by TanakaTarou on 12/4/18, 5:10 AM
What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engine is a big step in that direction. It is a step they have to do because.. and now comes the down votes... YOU don't test your work in Egde and because YOU tell all friends and family to use Chrome instead of edge. I bet many of you even helps friends and family in downloading it. So stop complaining about monoculture. Many of you helped create it.
by jccalhoun on 12/4/18, 3:06 AM
As a firefox fax, I hope this isn't true. The dominance of chrome isn't good for anyone. This will lead to (even more) sites not bothering to be made compatible with Firefox. We are headed back to the "designed for IE" days.
by tambourine_man on 12/4/18, 3:20 AM
Interesting theory and thread:
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10697763353362923...
“This isn’t about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork”
by fourthark on 12/4/18, 3:13 AM
Very sad. I'm not a Microsoft fan but I thought this was one of the things they were doing right.
The performance was really good, compatibility with standards was actually the best IMHO. Every thing (SVG) I tried that got past Firefox and Chrome worked on Edge without modification.
And yeah, we need the competition.
It's not like Microsoft is running out of money. Guess they need their most talented people doing something else.
by c-smile on 12/4/18, 3:03 AM
That's just the disaster.
And the end of W3C standard development process. AFAIR it should be 3 independent implementations of the feature in order for Draft to reach Recommendation status.
So technically all that means that web standards will be written by WebKit team alone.
Sic transit Gloria mundi, sigh.
by talawahdotnet on 12/4/18, 3:10 AM
Interesting, but what I really, really want them to do is EOL IE 11 so that the web can move forward without feeling guilty about the X% of users still on it. IE 11 has unfortunately become the new IE 6.
As it is right now I believe the IE 11 EOL is tied to the Windows 10 EOL...which is not happening anytime soon. Many frameworks are dropping support for it anyway so I guess it will end up being defacto desupported.
by mooman219 on 12/4/18, 2:00 AM
This has been in the works for a while! A number of Microsoft employees have been making contributions to Chromium too. I hope to see Chromium's performance and battery impact on Windows to improve with this decision which is great for those using the OS.
It sounds like Microsoft really just wants a platform to route people into using Bing and service ads on the new tab page, which they're more than capable of doing on a reskin for Chromium. From a cost standpoint it makes sense to use the existing tools available.
For developers, it's one less platform to target.
by sytelus on 12/4/18, 3:37 AM
by Despegar on 12/4/18, 2:44 AM
And then there were three. Even more reason for Apple to never allow anything but WebKit on iOS. This monoculture isn't good for the web.
edit: Guess the pro-monoculture folks flagged this.
by cwyers on 12/4/18, 3:08 AM
I don't know, I am typing this post on Edge, and HTML rendering is way down on my list of complaints about it. Is switching to Chromium going to fix the lack of a "Paste As Plain Text" option, for instance? (Not the biggest issue, just the one that's freshest in my mind.) And I hope that whatever they do retains their focus on not burning battery, which is a big reason I use Edge as much as I do.
by no_wizard on 12/4/18, 5:49 AM
I think this is interesting. What is more interesting to me is that this would have been a very good chance to align themselves with Apple (WebKit) or Mozilla instead. Effectively Google is far far more of threat than either of these two companies. In fact I think at this point Apple and Microsoft have so much more in common than different in terms of goals, they don’t even really compete head on anymore.
Shocks me they aren’t considering that
by emeraldd on 12/4/18, 1:00 PM
A big reason Inuse chrome is that it is literally everywhere I need it to be: Mac, Linux, Windows, IOs, and Android. Edge is only on one of those and the only time I interact with a Windows machine is when my wife needs help fixing/recovering from something majorly broken on her computer. I haven't used a windows machine in a professional setting in ... 8 or 9 years at a minimum. Purely anecdotal, but my experience leads me to believe that, even though users on alternative platforms may be smaller in number, they tend to be the people building things for everyone else to use. Hence, Edge is stuck in a walled garden of Microsoft's own making and they aren't putting in the effort to make it work with the stuff that runs everywhere else.
