
Microsoft Presenter Gives Up on Edge, Installs Chrome - phr4ts
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/10/microsoft-presenter-gives-up-on-edge-installs-chrome/
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crankylinuxuser
Ugh.. Ive been exactly in his shoes. He's trying to demo an area, and dogfood
an unrelated area (browser). I know when Ive done Azure work before, it'll
work in Chrome and firefox. But that's about it. Or it could be some goofy
problem with the browser, or how MS handles what browser it thinks you're
running, or a million other possibilities. Who knows.

But the best way to continue a demo, is just to get the demo done. And
frankly, that someone from MS can install and get to work with Chrome/Google,
cool. Get it done, then get it right.

Tl;Dr. The hotseat of live demos can suck. Really suck. Don't diss till you do
one, and it falls apart. There really is nothing worse than having big
yuckity-yucks sitting there, tut-tutting you because the "Thing" you're
showing off falls flat. You feel about "." this tall.

~~~
CapacitorSet
>The hotseat of live demos can suck. Really suck. Don't diss till you do one,
and it falls apart.

Nobody is picking on the presenter himself for what happened; in fact, he
"saved the day" by quickly switching to Chrome and continuing the
presentation. It is Microsoft that is taking the ridicule for not testing
their interfaces on Edge, their own browser.

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MR4D
It’s exactly this attitude of just get it done that has reignited Microsoft.

They probably get flack for this, but it shows they’re focused more on
results.

~~~
Klathmon
I've talked to some people on the team who works on Edge, and they are a
fantastic group of people.

They know they are in an uphill battle, and everyone is writing them off, but
they are doing damn good work.

Edge's performance is getting leaps and bounds faster every update, they are
doing incredible things for battery life on many devices, they are catching up
to google for web API support, and nobody is taking them seriously.

I know nothing about what it's like to work at microsoft, but whatever they
are doing with the Edge team is working. They know their product isn't perfect
(what is?), and they are just trying their damn hardest to make it better.

~~~
revmoo
> nobody is taking them seriously

Because it's 2017 and I'm STILL having to write workarounds for IE.

~~~
manigandham
This is absolutely valid criticism. Of course the devteam is "good people",
but the issue remains that Edge created yet another browser fork while IE11 is
still around and actively used. Also Edge is still behind with several
features (like server-sent events).

For those saying Edge is different than IE, is there even an IE team anymore
or did they just become the Edge team now? Either way the development strategy
is not great.

~~~
WorldMaker
The way Microsoft likes to shuffle project teams, it's a bit of a ship of
theseus. It's a very strange philosophical debate if the Edge team is the
"same as" the IE10/11 team. The Edge team is definitely not the IE7/8/9 team,
that I'm sure of. The Edge team can't possibly be the IE6- team, because that
team was entirely disbanded. The IE10/11 team inherited the mistakes of the
IE6- team by way of a need for backward compatibility and the backward
compatibility plan put together by the IE7/8/9 team. Does that backward
compatibility arc define what was the IE team? If so, then the Edge team is
definitely not the IE team, having for finality killed the backward
compatibility story of IE7/8/9.

~~~
manigandham
The point is that the criticism applies regardless of which specific product
or people because it is all the "microsoft web browser" group.

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MattSteelblade
From the presenter's comments, it sounds like a GPO locked down Edge. In that
context, it makes sense to immediately install another browser and Chrome is
the market leader.

~~~
nvr219
If GPO is locking down Edge, but not preventing you from installing another
browser, it's a bad GPO...

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dman
Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a
competetive browser?

As someone who has no background doing web development, would also like to
hear from web devs on what proportion of a project is spent building features
vs handling edge cases in browsers (like the one that was hit here in the
article).

~~~
Sylos
> Any estimates on what the economic cost of entry is for developing a
> competetive browser?

