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Microsoft is Building a Chromium-powered Web Browser That Will Replace Edge on Windows 10: Report (windowscentral.com)
Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and is building a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium, news blog Windows Central reported Monday. From the report: Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 back in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but launched with a plethora of issues which resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain any traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.
Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser. Codenamed Anaheim, this new web browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.
Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser. Codenamed Anaheim, this new web browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.
Oh no you DON'T just get to quietly admit defeat, there has to be public shaming! THEM'S THE RULES!
Now if Windows can be turned into an MS branded *nix distro things would be even better
Spoiler: The rendering engine is not the reason I don't trust your web browser, nor will switching to Chromium get me to actually use it.
I guess now banks and B2B companies will now feel comfortable to use Edge now that Microsoft has stopped supporting it.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Edge downloads Chrome faster than any other browser
It's probably more about someone finally realizing that, there's a high quality rendering engine available for free for them to use.
Microsoft will still have their own branded browser... But nobody is making money off of the rendering engine, and it's the hardest part of the browser to build/optimize.
Might as well leave the non-money making part to others while MS engineers focus on browser shell, money making services etc.
Next thing they will be replacing the Windows kernel with the Linux kernel with a Win32 compatibility layer for running Windows apps on Linux, and a driver compatibility layer for existing Windows drivers. I'm not kidding. Mark my words. It will happen. Will also include even moving the Windows GUI over to Microsoft's own Wayland server. The UI look and feel will be maintaining but the underlying architecture replaced with wayland with a compatability layer for Win32 apps.
Microsoft is a cloud company, the Windows kernel really is just an added expense that it wants to shed so will move Windows over to a Linux kernel, seamlessly, due to the compatibility layer, windows apps and drivers will run fine. They can thus share development costs with other users of Linux.
This is exactly whats happening with Edge as well. Overall, its a pretty good thing, actually.
Even more likely that the failure of Edge coupled with the complexity of development in-house supporting that flop (and thus cost) just doesn't make sense when the EU is going to be looking to kneecap them for it also.
If they had gotten away with forcing everyone into their browser and telemetry and it had *worked* there's no question they'd have stuck with that come fire or flood until the last day.
Microsoft could really change some minds and win some hearts. They've done a lot of good things, and Satya Nadella has done a lot to win me over. I wanted to love Edge, and I've tried over and over, but never succeeded. If Microsoft is really willing to change their course, this could be a huge step in winning me, and people like me back.
Unfortunately I can't forget the past. Twenty years of pain and suffering from their decisions has made me reluctant to trust them. I can't help but remember all the things they've done to abuse their customers. I was a Linux at home guy for decades thanks to Microsoft failing to provide a system I could really make do what I wanted or needed. I've been on Windows 10 at home for nearly a year now and thanks to WSL and Chrome, I almost don't miss it. Give me bash and Chrome and they're getting close. An abused dog takes a long time to learn to trust. We've all been the abused dog by Microsoft, we want to love and hope, we want to believe. This time, we hope it will be different, but we don't trust easily.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
They have been trying very hard to support all the standards. Their browser has been a lot better than it has in the past. It's too bad this new rendering engine didn't work out. I guess with a Chromium base they won't need to worry about keeping it updated.
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
That's just awful.
Not quite as awful as IE or Edge.
But still.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Did we just time warp to April 1st?
Windows subsystem for Linux is the thin edge of the wedge... gradually build more stuff to run on WSL, and then a few years from now, everything flips, and instead of running linux apps in a windows host, the base os will be linux, and the windows apps will be running in wine... and it will still cost >100$ to buy the *license* bute they can fire almost all their OS folks, and their cost will be nil. If they play their cards right, just us nerds will notice.
I hope this isn't another Embrace Extend Extinguish attempt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If there ends up being only one main source for all vendors then HTML will be defined by whatever the code does rather than by any standards process. And then it will be very difficult to move on if Chromium goes bad. Which means that there will be no incentive to make Chromium good.
whether open source or not. It is going to be interesting to see how we address open source monopolies.
I'm not sure if Microsoft is preparing to do evil, or finally found the much sought after vaccination/cure for NIH syndrome. Either way, this development is interesting. Both could be possible too... Hmmm...
Microsoft used to bridge between OS versions, e.g. IE6 and .NET were available for Win 9x, IE7 and IE8 were available for XP.
