
Microsoft's Three Browsers - thibautg
https://textslashplain.com/2020/02/03/microsofts-three-browsers/
======
andrewstuart
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.

~~~
overgard
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.

~~~
alwillis
_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.

~~~
ksec
>Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock in Apple as a show of good
faith.

Well there was the legal battle going on between the two as well. So you could
think of IE, Office, 150M stock was part of the package.

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lostgame
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.

~~~
sahaskatta
I switched from Chrome to Edge because:

* No Google tracking.

* Blocks 3rd party trackers.

* Zoom/Scroll is smoother.

* Better optimized for touch screens.

* Longer battery life.

* Seems to use less RAM.

* All my Chrome extensions are compatible.

* I can watch Netflix in 4K. Can't do that on Chrome or on a Mac.

~~~
gjhr
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)

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TsomArp
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.

~~~
6nf
link?

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plopz
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?

~~~
WorldMaker
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.

~~~
apatheticonion
How do we convince hospitals and medical clinics to use Chrome, Firefox or the
latest edge browser?

~~~
WorldMaker
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.

~~~
lvspiff
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.

~~~
WorldMaker
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).

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butz
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?

~~~
jjeaff
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.

~~~
eitland
> Just testing for Firefox and chrome/edge will be nice.

Thanks! Most thinks just work on Firefox but I also see a number of things not
working because certain people just can't be bothered to:

a) learn to not use Chrome-specific hacks instead of the normal way

b) just test their sites with the second most used browser engine

~~~
pdanpdan
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.

~~~
tallanvor
Sometimes it's where Firefox adheres to specifications, while Chrome doesn't.

As an example, [https://www.just-eat.no](https://www.just-eat.no)

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.

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gfiorav
The new Edge is excellent. Windows is evermore becoming a great digital home.

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mappu
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.

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mixmastamyk
I don’t see why they need a browser at all. Kill IE and Edge and be done with
it. The integration was a ploy to fool regulators.

~~~
peterclary
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.

~~~
unnouinceput
Unwillingly is an understatement. They are adamant on doing backward
compatibility. Just ask Raymond Chen

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zerr
I wonder why they (also Opera) couldn't keep up with the development of in-
house engines.

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limeblack
There is a fourth WebKit Safari for iOS. Marketed as Edge has bugs all it's
own although more Safari then a separate browser.