I doubt you're gonna get numbers, but I can give you two rough reference
points:

1) All popular modern browsers use browser engines that started out their
lives in the last millennium:

\- Edge uses EdgeHTML, which was forked from IE's Trident, which was first
released in 1997.

\- Firefox uses Gecko, which started development in 1997.

\- Chrome/Opera/Vivaldi use Blink, which was forked from WebKit (which Safari
uses), which in turn was forked from KHTML, which started development somewhen
around 1998.

So, all of these had their architecture laid out before multi-core CPUs were a
thing in desktop PCs and before the web became more than just text with the
occasional image thrown in.

As a result, all of them lack severely in parallelism and use of the GPU, and
writing a browser engine from scratch would allow you to get these things
right and give you ridiculously better performance than all other browser. But
no one's done it yet, because of this insanely high cost to redevelop
everything.

Which brings us to reference point 2), Mozilla has actually started work on
writing a browser engine from scratch in 2013. The project is called Servo and
they even find it worthwhile to basically develop their own programming
language, Rust, for writing Servo in it.

And well, Servo shows off quite nicely the aforementioned potential in writing
a browser engine from scratch, but it also still explodes spectacularly,
trying to render out ACID3, which was released in 2008 to try to represent
what a good browser should have been capable of back then.

Now, Mozilla is not working on this full-pelt, but it is a big organisation
with lots of browser-making know-how. They're also sort of bootstrapping Servo
by including production-ready Servo components into Gecko, resulting in the
maintenance work being shared.

So, basically I wouldn't expect any new player to enter the market in at least
the next ten years.

~~~
steveklabnik
In my understanding, the Servo team has never focused on ACID 3, instead
prioritizing features that are actually used by the top X websites.

------
hungerstrike
I'm sure that the Azure team built their portal to work with the most popular
browser and didn't concern themselves with Edge too much, just like every
other web developer.

Anyway, I like how he unchecked the Telemetry feature before installing Chrome
so that he didn't have to "help make Google Chrome better".

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senatorobama
This reminds me that enterprise software is garbage.

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red75prime
Edge... A fine browser, but alt+shift randomly stops working and it is show
stopper.

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BrandoElFollito
This kind of state of mind is what makes me interested in a product. Being an
AWS user, I will have a look right away at Azure (now that they have a free
tier of sorts)

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GrumpyNl
He handled it impressively and was focused on the presentation. Hats off sir.

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mattimo
I wish I could give up on Edge, but my end users won't let me.

~~~
dictum
> I wish I could give up on Edge

Why?

~~~
Spivak
For the same reason it's easier to target just Linux or just Windows or just
OS X. The fewer platforms you need to support the less time/work needs to be
spent porting.

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digitalshankar
Savage!

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diego_moita
He was presenting Azure and the browser was enable to parse a XmlHttpRequest.
It could be an error on the browser or on the server side application. Because
he is on the server side team he blamed the browser.

Rule #1 of pointing fingers: it's always someone else's fault.

~~~
raverbashing
From the comments on the article, it could also have been a beta version of
Edge

~~~
blinkingled
The presenter said it could be because the work laptops are locked down quite
a bit. (GPOs to disallow some browser features is not uncommon in corporations
at all.)

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crabasa
To be clear, this isn't a product called "Presenter", this is a person who
works for Microsoft who switched to Chrome during a presentation. Nothing to
see here.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It's a little embarrassing though. Had they at least chosen Firefox which
isn't a major competitor of theirs across multiple markets, it wouldn't be
nearly as bad.

~~~
ballenf
Showing that your product works flawlessly on the market-leading browser is
not "bad" in my opinion.

If he'd tried it in Firefox next I think everyone would have been distracted
by the question in their heads of "does it not work on Chrome?".

~~~
josteink
> I think everyone would have been distracted by the question in their heads
> of "does it not work on Chrome?".

Or maybe be they would had thought “Wow. Finally someone who does proper
cross-browser testing and not just defaulting to Chrome. How refreshing. Maybe
there’s hope for the web after all?”

