Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10 (opens in new tab)

I applaud the death of IE and Edge. One thing I'm worried about though is that Chromium may take over the market and we end up with websites working only in Chromium based browsers and other important browsers like Firefox and Safari get left in the dirt.

Also Microsoft are victims of their own legacy, namely what they did with Internet Explorer. Changing the box model, not adopting standards, not fixing bugs, causing no end of headaches for people having to support IE and so on. Trust needs to be earned.

Apple had the same problem and briefly tried to have Safari on Windows but that didn't work out well and honestly I don't think they were ever that committed.

Firefox is a viable alternative bit they still do stupid shit. My favorite is prompting me to restart to install an update when I open it. Well I just opened the app to do something but sure I'll interior what I'm doing so you can install an update that you could've done when I wasn't using it (ie like chrome).

It's 2018. The era is office like updates is over.

I think everyone wants healthy competition in the web browser space, but I didn't want a closed-source browser that didn't run on Mac or Linux with a UI I can't agree with and an already disappointing track record. It only hurts worse that I humored Microsoft once when they forced my browser back to Edge only to discover that practically I still couldn't stand it.

Maybe we should feel bad here, but I don't. If I feel bad for anything it's for the good people at Microsoft that brought us this great piece of engineering delivered in such a disappointing fashion.

A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.

Can't expect a small rag-tag group like Microsoft to compete with a rich corporate behemoth like Mozilla, I guess :)

This is at least partly self-inflicted damage by Microsoft. Edge only works on Windows 10, which not only excludes all of the regular Win 7 and 8 desktops that haven't been push upgraded, but also kiosk-type devices and at least some VDI (which use Windows Server with a "Desktop Experience" that does not include Edge).

So Microsoft ended up with IE11, which is supported but frozen, Edge that doesn't even run on all Microsoft platforms, and no browser for Macs (because IE for Macs is long dead). So if you are trying to deliver or support a Web application, Microsoft aren't helping, hence "just download Chrome".

Firefox didn't support enterprise Windows deployment as well as they could have (though they now seem to picked that up), and can't match the market power of Google. I would like to see a grass-roots move back to Firefox, but it's going to be up-hill work.

You can get free virtual machines for testing, but it's still a slow, annoying and irritating experience to test in a Windows virtual machine.

That and the fact that IE has always had terrible developer tools.

Bing is terrible, but I don’t think Edge is.

So instead of giving users more control over the update process and the telemetry settings, without dirty tricks to reset these and so on, they decide to use another browser. Fine, but that doesn't solve their basic problem with the perception of Windows 10.

Right now, I'm just happy that I am able to put IE behind me at work. TBH, I like having some competition. I think the single bigest miss with Edge is the fact that people search for "Internet Explorer" and many wind up running that in windows out of habit, and those that know better prefer Chrome or Firefox.

Beyond that, the fact that it's shoved in your face at every other turn. Chrome syncs my settings cross platform. And I just haven't liked IE/Edge UI any time I've tried either. Despite issues I have with Chrome, it just works more like I want it to than the alternatives.

Frankly, I'm happy to see MS making a shift. A lot of tools have been made using Electron from MS at this point, with more in the works. So it makes sense that they'd make a shift. For that matter, I'd like to see better platform support with Node style APIs for application development in general, which may be the final target for these changes.

The net effect is that, stuff that Google tries to pull (like auto logging in accounts in Chrome based on your gmail) will still be negative for Google and still cause people to switch; because you have options. On the other hand, devs can expect code behavior to match more closely now even in MS Anaheim because its underlying rendering engine is now the same as Chrome. It's not monoculture of product choice, it's monoculture of underlying rendering engine, which seems like a good thing to me.

Yup, because it doesn't have the market share to justify it.

Plus, for many years, IE compatibility was an extremely unpleasant aspect of my job, and I'm certainly not alone there. Mainly because they didn't really care about improving it or keeping track with browser standards after "conquest accomplished". Some people get what they deserve.

They can change the tech as much as they want. They can hire armies of engineers and make the browser 1000% faster than Chrome... but if they reuse the stupid logo it will fail again, and again, and again until they give up and forget that logo ever existed.

At least in Germany the perception of Chrome is "Google spyware". That is also the reason why in Germany (and I think in many other EU countries, too) Firefox has a much larger marketshare than in the USA. Since Windows 10 already has its spyware image in Germany, this just reinforces the impression (right or wrong) that Microsoft wants to become an even more spyware company.