No such work was to run Edge on previous versions, so a billion people were not able to run Edge and had to run other browsers for years. Millions people using Windows 10 for the first time in 2017, 2018 or 2019 thus have little reason to run Edge.
I think this is a reason for Windows 8 (RT) store and apps failures as well, back then people may have had been curious about tablet-like ipad-like applications on their desktop (this was still relatively new in 2012, smartphones not universal yet, blackberry still around). They didn't backport it to Windows 7 so they left out hundreds millions users.
I'm dumbfounded by this news still. A very bad news it means Google Chrome dictating the web. Does the oligarchy divide the cake (entire globalized world) between themselves? Microsoft keeps the desktop OS and legacy Office, Google gets the web, Amazon gets retail, Facebook is the ultimate real identity verifier and anonymity killer, Atlantic Council pilots the censorship, European Union writes the laws, Finance e.g. Goldman Sachs and central banks blackmail the governments.
Several such compatiblilty layers already exist. Without Microsoft's help, or patents and copyrights. Microsoft could buy Codeweavers (Crossover) for less than Microsoft spends on toilet paper.
Projects like Wine have to develop a shim for each part without even seeing the code they are working with, much less being able to change anything. Microsoft would have the luxury of being able to adapt their systems to make compatibility easier. That makes the task easier than what Crossover and others are already doing.
Wine, Crossover, etc have to analyze each new update from Microsoft and try to catch up. Each update makes their job harder. If Microsoft owned the compatibility layer, each update would make the job *easier*. For example, whenever they dump their old browser they'd make the new one be Linux-friendly without any extra layer. Perhaps by starting with Chromium.
That wasn't about developers employed by Microsoft - it was about trying to ensure that Windows is the preferred desktop OS for developers in general.
Is this MS's new new browser, or their new new new browser?
Table-ized A.I.
It won't help much, there are many Chromium forks and none of them is mainstream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The telemetry is the reason I never used Edge. I wonder what proportion of potential users were turned off Edge for a similar reason.
It's faster, and it's not Google. It just needs a little bit of UX polish to really shine, including such bare necessities as global scale factor that Firefox flat out refuses to implement.
Luckily Chrome doesn't spy on you
MS will soon port Wine to Windows in 2020
aaaaaaa
WebKit was built on KHTML, not the other way around. LGPLed KHTML was the reason they had to publish WebKit it in the first place.
They have been trying very hard to support all the standards
Then why do I have the feeling I'm back in the browser war? As a web developer, I recall that you first made your site standards compliant, and then made it work in IE as well. Then came Firefox (it was a great browser in those days), and finally Microsoft started adhering to some standards as well. Nowadays, I have the feeling we are back in the browser war again. I wouldn't know who Microsoft is fighting this time, but again I have to make my sites standards compliant first, and then "fix" them for Internet Explorer and Edge.
So if this new browser has the standards compliance of chromium, it cannot come soon enough.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I have been thinking lately that IMHO Firefox would be an ideal candidate for a co-op with MS. They could do a little more good, regain some of that long lost karma, FF quantum would get the attention it deserves and MS would still be giving Google and Apple the finger. That works be a win win win Situation for both MS and Mozilla IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Let's see how much Microsoft Loves Linux and Open Source... In fact, they could have done it long before throwing in the towel - in the hopes of generating some kind of momentum. The fact that they didn't probably means that the source code will expose too much embedded spyware. It'll take months to clean that dirt away before they even consider making the source viewable.
Luckily, in the blurb it says they are going to base their replacement on Chromium. Don't worry though, I'm sure they'll retrofit all the spying you can eat into it.
I've got more instabilities with Chrome than actually with Edge. Both have their plusses. Biggest problem with chrome was that it was doing exactly what people bitcht at with IE6, but a lot of webdevs didn't mind this time, as it was their prefered browser.. a lot of times they don't even check their sites with Edge, which is even more HTML5 compliant than Chrome.. Ahwel, I don't care (like a lot of people), as long as I can browse..
then the Explorer, and in the end came the Konqueror!
http://nelson-haha.api-meal.eu...
So, a small player, KDE, decides to build a new web render engine, which is forked by a (at that time) smallish player, Apple, and turned into webkit, which then is forked by Google who quickly needed an engine because they were tired of Microsoft IE6 vs. Firefox dormancy in the early 2000s which now comes back to the people, Microsoft, who had 95% market dominance in the late 90s with IE5/6. Funny.
