(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.
Chromium != Google. Chromium is the FOSS project that Chrome is based off of.
Microsoft is of course free to diverge from it as much as they like but, like any other Chromium-based browser, they are either going to be joined at the hip to Google's decisions, or they'll be downstream consumers. The bottom line is that while MS will be contributors to Chromium they won't be in the driver's seat.
Same, but neither of us actually use Edge. Just like nearly everyone reading this comment.
I wouldn't be too sad if Firefox was switching to chromium either. Then developers would only need to worry about rendering into one engine, and users would have all their sites always working.
Keep in mind that, for quite a few years, developers welcomed the oncoming Microsoft browser monopoly; IE3/IE4/IE5 were generally better and faster than their Netscape counterparts and Opera was so niche as to be irrelevant. Then Netscape (the for-profit enterprise) folded and there was no viable competition to IE for a while, and the broken mess known as IE6 became a serious problem for years since it had something like 98% market share.
Trusting any company, even Google, to be the de facto sole steward of the web is insane. They are a for-profit company. That may not make them intrinsically evil, but they sure as hell aren't intrinsically good.
That would be a terrible day for the open web. Damn it, somebody inject some IE6 into these people stat.
Apparently I called for this over four years ago:
Regarding the problems with Edge, mainstream websites don’t face problems — but you hit the edge cases (no pun intended) when you try to use it for smaller sites — and especially sites meant for limited audience — e.g. internal websites built by enterprises. They are often tested for Chrome and Firefox only — and maybe Safari if there are significant number of Macs in use.
I can’t really blame the developers for not wanting to waste their time on a browser with limited usage and — especially since it often presents challenges not posed by other browsers.
What are your objections to modern Firefox? Most of the criticism I've heard is that it's become too much like Chrome. I'm quite happy with it personally.
* No spellcheck in form fields (without a plugin, and I hate plugins).
* It feels slower. There's something about it that just doesn't feel as fast. Mostly things like opening windows etc.
* There's some annoying defaults.
* Dev tools aren't as good.
* Updates aren't installed automatically.
I mean, it's close to Chrome, which is good (for me), but it just feels about 5% less polished. It's good enough that I'll stick with it, after all there was a driving force for me to leave Chrome too.
That said, my comment was directed towards that FF’s market share is plunging rapidly and unless things change drastically, it might become another Opera — a niche browser at best. We need something that can counter Chrome and by extension, Google — something that developers have to support in addition to Chrome. FF has been playing that role nicely so far, but for how long? FF is not cutting it in terms of adoption — in terms of challenging the might of Chrome.
Maybe someday they'll do that but it's hard for me to believe that's the plan they're starting off with.