by sroussey on 12/4/18, 2:55 AM
by lwansbrough on 12/4/18, 3:14 AM
Stupid. Open source Edge and see where that gets us before you blow up the only chance we have of maintaining an open web standard.
by morpheuskafka on 12/4/18, 4:36 AM
This definitely makes sense from a business standpoint. MS gets two big things from Edge/IE: one, people using Bing by default, and two, tight integration with Windows/Office/MS Cloud services. All of that has nothing to do with engines, very little to do with even UI design.
by chiefalchemist on 12/4/18, 3:20 AM
A number of the comments mention monoculture. But where does monculture end and a solid reliable and honest standard begin? For exampke, at some point the power grid and gasoline formulations were standardized, yes? TV screen sizes, tin cans and shipping containers. Is the browser not the shipping container of our time?
To call W3C a standard and then have different implementations is no standard at all. That is the nature of guidelines. The fact that said "standard" so often led to a suboptional UX only poured salt on the wound.
Maybe this really is bad news? But there doea seem to be some upside, monoculture or not.
by TheCoelacanth on 12/4/18, 4:08 AM
Yay, now instead of two crappy Microsoft browsers, I get to support three crappy Microsoft browsers.
by atonse on 12/4/18, 1:59 AM
Sad news. Chrome is an energy hog on the Mac compared to safari. It probably won’t be as tied to the OS APIs as Edge was.
by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 12/4/18, 3:08 AM
If Microsoft really does this and makes the Chromium based browser the default in Windows, what is the value proposition of installing Chrome? Presumably all the websites will work exactly as they do in Chrome and it will be no faster or slower?
by kainazzzo on 12/4/18, 2:32 AM
Great news! I really tried to like Edge, and used it exclusively for a few months. It just couldn't do the job.
by sn41 on 12/4/18, 4:46 AM
I am somewhat sad at this. I use Seamonkey, but when it comes to opening and annotating pdfs, djvu and epub files, edge does all this on my laptop with minimal fuss. I felt that Edge is one of the things that Microsoft is doing right.
by alpb on 12/4/18, 5:33 AM
I honestly wondered, while I was at Microsoft‚ why this has not happened with Edge from the beginning. Microsoft knew how problematic mshtml.dll was and how frequently it led to zero-day vulnerabilities, while Chrome was not having any high-profile 0-days for many months, maybe years.
Edge was mostly a UI remake of MSIE and it used mostly the same security model, rendering engine etc. It was never a real value add over MSIE.
by saghul on 12/4/18, 9:48 AM
I wonder if this also means ChakraCore would be abandoned. I haven't played with it directly, put it seems to be a very capable JS runtime, which has no home outside of Edge. Well, there is node-chakracore, but I wonder why Microsoft would interested in keeping that effort.
Unless... they replace V8 in their Chromium build with Chakra. They already have a V8 API shim, so I guess that would be within reach.
by morganvachon on 12/4/18, 12:17 PM
From the article:
> In addition, Microsoft engineers were recently spotted committing code to the Chromium project to help get Google Chrome running on ARM.
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something, Chromium already runs on ARM SoCs. Raspbian even ships with it as the default browser.
Also, as to Edge and stability, I don't use Windows 10 for any serious work anymore in light of the recent update gaffes[1], but Edge has been consistently stable and fast in my experience. In fact it's one of the better things about Windows 10; it can correctly render certain websites that Firefox/Waterfox struggles with, and it's as fast as or faster than Chromium across the board.