For me it's not the telemetry, but working with Bono that turns me off.
Ie is currently at 2.8% and edge at 2.15% of market share. Why are they bothering to make another browser? They have clearly lost and are wasting their time and money on this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
because I'm tired of it eating up all my RAM. I'm pretty tired of these browsers forcing me to upgrade hardware to handle the performance and data footprint that they sell as "fast" and "feature rich". What is it worth if my perfectly stable old machine can't handle it?
Microsoft never really wanted to be in the browser business anyway. They have always preferred more application 'lock in" via web services. I guess the browser wars are officially over?
Back in the late 1990's Microsoft won the browser war against Netscape. However they had failed to reach the objective of such war.
Microsoft never really liked the World Wide Web. With Windows 95 it came with rather limited IE browser (in essence a tool to download Netscape) but at the time they really didn't care much, because they were pushing MSN service to compete against AOL. These services at the time were less an ISP but a large multi-node BBS with graphics. That was the direction they wanted to go. The internet and WWW was just for academic and those looser who had those Unix based servers.
However the Web Grew in popularity, and Netscape was getting big, and showing a future of an OS independent system, where the browser was king. This future was a threat to Microsoft, however it seemed inevitable. So Microsoft started the browser war by beefing up IE to compete with Netscape (Which was a bold move at the time, as most applications that come with the OS were just small tools that just barely get the job done, eg. notepad, wordpad, calc, paint ). Now Microsoft is on its EEE strategy. Embrace the Web, Extend it with its own custom html commands and http protocol changes, then being able to kill it, because what everyone is using is so far from the normal web, there isn't any point to it anymore.
With Windows 98 and the embedded full feature browser. It fully Embraced the web, and basically killed Netscape. Then they were in the process of Extending, with some ideas that are still common such as CSS, and others that are just a bad idea such as Active X, and Sliverlight. However Microsoft got stuck on IE 6 for way too long, and the Active X became a security nightmare. Microsoft extensions made people to not trust Microsoft, as their systems were getting hacked, often working around firewalls and all the other best practices at the time, because a trusted sight may had a less then trustful advertiser which would run applications on your PC.
This security problem brought in a new lightweight browser called Firefox. Which supported the standards much better then IE, was faster and didn't use the stuff that allowed people to break into the computer. Then Firefox grew where it started to be too big, that is where Google Chrome came in (at around the same time Safari came in for Apple also based on WebKit)
Now the growth of the WebKit based browsers, now meant for browsing the Web, it really doesn't matter if you are using Linux, Windows, MacOS or even some of the lesser known OS's such as the BSD's. And Netscapes vision of nearly all your applications being web based is nearly true today. Now Microsoft is having to fight to keep its market share, and having to deal with mobile devices with Apple and Google based OS's. Microsoft is still going strong, but they had to change their business model a lot.
So they had won the browser war but failed the objective. Now with them trying to put effort into a rendering engine is just wasting resources. Going to a WebKit chromium browser will probably just let them focus more on what they really want to focus on and less on trying to get a better HTML5 support score.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I know but the world's most popular browser is Chrome so privacy is not why people are avoiding Edge.
I never understood why Edge is a bad browser at all. I surf your standard sites (Youtube, Amazon, eBay, etc) and it works fine. I have not had any difficulties with it. What trouble has everyone else found? (I'm not a web developer, so I'm sure there are features/things Edge doesn't do that make developers upset). Sure, I use Chrome too. Why? I'm not sure why I bounce between both browsers. I guess I like having a safety net in case a browser goes sideways on me. That hasn't happened to me in years however.
Not that there isn't a few of them already.
Vivaldi and Opera are the biggest I know of.
Still won't use them. There display is stuck with the same as Chrome and you cannot change it..
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
You may be right, for "a kernel". You may even be right for the Windows kernel. On the other hand, at the time they wrote their kernel Microsoft wasn't exactly known for high quality, robust software. Their kernel source may well be an unmaintainable mess. A shit show even.
In the last couple years they've thrown away their browser and started fresh TWICE. They certainly could start fresh with a new kernel, one that has already been written for them.
172 comments and still no "embrace, extend, extinguish" ?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They're really in a rock and hard place with IE.Enterprises with legacy apps will be using IE indefinitely. Even the latest LTSC ships with IE11 by default. And then there is the transition period where Microsoft is supporting hree different engines, not helped by the fact that hardware drivers stop some devices upgrading to the latest build of Windows 10. What a mess, Microsoft should just include a Firefox download link on Windows 10 atnd let Mozilla handle it.
