
Chromium-based Edge preview builds - cmsimike
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/04/08/microsoft-edge-preview-builds-the-next-step-in-our-oss-journey/#StkMOeGHF90ywVZP.97
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fgonzag
I wish they've would have gone with Firefox's Quantum, in order to try and at
least balance out web market shares.

MSFT no longer has any leverage in the web, so trying to keep it fair and
accessible (no browser monopolies) should be a priority for them (especially
since they have quite a few web platforms like office 365)

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lousken
I hope Apple would turn away from webkit and invested into firefox. They're
both privacy focused so it seems like a logical choice.

~~~
saagarjha
Why would they do that when they essentially control an entire browser engine?

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fjp
Because their browser engine sucks, people just use it on mobile (iOS) because
they basically have to in order to open any link.

Every full time job I've had I've been issued a MacBook and step 1 of setup
was "install Firefox or Chrome".

Safari is one of the few things that truly outright blows about the Apple
ecosystem.

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saagarjha
Safari is the first thing I launch when I open my Mac and it's the last thing
that I quit before shutting it down. If you're looking for battery life and
RAM to spare for other applications, use Safari.

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olliej
Can we finally stop saying safari is the new ie, and recognize that chrome is
now _literally_ the new IE?

Seriously, this means that chrome has more or less complete market dominance
at this point.

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gerardnll
Why is Safari the new IE?

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apocalyptic0n3
Safari increasingly doesn't follow standards, implements non-standard
features, and updates are tied to OS updates so if users do not update their
OS (which is free on macOS but not well advertised in the OS itself), they are
stuck running an old browser.

~~~
bendavis381
This is incorrect. Safari 12 shipped with support for macOS 10.12 and 10.13
[1].

[1] - [https://developer.apple.com/safari/whats-
new/](https://developer.apple.com/safari/whats-new/)

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
Huh. That's changed, then, since previous updates were always tied to the OS.
Still not great support, though. Chrome supports back to 10.10, Firefox back
to 10.9, Vivaldi back to 10.10, Brave back to 10.10, etc.

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emp_
To the surprise of no one, its basically chrome. Even my google account came
in logged in automatically, same recent sites etc. I wonder if the roadmap
will include things like dark mode, I never used the annotations feature so
can't vouch much for it. I'm yet to try to make a MS Teams call but looking
good so far.

The single engine world domination plan takes one step further today.

~~~
geofft
Google account integration seems pretty non-strategic for Microsoft - do we
have any idea if this is intentional? (I would have assumed they'd implement
all the cloud stuff backed by Live accounts.)

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fxbl0i
This new Edge seems to reuse the cookie jar, history, etc. of the real Edge,
so emp_ is probably already logged in to his Google account on the real Edge.
(Corrections welcome, but it's what I've noticed after trying it.)

~~~
emp_
I'm not logged in anything google on vanilla Edge at all, this is not coming
from the Edge history.

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rayiner
I liked Edge because of its fantastic battery life (for browsing, Edge was
like having a 25% larger battery.) I was annoyed that many sites seemed to be
Chrome-specific, including some I absolutely need to rely on. I switched to
Brave, and it's amazing. Chrome-based, but somehow results in far better
battery life than Chrome.

~~~
pcwalton
> I liked Edge because of its fantastic battery life (for browsing, Edge was
> like having a 25% larger battery.)

For what it's worth, I suspect this is the result of using the system
DirectComposition. If you look at the more recent additions to that API,
they're essentially just CSS 3. Basically, Windows integrates portions of CSS
deeply into its OS stack, like macOS does with Core Animation. It's sad that
moving to Chromium will regress this elegant architecture, as saving the extra
blits that come from doing everything at the application level as Chromium
mostly does (except for video playback IIRC) is a nice power and performance
improvement.

> Chrome-based, but somehow results in far better battery life than Chrome.

Most likely because of ad blocking.

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rayiner
Neat, I didn't even know that existed.

> Compositions and animations created by DirectComposition are passed to a
> built-in component of Windows called Desktop Window Manager (DWM) for
> rendering to the screen. Therefore, no special rendering components or UI
> frameworks are required on the computer.

Wow. Everything old is new again:
[https://nnc3.com/mags/LM10/issue/04/Berlin.pdf](https://nnc3.com/mags/LM10/issue/04/Berlin.pdf).

(As an aside, Berlin has somehow almost completely disappeared from Google. I
had trouble remembering the name, and I searched "display server scene graph
corba" and it didn't come up in the first few pages. Finally found this
slashdot announcement:
[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/11/24/189226/fresco-m1-re...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/11/24/189226/fresco-m1-released.))

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pcwalton
Yeah, it's neat. The long-term goal is to move Firefox to use
DirectComposition as much as it can, by the way, by integrating it into
WebRender. I've done some work on this with the "planeshift" library. I
wouldn't be surprised if Chromium eventually does the same (as it already uses
Core Animation on macOS).

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penagwin
I think there's a tongue-in-cheek joke about IE/Edge being so bloated as is,
that the only route they could take was to slap electron on top for even more
memory usage.

All jokes aside, are they still using Chakra or switching to V8? I know there
was a ton of work in node.js to make it work with chakra, not to mention edge
was one of the early adopters of many ES2015/ES6 features, it seems odd to me
to abandon all of that momentum.

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muizelaar
They're using V8.
[https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/5865#issue-38...](https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/5865#issue-388756166)

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devoply
Which begs the question why would anyone use Edge when they can use Chrome?

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flanbiscuit
I _believe_ they are doing this because they are heavily investing in Electron
(Skype, Visual Studio Code, Teams, more). Having both Chromium and V8 be part
of Edge (and the OS) means they can remove them as bundled dependencies from
Electron on Windows and lighten the payload of those apps. I wouldn't be
surprised if we see future Windows builds of Electron becoming smaller because
of this.

There is not proof of this, this is just a hunch I have.

Eletrino[1] and Quark[2] tried tackling this idea of using native OS engines
but they seem to just be side projects and/or experiments.

[1] [https://github.com/pojala/electrino](https://github.com/pojala/electrino)

[2] [https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark](https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark)