[1] Even running Windows 10 Pro and deferring updates, I had stability issues with the OS from day one. I had relegated it to just gaming and went back to macOS and Linux for serious work at home, but lately I've decided to stop putting so much time into games and focus on learning and music again. Therefore, I no longer use Windows 10 at all apart from IT duties at my job.
by Analemma_ on 12/4/18, 4:08 AM
I hope everyone complaining about this, and the web monoculture it will crystallize, uses Edge (or at least Firefox) when they're on Windows. Otherwise you're part of the problem. Just like on the "Firefox's market share dips below 9%" thread, everyone wants to gripe about Chrome's dominance but no one wants to do anything about it.
by BuckRogers on 12/4/18, 5:15 AM
This is the wrong strategy for adoption. Edge adoption will skyrocket if they give Win10S / a UWP-only version of Windows away for free. Edge locked and minimal ad support with no data collection business model. Or, give the user the choice between the two SaaS support models that they prefer, one of those combined with being funneled to MS services (Bing etc) should make it sustainable. This will result in being good for web standards, empowering MS, Google, Apple and Mozilla independently.
To increase Electron app performance on Windows, it's a good way to go about it. But I have to wonder if in time Electron will be around when wasm will be a better universal app platform to build around. Little to no performance issues to resolve there.
So some good and some bad. But I can't say that I think it makes as much sense as working hard on pushing wasm and releasing UWP-locked Win10 for any vendor to install or user to download.
by gpvos on 12/4/18, 1:44 PM
Could Microsoft at least open-source their Edge code, so others can develop it further? It's really important for the openness of the web that we don't get a Chromium/Webkit monoculture.
I'd also like to see if there is any way the Opera source code could be opensourced.
by owaislone on 12/4/18, 6:39 AM
Wish they had gone with Mozilla tech instead. Would have created a nice balanced ecosystem.
by nikkwong on 12/4/18, 3:34 AM
I can see how this is creating a monoculture on the web which could have some really negative implications going forward. However, chromium is open source; so I don't really think this is comparable to the IE days.
Also, as a web dev who is trying to push the limits of what is possible given current web APIs, being shackled by edge's lack of compatibility is really a hindrance and makes really cutting-edge stuff impossible. So, it will be nice to not have to worry about that as much.
It didn't seem like microsoft was ever serious about advancing the development of the web with edge; they were just always trying to catch up (and doing so poorly). Microsoft is probably gauging the state of their browser now and coming to the conclusion that they're too far behind to make a realistic comeback without totally revamping their approach; lots of firings/organizational reshuffling, etc.
At least google is serious about the web APIs, even if its' only because it aligns with their financial interests—at least it does end up being a good user experience; i think that's what matters.
--
edit:
Also, not trying to belabor the point, but this subject on the whole is especially important to me. Chrome has allowed me to do crazy-amazing things with SVGs for my dev agency (1) since, well, they actually follow most of the SVG spec. I think most browser vendors see the SVG spec as superfluous and don't follow the spec verbatim, and that stops people like me from doing more awesome things with it; I'll literally have clients pitch me awesome ideas and my response is; sorry, we can do that but it just won't work in safari! So it becomes a no-go for all.
If other vendors really were able to dedicate serious resources towards their browser implementations then yeah, I would also be unhappy about microsoft's decision here. Optimally they would shell out more resources to their Edge division; but since they don't care about web experience the way google does—I agree that deferring to the experts is the best case scenario for everyone (i.e. developers like me and then users). At least, until microsoft redefines their priorities.
[1] www.beaver.digital
by OliverJones on 12/4/18, 4:21 PM
FINALLY. They're laying the Redmond Middle School Science Projects (the Microsoft browsers) to rest.
In the 2+ year timeframe, this will save independent SaaS and software vendors MASSIVE amounts of time and money. Thank you, Satya Nadella.
Hopefully this will resolve the Web Extension store headaches induced by having to distribute through the Microsoft Store.
I suppose those of us who sell to large organizations will still have to support IE11 and Edge for the foreseeable future. Or maybe MS could help us all out by pushing an update to put Rick Astley on the default home page for those browsers, as an encouragement to upgrade.
by EdSharkey on 12/4/18, 9:15 AM
I complained here when the Windows Subsystem for Linux was released that Microsoft was capitulating to Linux, giving customers a migration path away from Windows. That Microsoft had lost confidence in the homespun Win32/Win64/UWP/... API's to court developers. I caught some flak for that, but I was right.
