of IE11.

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babyslothzoo
And here's the source minus The Verge ad covered regurgitation:

[https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-
edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/)

[https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-
us/](https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/)

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rrival
Great! Let's add another MSFT browser to the regression tests!

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drivingmenuts
I don’t think it matters much - it’ll be just another Chrome-based browser. As
long as it renders as well and as fast as Chrome, no big deal.

Sure, there may be other features, but those are User features and hardly
important since they come and go and most browsers cover the basics of
bookmarking.

Aside from the rendering and JS engines, browsers aren’t even interesting
anymore.

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lupinglade
Yeah, we Mac users have been waiting for this! /s