P.S.: Of course I test my work in Edge.

But to be serious, they are just the better browsers. Maybe the trident engine or whatever it is called right now does perform very well and I see no issues. I just cannot understand how anyone opening the settings of Edge would not get an instant aneurysm. I can't believe that people think this to be the "the new way" of structuring settings. It is just horrible and unusable.

But changing just the engine probably means the horrible things about Edge are here to stay.

I am no web developer, but if I have an application on the web, I do test compatibility with Edge.

Win10 does have serious issues, the engine of Edge was one of the things not relevant to the topic at hand.

Sorry for going off-topic on rant here, but yesterday I had a 3 months old win10 workstation refuse to start the built-in calculator app. It worked fine the evening before, and no updates were installed in between...

This is apparantly a common problem for many users. I found lots of possible solutions, but of course, none of them worked for me. I took ownership of install dirs, redeployed the appx, every hack I could find...

Eventually I gave up and copied calc.exe from a win7 computer -- of course it doesn't run on win10, that would be too easy. So I installed a third-party calculator and apologized to the user on behalf of Microsoft...

> Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10

Nothing will change my perception of win10.

I also test in Edge, always looks good and then I close it.

If Edge were multi-platform, then I'd consider it worth my time. But as Mac, Chrome OS, and Linux users continue to grow, I'm not going to waste my time making sure it works for a small amount of Windows users who barely even use the browser to begin with. Not to mention I'd need to dual-boot or run a VM just to test my work.

Encouraging the best-working alternative is the creation of monoculture?

C'mon

my last interaction with edge was that it crashed twice on the path to downloading chrome - as in, clicking the "X" to quit it wouldn't work and I had to kill it in the process manager. This was on a pristine Windows 10 that was just installed.

Very often when I had to use it (or didn't notice that windows opened it for some reason) I also could not close any tab.

The problem with Edge is it's missing features other browsers have had for years, including IE. Microsoft just needs to add those features, not reinvent their browser again.

I'd have loved to if it'd work on my development environment (! Windows) They should be focusing on porting IE to other operating systems and not leaving the control of a core component of their offering to somebody else.

They've been doing some good stuff lately, and I'm sure this is another honest attempt towards doing good to developers, but they got this one completely backwards.

Chrome out-innovated Firefox for a lot of years and won the demand for a web browser (and now sell to it).

The new Firefox, is similar to the new ground breaking features of a Chrome when it had come out. A few years of recommending Firefox will have an effect.

Today I use Chrome, Chromium and Firefox. Firefox is my daily driver and it is no slower than Chroumium

Besides, we have already settled on Google, Linux in Cloud, Windows on consumer and corporate computers. Its simple process of elimination. Market is deciding what should get eliminated. Anything that doesn't have a steady or abundant flow of resources behind it will die eventually. Of course ethics and morals don't stand chance when it is survival of the fittest but that has been the case for billions of years.

I already know the results of my tests. It won't work so I won't even bother testing. Because Edge doesn't support WebGL2.

I doubt Browser's engine has much to do with application UI, which was the main issue of edge.

Especially after Mariani left almost 2 years ago to join Facebook. I assume everything went to shit shortly before he left.

It doesn't matter how good Edge would be. The damage is done.

It's like the old adage: You cannot un-kick someone in the face.

(Obviously, MS will maintain their own fork and can permanently fork away whenever they want/need to, I guess, so it's not like they've locked themselves in forever, but still)

I actually wasn't aware of the problems with Edge. This is the first I've heard of them... I hadn't heard much about it from either devs or users, so I assumed lots of people were more or less happily (or at least uneventfully) using it as Windows' default browser.

Never thought I'd be sad to see Internet Explorer (or its descendant) bite the dust, given what a plague upon humanity IE was for so many years, but I'm not sure this is the happy ending we might've wished for.

IMHO, I personally think it's a good thing to consolidate on one engine to render HTML cross-platform for these two reasons:

1. Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines.

2. The Chromium engine itself is open source. There are other browsers (Vivaldi, Opera, etc) that run on top of it.

3. While I think it's great the engine underneath is the same, I think it's equally great that there is a variety of UIs and browsers built on top of the same engine - the innovation happens in the browser space, not the engine, anymore.

I rarely see people saying that there need to be competing kernel projects with completely separate code bases but all trying to conform to the same ABI, etc.