Here, again, we see Microsoft signalling surrender in a HUGE market. Why should I be troubled to run Windows 10, again? Where is the technical distinctiveness in rebranding Chromium? There is no advantage to Microsoft in doing that. It's less disgraceful to keep building out Edge than to rebrand Chromium.
I'm not claiming Microsoft has done a great job. Edge was another mixed bag in a long line of mixed bags on the Web front from Microsoft. But they did compete for a really long time with no shortage of technical distinctiveness. Active Desktop, in the right product manager's hands, could have been a really amazing system. IE6, when it came out, was technically very awesome, doing HTML5-like functionality 7 years before the other browser vendors.
I'd wager open sourcing Windows is next because they're not doing the brand any favors; they'll dump it and move on. Microsoft will focus on Azure and SaaS apps or whatever new market crops up and we'll all be poorer for it.
Windows 7 will be my last Windows unless some amazing direction change happens in the product. I'm just waiting for support to end. Debian Linux, here I come!
by Endy on 12/4/18, 9:28 AM
Chromium, great. With this move, Google gets to take one more step toward total domination of the Web. I'll be honest, I use WebKit-Edge on my iPad and it's fine; but I believe that the desktop space needs a new engine. We need something that isn't Chromium or the Chromium-Gecko that's backing Firefox since the intro of WebExtensions. There's only one problem - that's a hard challenge, and just blindly following Google is the easy way out.
by nwah1 on 12/4/18, 2:19 AM
Very much hope Edge is open sourced.
by vbezhenar on 12/4/18, 3:17 AM
Sad news for me. I liked Edge. It missed few essential features for me (no search in history, really?), so after a while I switched to Chrome, but I was checking it from time to time and I never wanted it to have another engine.
Microsoft seems to lost an ability to fight and make successful projects. There’s absolutely no reason for me to use their browser now.
by zapzupnz on 12/4/18, 8:44 AM
Tangentially related to all the stuff about the impending browser monoculture (everything old is new; Chromium shall be the next IE, etc.), I wonder if Apple would ever revive Safari on Windows.
There's probably more value in it now than there was before, because all those iPhone users who don't want to or don't the choice to use a Mac would still want iCloud bookmark and keychain sync on their machines. Plus, eventually, it might become another glass of that proverbial ice water in Hell that iTunes and Safari for Windows were once touted to be.
Yes, I know Windows would still have Firefox and all that, but I don't think one competitor does competition make. You need many competitors to segment the market, because this is not a market where segmentation should be considered a problem; rather, it should be embraced as the way to drive standards forward. It's worked that way for us since 2007 up until the last couple of years, it'll work again.
by technion on 12/4/18, 5:56 AM
The writing was on the wall when Microsoft release Windows Server 2019 - and announced it won't support Edge. Thinking of every corporate that's going to be using this new OS for RDS and Citrix farms, not shipping with Edge said they weren't going for the corporate market. Which happens to have been their biggest market.
by meruru on 12/4/18, 6:44 AM
They should just ship Firefox instead. They would get most of the benefits, wouldn't have to depend on Google tech, and could probably garner a lot of good will from the FOSS community. At least for me, it would mean much more than things like open-sourcing VS Code and other such moves do.
by userbinator on 12/4/18, 12:37 PM
Edge was already in a difficult place from the beginning --- a new browser engine in a new UI that tried to be yet-another-Chrome-clone. They alienated both their IE users, which hate the UI changes, and weren't very successful in pleasing web developers with their new browser engine either. I would much rather have the classic familiar IE UI with a new browser engine, because the UI is the only reason I use IE over other browsers (which are increasingly turning into approximations of Chrome's UI.)