I'm always surprised that there's no browser aimed directly at corporate environments.
As head of IT, and our companies reliance on cloud based SaaS, the browser is a crucial tool in our company. The existing batch of browsers off little to zero support when things go sideways when shit breaks.
Why no company has made a hardened corporate browser. It seems logical that there would be a market for a licensed browser specifically to meet corporate needs. To me it would give more incentive to SaaS providers to make damn sure their platform works on a specific browser.
My staff are always complaining that they need to use two, sometimes three, different browsers to do their jobs because companies like Google and Mozilla are always trying to one up each other, and users be dammed when they break shit along the way. They're not held accountable.
If I'm not mistaken, Chromium's javascript uses v8, while Edge's uses Chakracore. My experience with both is that the latter is vastly technically superior, as well as easier to embed into an extensible system with less boilerplate code. While v8's templated approach to its API does arguably make it easier to use javascript types directly from C++ than Chakracore, it also makes v8's API far more complicated. It is less work to write a C++ wrapper around Chakracore's simple C api than it is to understand v8.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I avoid it because it's just a way to try to make me use Bing/Cortana.
No sig today...
This was the thing I never understood about Firefox. I have been using SeaMonkey for a very long time now. When Firefox came out they removed a whole bunch of stuff, but from day 1 it was a larger download, took more RAM and started slower.
Now it still is larger, takes up more RAM, starts slower, has more bloat and is removing old standards.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
NiNite has similar functionality. It's the first thing I run on a new PC.
100% is likely an unattainable goal. But Wine has been painstakingly reverse engineered. They had to identify all the compatibility workarounds and play a never ending game of catch-up. If Microsoft were to make their own equivalent, they would be able to have much better coverage, with the original sources.
How about Zune?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Losing Presto was bad enough, and losing EdgeHTML is even worse. We need more major good engines; this is how open standards stay open. Chromium and Gecko are frankly not enough by themselves, and Servo won't increase the number of good engines because it'll just take the spot currently occupied by Gecko.
"Microsoft is a cloud company, ..."
Cloudy thinking?
Microsoft seems to me to be extremely badly managed. Some of the many, many stories:
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (Aug. 4, 2015)
Microsoft's Intolerable Windows 10 Aggression (May 27, 2016)
Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads (March 17, 2017)
Microsoft, stop sabotaging Windows 10. (March 21, 2017)
There is no way to justify Microsoft managers operating the company like that. If Microsoft had paid $100,000,000 for negative advertising, it wouldn't have gotten such extremely bad results, in my opinion.
Silverlight. .... do nothing. We aren't exactly sure what will happen when Silverlight officially dies, it could very well be that nothing will change. If we have a bundled version of it, our application should still work. However, if IE11 stops supporting it, or if IE11 is no longer supported, then we will have a major crisis on our hands. Our platform is installed at client sites, but only supporting IE11 is a huge liability. It's also a great reminder about why being locked into proprietary technology is a baaaad idea.
Company I work for has a platform that only runs in IE11 because a large portion of the UI was written in Silverlight.
It's large and the platform is complex, and estimates were that it would take 1.5 years to rewrite it with current staff. So management decided to
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I don't understand not gaining "mindshare" from developers. Does this matter still? Are developers still reluctant to make browser independent pages? It's one thing to worry that users don't like it but it should be irrelevant if web developers like it or not. The days of coding only for IE should be relegated to ancient history.
More like McD's buying their bulk ground beef from a generic wholesaler, then spicing and packaging it along the lines of their brand. Which is probably a smart business move.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Raw HTTP GET behind 6 proxies FTW.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
that's what open source is for. In the business world it's like neutral ground.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Any decent web developer never makes browser specific pages. That's just dumb.
Agreed. Amazing they found out about chromium so quickly, only took 10 years?
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
McDonald's DID have a burger meant to mimic the Whopper. It was called the McDLT.
https://www.seriouseats.com/20...
Like Edge, that copycat went basically nowhere.
Edge could triple the rendering engine competition and alternatives if they started it open source and open to multi platform. They tried to act like open (JavaScript) while being old MS, pre Nadella.
Honestly. They should rather take the money, buy Opera's old engine, and bring that up to modern web standards. I would so much use that. Best browser we had.
You weren't around during IE6's dominance of the web, were you?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.