~~~
petecox
Porting VS Code to Chrome OS, without need for an electron-based GTK app
inside a 'Linux container'?

[https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1031](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1031)

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makecheck
It’s truly remarkable that a company that was once nearly broken up by the
government over its browser bundling, is now barely implementing a browser.

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saagarjha
> Support for Mac and all supported versions of Windows will also come over
> time.

Is anyone actually planning to use Edge on macOS? What reasons would you have
for doing so?

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outside1234
Its Chrome but not Google? Sort of the same usecase as Brave?

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saagarjha
…but it’s Microsoft. Is that any better?

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kitsunesoba
I hope Microsoft makes a point of prioritizing efficiency over features in
Chrome-Edge. Google has seemingly placed low resource consumption and low
battery life impact as tertiary concerns (at best), opting to woo developers
with a constant stream of hastily developed shiny features instead.

As it is the only browser that seems to care at all about not sucking your
battery life down a black hole is Safari…

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WorldMaker
The Edge team has repeatedly said that Performance/Battery Life has always
been important to them. One of the reasons they've mentioned for why they are
going Chromium-based is that it gives them more time to focus on
Performance/Battery rather than web platform bugs, and they've definitely
listed Performance/Battery as a continued "Focus Area" for the team.

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janober
It seems like they do not have planned to support Linux. It simply says "Not
supported" and on the download page it is not even mentioned:
[https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-
us/download/](https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/download/)

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partiallypro
It looks nice so far, but Microsoft really needs to drop the E logo, and maybe
even the Edge name. Both already have negative connotations; and I don't think
Microsoft can now claim that it makes it easier to find access to the
internet. Especially when Chrome and Safari on tablets and phones look nothing
like the iconic blue E, and yet late age boomers can still figure out the
devices.

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s_y_n_t_a_x
I'm not so sure that all old consumers can find another browser icon. Most in
my experience look for the E.

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abrowne
That's what they said when they announced the Edge name – if they didn't
choose an E- name (and logo), literally millions of people wouldn't be able to
get on the web.

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ghostly_s
Now try to imagine providing support for one of these users and explaining
_no_ , you're clicking the _wrong shade of blue 'e'_.

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sverige
Seriously, why is MS doing this? Internet Explorer died years ago, Edge never
took off, and Google isn't about to give up their market share for spyware
without a fight. It's like MS thinks this is Browser Wars 3.0. Heaven help me
if it turns out that MS seems to be doing something comparatively good.

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s_y_n_t_a_x
I think you answered your own question. Edge never took off, why continue
investing money into it?

This offloads a lot of work to the open-source Chromium project, allowing
Microsoft to just skin it and add whatever else they need.

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dragonwriter
> This offloads a lot of work to the open-source Chromium project, allowing
> Microsoft to just skin it and add whatever else they need.

Plus, it means any work MS does at implementing web features they view as
strategic in their browser will naturally easily port back to Chrome,
eliminating _technical_ barriers for them becoming common user-agent features
(there might still be political/strategic reasons for Chrome not accepting
them, of course.)

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forgotmypw
URL contains tracking device.

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murkle
chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features works but redirects
to edge:// :)

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fxbl0i
This wasn't necessary, they just had to get rid of the slow, ugly UWP UI
framework. The Edge rendering engine was fine.

It looks like this new Edge uses Win32 instead of UWP, so people will actually
use it, and they'll pat their own backs thinking the problem was the rendering
engine. No, it was the stupid UI framework. >:(

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zamadatix
99% of people probably never even noticed Edge is UWP based. I don't really
think MS switched over because they were losing out on performance either.
Seems more like they were just tired of maintaining a first class browser
stack that wasn't very popular when using Google's gets them everything just
about the same.

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rock_artist
I mostly use Windows on Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet.

TL;DR - no 32bit builds. currently only 64bit builds.