There used to be many browsers. Not so long ago, it was mainly a choice between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and IE. Now it'll be more like a choice between Chrome, Chrome, and Firefox.
by tannhaeuser on 12/4/18, 6:54 AM
This is very sad, and a huge, terminal fail on the part of WHATWG to steer HTML, by making it so fscking complicated that it's infeasible to develop new browsers ever again. But maybe a monoculture was what they were heading for all the time.
by kerng on 12/4/18, 5:02 AM
For Microsoft this makes perfect sense, they can keep Edge UI and use that to build there own non Google experience. Maintaining the underlying details and stuff is just overhead, rather they can entirely focus on new things and experiences.
by thrownaway954 on 12/4/18, 1:29 PM
FINALLY!!! The bottom line is that Chromium has won in all areas of the engine wars and Chrome has won the browser wars. Heck Chrome has even won in the testing area once it release a headless version. Everyone uses Chrome as a baseline when checking how their site renders. Like 99% of Windows users, I used Edge to download Chrome. This is a smart move by Microsoft, having the browser that is package with Windows, using the most popular rendering engine, will make people think twice about having to download another browser.
https://imgur.com/gallery/9TxWoa9
by kgwxd on 12/4/18, 3:58 AM
If they had made it open source, cross-platform (like vs code), with sane telemetry options (unlike vs code) I would have gave it a go. I don't get why they though anything else had a chance in the current market.
by WorldMaker on 12/4/18, 6:57 PM
There is something really weird/off about this rumor. It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to drop EdgeHTML. EdgeHTML is doing really well.
The big thing that jumps out here is the repeated use of the term Chromium rather than Blink. That might just be a non-technical writer here, but what if it is not?
EdgeHTML has been working for years to be open source, and maybe even cross-platform. Could this project actually be the completion of that effort? Maybe they are using Chromium to host EdgeHTML (and ChakraCore) instead of Blink/V8? Edge for macOS and Linux, maybe?
by MarkMc on 12/4/18, 1:28 PM
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why did Microsoft create a web browser in the first place? Did Microsoft make any more money by having control of the dominant web browser?
They could have just let Netscape win. Later when Google demonstrated the value of search, Microsoft could have just shipped Firefox with Bing set at the default search engine. Microsoft wouldn't have had to pay for decades of browser development, and it wouldn't have been slapped with a huge anti-trust action by the US Department of Justice.
by captainmuon on 12/4/18, 10:40 AM
That's quite unfortunate. I like Edge - the rendering engine, not so much the browser. If Edge would let me sync my bookmarks with Firefox, I would switch immediately. I found it quite fast, and no other engine works so well with touch. I also don't recall rendering problems.
What MS should do IMHO is to package Edge as a component (like IE was in the old days), and let people build shells around it (like the Maxthon browser was).
I don't think I would use an Edge based on Chromium much, as I liked the UI itself not so much.
by t0astbread on 12/4/18, 6:40 AM
It's good that a Windows-only rendering engine where people working on other operating systems can't test their work is gone but this is problematic for tech diversity on the web
by qwerty456127 on 12/4/18, 3:14 AM
… and it will always use a severely outdated version of the Blink engine with nothing but some of vulnerability fixes back-ported occasionally (after unreasonable pauses of course).
by zvrba on 12/4/18, 6:31 AM
WTF, what instability? I use it as my main browser and have (almost) no issues at all, even with ad blocker installed. Maybe 2x a month I need to launch Chrome for some weird site.
by mustardo on 12/4/18, 11:00 AM
I hope they continue to struggle for many more years in the browser market. I and millions of devs lost many years on IE 6/8 crap they shouldn't be forgiven so easily
by prossercj on 12/4/18, 1:38 PM
Hm, my first thought is "will this work with carlo?" [0].
I'm excited about that project, but one big downside is that Chrome has to be installed. It would be great to write desktop applications that render through a browser, without having to either download Chrome (like carlo) or bundle it (like electron).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355345
by Solar19 on 12/4/18, 5:28 AM
This reminds me that I think there's a real market opportunity for a clean-sheet
proprietary browser. Everyone just assumes open source (except for Safari and Edge until now).
I think it's possible to build a significantly better browser than Chrome or anything else out there. And I think at least a few million people would pay more than $100 for it (there are 326 million people in the US alone). This would be a good time to do it.
by jeromebaek on 12/4/18, 10:36 AM
(Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft.)
