Yeah, this is just depressing and honestly a little baffling. Seems contrary to Microsoft's interests - why let Google control this aspect of the Web?
(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.
>Yeah, this is just depressing and honestly a little baffling. Seems contrary to Microsoft's interests - why let Google control this aspect of the Web?
Chromium != Google. Chromium is the FOSS project that Chrome is based off of.
Chromium is just a fork of WebKit, a fork of KHTML. Unless Microsoft is really planning on downsizing their web browser division, they’ll fork it instead of maintaining a rebranded patch set.
Unless MS wants to work on the browser secretly for years (the reason for the Webkit fork) or Google refuses many contributions from MS (the reason for the Blink fork), there's no need for a fork.
Google's employees make up the bulk of Chromium's contributors and leadership.
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.
Not that I have any insight into Microsoft but it appears to be consistent with their strategy of disengaging from the client. Why bear the cost of maintaining your own browser technology given the extraordinary complexity, a low market share and little to no associated revenues.
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.
Ah, I can see you weren't around during the days of IE6, when the web stagnated and suffered under Microsoft's stranglehold and ineptitude.
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.
> 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.
That would be a terrible day for the open web. Damn it, somebody inject some IE6 into these people stat.
I don’t think they intend to let Google control anything — least of all the future of the web. They have been burned too badly by them for that. They are more likely to do what Google did — they used WebKit in the early years of Chrome and then forked it to create Blink once it had gained enough traction. Microsoft is likely to do the same at some point — assuming their browser gains traction. And I, for one, hope it does — and that they make it cross platform. We need an a way to browse the web without Google tracking and Firefox is just not cutting it. And while Safari works, it is not available on other platforms.
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.
You really think a Microsoft browser is going to track you less? The same company whose entire OS is deliberately riddled with spyware and tracking, and even managed to sneak telemetry into an open source code editor?
It's a different source of tracking, and frankly speaking, we know why Microsoft wants to track us - the same reason they always have. Microsoft wants to sell us more of their own products, generally speaking. It's not about throwing all private data to the open market for the highest bidder. I'd rather have M$ out there looking to sell their own products and services to me than Google looking to sell me to their advertisers and whoever pays them this week.
> Microsoft wants to sell us more of their own products, generally speaking. It's not about throwing all private data to the open market for the highest bidder.
This is increasingly not true. Between Bing and adding ads[1] to various parts of Windows 10, I expect Microsoft’a long term business strategy will be increasingly ad-heavy. And you can’t make them un-collect the data they’ve already collected on you.
Agreed. As hardware and even operating systems themselves become more or less commoditized, Microsoft sees that the writing is on the wall. They see their future revenue (or at least a significant part of it) coming from advertising and services.
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.
As someone who switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago my main issues are:
* 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.
edit To clarify, I'm used to Chrome seemingly just updating itself in the background. Firefox needs a restart, and so far the restart behaviour with Firefox has been less reliable than Chrome (losing opened tabs sometimes, for instance).
I understand this is my fault for having 10-30 tabs open at any point in time, but still, chrome will generally manage that at 2-4gb ram. FF often breaks 10gb.
I understand Jira is a pig of an app (Atlassian software is generally shit), but I unfortunately need to use it all day long. Chrome seems to be able to handle 2-4 each of jira, gmail, google cal, github, aws console, and slack. FF couldn't last time I tried, a couple months after they released Quantum.
This would, of course, be less of a problem if the cheapest macbook with 32g ram didn't cost $3k...
I never see my total RAM usage going over 6G to the whole system if I don't compile anything. I have tens of tabs open and the 32G of RAM is most of the time useless. Mind you the ThinkPad RAM upgrade was about 120€...
To be honest, my experience with FF has not be been great in the recent years — although I do acknowledge that it has improved recently. I can’t point my finger at one thing — it was combination of little things that bothered me enough to make me switch to Safari and later Chrome.
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.
Do we think Microsoft is getting away from maintaining their own browser just so they can go right back into the business of maintaining their own browser?
Maybe someday they'll do that but it's hard for me to believe that's the plan they're starting off with.
(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.