[HN Gopher] Microsoft's Three Browsers
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Microsoft's Three Browsers
Author : thibautg
Score : 32 points
Date : 2020-02-03 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (textslashplain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (textslashplain.com)
| plopz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| frandroid wrote:
| They are, it's IT departments and customer internal apps using
| IE-specific things like ActiveX which are keeping it alive.
| gsnedders wrote:
| Note that Chromium based Edge contains "IE mode" (see
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode) as
| an attempt to get enterprises away from using IE on the open
| web (essentially, they can set "all intranet sites use IE" or
| "these domains use IE", but Edge will use Chromium on all
| other websites).
| TsomArp wrote:
| 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.
| butz wrote:
| 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?
| jayflux wrote:
| I don't think this question is silly at all, they are using
| literally the same rendering engine (it's not a fork), only the
| UI on the outside is different, it even seems to get the
| chromium update the same time as chrome (version numbers always
| match so far), so probably not, however who knows what may
| happen in future.
| gsnedders wrote:
| https://textslashplain.com/2019/05/01/edge-76-vs-edge-18-vs-...
| documents many of the differences between EdgeHTML v. Edgium v.
| Chrome, though it's not really that obvious skimming through
| what the differences between Edgium v. Chrome are (but there's
| a bunch, though probably things you don't need to worry
| about?).
| andrewstuart wrote:
| 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.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Linux is on Windows. A few people might have did a little
| chuckle, but I don't think anyone would be angry :) I'd bet the
| Chromium choice was more about Electron than Edge.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I heard part of the Chromium choice was that Edge developers
| felt they were already spending too much time in the Chromium
| codebase to support Windows initiatives even before the
| decision was made. For instance, Microsoft wanted to make
| sure all the browsers to support ARM64 on Windows natively,
| Mozilla did the work themselves (and it was basically already
| in their build farm when Microsoft asked), and Google asked
| Microsoft to PR it (which they did).
| [deleted]
| gsnedders wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It would, but at the same time while there's been long-term
| work at making Gecko embeddable (though primarily on mobile, in
| the form of GeckoView), it's still the case that it's much
| easier to embed Chromium or WebKit into a larger product today.
|
| Arguably, one of Mozilla's biggest mistakes was never really
| caring about making Gecko embeddable.
| xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
| Chromium (and Edge) are using Blink, not Webkit. They have been
| developed separately since 2013.
| gruez wrote:
| >There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft
| has adopted Firefox
|
| Who? Shareholders? Open source advocates?
| arexxbifs wrote:
| As an avid Firefox user, privacy tinfoil hat and all-round
| Stallman-esque interjector, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft
| contributed to Gecko, Quantum and SpiderMonkey - provided it
| didn't interfere in any way with my abilities to do for
| example ad- and tracker blocking.
|
| As far as I understand it, the Chromium codebase is deeply
| intertwined with the Google ecosystem in a way that makes it
| hard to guarantee privacy the way Firefox does.
| jraph wrote:
| Google? :-)
|
| By the way, it occurs to me that Microsoft is now doing
| better what Google was doing with the Chrome Frame for IE
| extension a few years ago.
|
| 13 years ago, I asked myself, why Microsoft doesn't just
| embed WebKit instead of keeping using their annoying web
| engine. It turns out they are now doing a variant of that
| now, something that seemed impossible back then, and
| (amazingly) I am not too happy with this... I guess I did not
| predict the collapse of my favorite browser's market share at
| the time, and the dominance of Chrome, which did not exist.
| Google seemed good anyway.
|
| Google building a web browser was strange to me back then:
| why would Google do that when we already have Firefox, an
| excellent browser? But now, it is obvious. And Microsoft does
| not care that much apparently. They don't care about having
| an edge over this area anymore.
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