This is a good move. Microsoft is further embracing open source technology. I really want to use Edge, I gave it so many tries, but every time I keep coming back to Chrome because Edge is just so damn unreliable. And Chrome is creepy as hell. And Firefox just... is slow and not smooth. A not-creepy web browser from Microsoft, with the same reliability and speed of Chrome? Sign me up.
by est on 12/4/18, 4:02 AM
I for one, welcome our one and only new browser overlord.
by gwbas1c on 12/4/18, 2:57 PM
Hell has frozen over!
I occasionally use Edge in my Windows VMs. It's just kind of... Well... I'm not sure, but I like Chrome better.
The irony is that I religiously used Explorer for years because I believed that the browser isn't an accessory; the browser provided with the computer should be good enough. I only switched to Chrome because the multiprocess model made it easy to kill that one misbehaving tab that was hogging CPU.
by g051051 on 12/4/18, 1:11 PM
It's unfortunate to lose another implementation...and very telling about Microsoft. They'll spend infinite money (which they effectively have) to try to take a dominance position, but will give up if they can't be the top of the heap. How much would it really cost them to keep maintaining Edge, even if it's not the most popular browser? How was that generating revenue for them, anyway?
by pluma on 12/4/18, 11:03 AM
I wonder what this means for Chakra Core, their JS engine.
They previously tried to establish Chakra as an alternative to V8 and even maintained their own fork of Node.js running on it. It doesn't look like those efforts went anywhere.
If they're already throwing out their rendering engine, it seems odd if they want to keep Chakra, especially considering how Electron (which runs VSCode and GitHub's Atom) is already built on V8.
by Osiris on 12/4/18, 5:31 AM
With so many browsers using Blink/V8, couldn't it be argued that an independent foundation should be created to take over the project so that no company (Google) controls the code? Each browser can then implement their fork / skin of the rendering engine / V8. It could even allow the foundation to experiment with larger changes how Mozilla has done with it's rust-based renderer.
by dschuetz on 12/4/18, 2:19 PM
How ironic. But, kudos to the responsible decision makers. It's a shame though that they haven't decided to make a modern and decent engine that works at least as reliable as FF or Chrome(ium), Edge always felt like a recycled version of IE. I think the move was done because the Chromium engine also has a strong extensions base. That's something I found Edge was lacking, ultimately.
by yason on 12/4/18, 10:06 AM
I would tend to frown upon shrinking competition but in this case Edge wasn't really a player. The markets were already shared by the Chromium engine and Firefox. Chromium has the ancestry back to WebKit and KHTML so, to my knowledge, Safari also isn't a direct competitor. So, we're looking at a duopoly which naturally happens when things get complex enough and smaller players are left behind by the sheer lack of resourcing.
Browsers always were hubs of a number of technologies because loading markup language documents over network and rendering them onto screen with some dynamic programming abilities covers a lot of ground. While we sort of agree on the rendering, scripting, and styling of HTML5 by now this has just intensified with features like WebGL of WebAssembly which reach out to completely new domains. So, it's near impossible to compete in the scene unless you're a big, established player.
A modern browser is a lot more complex than operating systems these days and probably 10x more complex than old operating systems from the era where it was still possible for a small group of people to write a competely usable kernel and desktop in a relatively short time. In effect, the browser has become the operating system and to think, that's probably the very reason it's much easier to be a Linux or Apple user these days. As long as you can run Firefox or Chrome, 90% of your problems are solved. Even Windows is, for most people, just a platform to run your browser on. Then you use things like Google Docs or the web-implementation of Office to launch Word or Excel to do your work. But you don't need Windows to do that, and with a Chromium based browser that Microsoft must fully support for their web services you can just use any Chrome/Chromium based implementation.
In this light I'm amazed Microsoft would be giving power to Chrome and Google. Microsoft was and still is an operator in the operating system and platform space. How are they going to stay at all relevant if they just officially reposition Windows as a host for Chromium build? Surely things aren't as black and white but that's effectively how it is, giving up control. Microsoft can't reinvent themselves as the new Google because that's an uphill battle. They'd need to create a new space where they can thrive because operating systems don't matter that much anymore and the lock-in cash-cow that is Windows+Outlook+Office is gradually munched away by the web technologies.
by johnvega on 12/4/18, 4:17 PM
I think this is a great idea.