(Yes, I know there are other kernels out there, but my point is that people don't complain that Linux is so dominant like they do about Chromium vs Firefox)

If I had my way I'd test on Chromium and Firefox only. And only the latest versions.

I already don't bother with Egde. Safari is the only pain I still have to bother with. Apple should just make a Chromium browser as well.

What MS is really doing is replacing HTA,WinStore apps, whatever with Chromium, because their own tech can't compete with Chromium as they didn't seriously invest in it. I'm actually starting to believe the people who are claiming that MS is rebuilding Office in JS from scratch...

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/progressive-...

Unfortunately it wasn't. See caniuse.com.

> And yeah, we need the competition.

This is the key point. Indeed. Google becoming the ultimate web monopolist seems scary. I just hope Mozilla is going to be able to keep competing (but I'm not sure how long will it stand, a neighbour post says "Firefox desktop market share now below 9%"). I wish MS could choose the Mozilla engine instead...

If they wanted competition they should released it under Mac and Linux.

These are still three strong and independent voices; Chrome has substantial control on desktops, Apple has a stranglehold on their highly popular platforms, and Mozilla has both the hearts of the tech community as well as wide regard in bleeding edge technology with Rust, Quantum/Stylo, and Servo.

Also, Blink is only the renderer. Safari does not use V8.

Anyone is willing to invest in that?

or, webkit will become the equivalent of linux for browsers. Considering that there will be less incompatibilities , it's a good thing. The hope is that competition for users will lead to innovations that benefit them, and not wall them off from competing platforms.

I feel ya. I keep having to stop myself from doing things the right way so that I can support my IE11 users.

Unfortunately, even after EOL, the ghost of IE11 will be around for a very long time. Heck, my November stats show 10% WinXP users.

On websites like "caniuse.com", a site which checks for support of the latest JS/HTML/CSS features, Chrome consistently ranks 1st. These features are all official features of the HTML/JS spec, not arbitrary Google-specific extensions.

Ensuring that more people use a browser with the Chromium-engine will allow web developers to use the latest features.

WebKit is a form of harmful monoculture. I'm ok with Blink's monoculture because it is probably the best rendering engine out there and inferior engines can't compete. But Apple's is creating an artificial monoculture by only allowing WebKit on iOS. This allows Apple to not innovative on WebKit and deliberately cripple new web technologies, so that people are forced to make native apps.

The focus is electron "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 [...]"

Abandoning EdgeHTML on the basis of that bug report would be drawing a long bow.

2018. “Fuck you, Microsoft, for bundling Firefox or Chrome.”

Hilarious.

Precisely false. A standard must have different implementations to ensure it is robust.

It seems that with more interest in that, it's likely to improve.

> It probably won’t be as tied to the OS APIs as Edge was

What makes you say that? Seems like they could integrate it more or less exactly the same way.

I try to avoid Google as much as possible these days, thus it's funny because I never thought I'd consider using a Microsoft browser instead of a Google one. I think this is a potentially good move on Microsoft's part(the EdgeHTML thing turned out not to be).

AIUI, Chromium didn't run on WinNT/ARM64.

It's already here, sad to see so many engineers I work with lately complaining so much at having to support anything other than Chrome and they're certainly not doing cutting edge work.

Find it pretty sad when really cross browser development is the easiest it has ever been in many ways, we're certainly not in the IE 5.5 days anymore yet there is less desire than ever to support anything outside their comfort zone and when real customers bring up something doesn't work in Safari their response it "Can't they just use Chrome?".

My first job in the industry was HTML/CSS for sites that needed to work in IE 5.5/6/7, Firefox, Safari and Crome had only just been released so maybe this bothers me more than it bothers most.

On Chromium being open source, and why that doesn't matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595978

- The 1st problem I see is that open source is often meritocracy and so Google will always be deciding because there will be much more engineer from Google on the project than from other companies joining the project. And anyway Google has no interest to try to align with MS/Mozilla interests.

- The other problem I see is that you need some independence to make fundamemtal changes. WebRender would never exist if Mozilla tried to fork an existing engine. They wrote everything from scratch and now they are doing fundamental changes to Gecko to be able to merge Webrender in it. If they add to agree with Google, MS, and other companies they would still be arguing and trying to convince them, and Google would refuse because they think their solution is better (or more suited to their own personal needs) and Rust would not even exist

But they have adopted GCC for Azure Sphere though.

Have there been any problems with Edge similar to Chrome’s suddenly logging people into the browser?