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)
Perhaps I'm too jaded, but there's an unmistakable smell of the fishy about this. Dominant mobile + dominant desktop OS vendors decide to cosy up together...
I never thought I'd see the day that I mourned IE's decline having lived through the zenith of its hegemony. Like parent, I similarly would much rather have seen MS link up with Firefox for the sake of diversity. Perhaps that's too fanciful.
Perhaps a more interesting pairing would be Apple and Firefox, given that both are increasingly playing the pro-privacy card...
[0] I'm not counting Safari since WebKit and Blink diverged some time ago afaik.
Gaming on MacOS has become a much more limited experience than on Linux (blame Valve for this) or Windows. Apple wields a big stick with each of these choices, kneecaping HTML5 PWAs, pushing forward their own graphics stack (hence the crap OpenGL support and lack of Mantle support)
But from a business point-of-view, there's two opposing sides: going with Gecko devalues your browser on mobile (where WebKit & Blink effectively form a duopoly, and there's still enough content that relies on non-standard (pre-fork) behaviour that it causes problems for Gecko), though going with Gecko would increase their leverage against Google.
There were certainly a fair few of us at Opera when the decision there was made to move to WebKit who argued for Gecko, but that decision was very much made on the basis of growing web compat problems on mobile (given WebKit had >90% marketshare there) and going with Gecko wouldn't solve that, and that situation hasn't really changed (well, the WebKit/Blink fork has improved things somewhat for new features, but that's about it).
Ironically, it was one of the few technologies coming from ms that I was interested in.
I remember at one point Apple wouldnt allow any other browsers rendering engines on iOS - is that still the case?
Seriously, this means that chrome has more or less complete market dominance at this point.
Personally, I compare it to IE because of how weird it can be. Does anyone else remember the time they broke file upload[1], even though those issues were found in beta[2]? Or about the time they changed meta viewport[3]?
Edit: Oh, the last link also remind me of the window.location change that utterly broke Angular/Ionic[4].
[1] https://blog.fineuploader.com/ios8-presents-serious-issues-t...
[2] https://github.com/FineUploader/fine-uploader/issues/1269 (I can't remember the Apple radar bug number(s))
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/3la04p/psa_safa...
[4] https://blog.ionicframework.com/ios-9-potential-breaking-cha...
I never said that, and chrome is not literally the new IE, no matter how poorly the word literally is misused.
Chromium is a free (a blend of BSD-style, MIT, GPL, and other generally regarded as free licences apply) piece of software that's performant, cross-platform, receives regular feature updates, rarely breaks backwards compatibility, and doesn't try to lock you into one vendor. Compare and contrast the history of IE.
Microsoft's (new) Edge is using Chromium.
> Seriously, this means that chrome has more or less complete market dominance at this point.
No it doesn't. This is hyperbole.
• https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267
• https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/
• https://www.telerik.com/blogs/safari-is-not-the-new-ie-but
• https://dev.to/nektro/safari-is-the-new-internet-explorer-1d...
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/6zb73s/safari_is_...
• https://apple.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/2251253/is-safari-...
• https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed...
• https://medium.com/@matthew.johnson/safari-is-the-new-ie-but...
I am a happy Safari user though :-)
The issue stems from the slow adoption of certain technologies. That was the issue everyone had with IE 6 - everyone used it but it lacked modern features so it sucked to use, but you had to because of it's market share.
So Chrome derivarives might fit first criteria but neither them nor Safari fits (yet) the second one. Yes, Safari development may be not as fast but it is still ongoing and the team is not disbanded.
The most evil thing Google is doong with their browser right now may be implementation of non-standard features which only help their business.
The single engine world domination plan takes one step further today.
LOL, this is hilarious.
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.
> 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.
(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...)
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.
Is anyone actually planning to use Edge on macOS? What reasons would you have for doing so?
So in the end, a mac version of edgeium just adds yet another browser to the test matrix columns....
As it is the only browser that seems to care at all about not sucking your battery life down a black hole is Safari…
So assuming an OS does need to ship with a browser, skinning a chromium one seems very sensible.
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.)
The greedy strategy of wanting to have both Windows 10 and browser market share is what doomed Edge.
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. >:(
TL;DR - no 32bit builds. currently only 64bit builds.