I use 3 Windows computers and use Chrome Firefox and Edge on all three computers. My experience is that Edge is less stable than Chrome which surprised me at first since Edge is owned by the host OS having all the advantages of access to all the private code.
You can throw all the money and resources in the world, and something like a browser is too complex to quickly catch up.
by mark-r on 12/4/18, 4:26 AM
Had to double-check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1. I think I'll wait for a confirmation before I believe it.
by merb on 12/4/18, 3:22 PM
To be fair, chakra is/was a really really solid JavaScript engine. And it's probably easier to embed than anything inside Chrome.
(
https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore)
Hope they are still comitted to chakra.
by asien on 12/4/18, 6:32 AM
This is interesting .
It’s coherent with their recent investments in Electron.
Hence the need for MS to support PWA with excellent feature parity with chrome.
by baby on 12/4/18, 5:31 AM
Microsoft please, can we have the tabs on the side by default? There is a lot of vertical space that is unused and it is a thousand times more practical to have tabs there on the left or on the right. Try Tree Style Tabs for a week on Firefox and you will understand why it is the future of browsing the web.
by me551ah on 12/4/18, 2:43 PM
I recently made the switch to Firefox from chrome. Webrender is a revolution in web technology since it primarily uses the GPU for rendering resulting in much faster and smoother websites. I'd urge everyone to give webrender a shot, it feels noticeably smoother than chrome.
by ryacko on 12/4/18, 6:16 AM
by oscargrouch on 12/4/18, 3:00 PM
We need to remember MS bought Github recently, and with that Electron. Electron is based on Chrome so..
It makes total sense for them to concentrate the effort in Chromium and Blink, and just reuse it as their default Windows browser.
I think this is much more about Electron than it is about Edge.
by partiallypro on 12/4/18, 3:33 AM
I hope that while Microsoft does this, once they make the switch, they open source Edge.
by intellix on 12/4/18, 3:30 AM
As a front-end developer this is amazing news. Less work and can deliver faster
by fiatjaf on 12/4/18, 11:56 AM
Wait, Microsoft, do you think people will use your Chromium-based browser more than they use Edge? Of course not, people will still be dumb and download Chrome. Don't throw the towell!
by fiatjaf on 12/4/18, 11:54 AM
I'm a Linux user and I use Firefox, but recommend Edge to all my Windows friends that don't care about browsers, it's a great browser, probably better than Chrome.
by chris_wot on 12/4/18, 5:19 AM
The only reason Edge isn't successful is because it's not cross platform. Which, I realize, is kind of the point - but sort of also why as a browser it is now dying.
by sys_64738 on 12/4/18, 3:44 AM
Microsoft should buy Vivaldi and make that their default browser.
by tinus_hn on 12/4/18, 10:21 AM
None of my issues with Edge have anything to do with the browser engine.
All of them have to do with stupid Microsoft like decisions, like ‘you can’t avoid the internal pdf reader’.
by King-Aaron on 12/4/18, 7:56 AM
Would be nice if they would pull their fingers out and update the rendering engine in Outlook from the 1995-esque bollocks they insist on using to this day.
by buboard on 12/4/18, 9:44 AM
Hopefully they will use it to compete against google , rather than helping them with their world domination plans. This might be a good thing
by akmittal on 12/4/18, 2:21 PM
It shows how difficult it is to rewrite a browser. I am glad firefox didn't go for full rewrite but going for progressive changes.
by mesaframe on 12/4/18, 12:30 PM
Edge didn't have any issues besides it's UI. It doesn't make sense to me that for UI MS halted it's development.
by simfoo on 12/4/18, 6:49 AM
More monoculture :(
I'm just waiting for the day Microsoft announces that they are dropping their own compiler in favor of Clang/LLVM.
by Thann on 12/4/18, 4:10 AM
how the meeting went: "its really expensive to build a decent browser and a spyware engine for it... hmmmm"
by ksec on 12/4/18, 2:00 PM
I would much rather Microsoft works with Apple to bring Safari/Webkit to Windows, then bending over to Chrome.
by wnevets on 12/4/18, 3:22 AM
how does this solve the market share problem of edge? The implementation isn't the problem, its the awful UI.
by xaldir on 12/4/18, 9:04 AM
That reminds me of the Azure presentation where the Microsoft employee switch to Chrome after Edge crashed.
by Mindwipe on 12/4/18, 12:10 PM
I look forward to yet another Microsoft browser that does not work correctly with SharePoint.
by Yizahi on 12/4/18, 10:49 AM
A pity really, even though I never used it. One more brick in the future googlenet wall.
by saranshk on 12/4/18, 2:59 PM
One less browser for the front-end folks to support in the long run!
by rmykhajliw on 12/4/18, 4:19 AM
Hallelujah! It's much better than maintaining a dead edge browser users use only once to download chrome. The biggest question whether people will use a new branded Microsoft browser or not because many of us remember a decade of ie6.
by qualsiasi on 12/4/18, 8:07 AM
Our customer only uses IE11, so this won't affect my work
by Neil44 on 12/4/18, 9:25 AM
Will the homepage be Google... or Bing? There’s the question!
by shacharz on 12/4/18, 12:25 PM
Anyone has more details, regarding the roadmap and timeline?
by 2bitencryption on 12/4/18, 3:16 AM
one browser to rule them all, one browser to find them; one browser to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them...
by amelius on 12/4/18, 12:54 PM
Next up: Windows 10 kernel replaced by BSD
by mises on 12/4/18, 3:09 PM
But I thought edge was faster. Every time I open a new installation, it's got that page with the speedometers showing that "edge is faster".
by oksawe on 12/4/18, 3:51 AM
Is Chromium different than WebKit now?
by firemelt on 12/4/18, 10:38 AM
Anyone here use edge for epub reader?
by russellbeattie on 12/4/18, 7:00 AM
If only they'd swap put the Windows kernel for Linux while they're at it...
by tuananh on 12/4/18, 8:47 AM
what does this mean for ChakraCore?
by mastrsushi on 12/4/18, 5:41 AM
Microsoft should give up entirely on Internet browser development. I cannot see any good reason to throw their money away like this. They are a company too dependant on legacy software to bother competing with Google and Mozilla. Cloud services seem to be their brightest modern opportunity, but they really weren't prepared for the 2010's. Competing with Chrome is just chasing cars. Of course they've always had the advantage of being the default browser. I still don't think average users will ever see IE as anymore than a fly on a Window. Regardless of who's layout engine theyre forking.
by sureaboutthis on 12/4/18, 3:45 AM
Someone needs to note that Chromium is a browser and the rendering engine is called Blink. You can't build a different browser and rename it based on Chromium but you can use Blink as your rendering engine. The article says "...building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine...".
by vtesucks on 12/4/18, 2:32 AM
On the one hand developers have one less engine to worry about. On the other if it becomes a chromium monoculture then Firefox loses.
by totfz on 12/4/18, 9:02 AM
Edge's rendering engine is good. The only real problem Edge has is that they've built it using the ugly, unresponsive Metro UI. If they build a browser with the Chromium engine and a Metro UI, they can expect nobody to use it as well.
by vtesucks on 12/4/18, 5:03 AM
What happens to chakra?
by baybal2 on 12/4/18, 9:34 AM
Tell me this is a late April fools joke
by nnq on 12/4/18, 8:10 AM
1. Embrace 2. ... 3. ... :)
by akayoshi1 on 12/4/18, 8:32 AM
Edge is only useful to download Google Chrome and Firefox.
by zouhair on 12/4/18, 6:14 AM
Just buy Ubuntu and turn "windows" to a full on Linux Distro already.
by thrower123 on 12/4/18, 3:11 AM
Broken shit should die.
And Edge was definitely broke.
Safari is next, with 5% market. Chrome is the clear winner in the end.