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Microsoft Is Embracing Chromium, Bringing Edge To Windows 7, Windows 8, and Mac

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today embraced Google's Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. Microsoft wants to make some big changes, which it says will happen "over the next year or so." The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

And yes, this means Chrome extension support.

5 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Adblocking by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The #1 feature I want on a web browser is adblocking.

  2. Re:Standards Compliant Finally by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Please. IE6 broke every standard it could (although IE5.5, for macs, was remarkably compliant.) They started adhering to more standards as it went through 7, 8 and 9 (the most standard uncompliant thing in 9 was websites could include tags that said "render this like you were IE6, 7 or 8") By 11 I'm not aware of any issues, and Edge was designed to the specification. I recall MS would proudly pointing to stupid edge cases it didn't comply, show how no one did, and explain why complying would cause major issues.

    Meanwhile, Chrome has been becoming more and more like IE6, inventing new optional add-ons, and doing its own EEE to the free webstandards. Meanwhile, Google has been downranking pages that don't use their EEE "features" to force websites to integrate them. It's at least as evil as MS wanting to own the browser on PCs, because at least then it just would render the page slightly off if you didn't buy into the monopolist's browser. Now, you (essentially) don't exist, cause you're on page 103 of the search results.

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  3. Re:Standards Compliant Finally by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's about time Microsoft had a standards-compliant browser so we don't have to have two sets of code; one for Microsoft, and one for everyone else.

    Well, there are a couple issues I can see.

    1) Monocultures are generally a bad idea, and this is moving us further down the road towards a web monoculture. I'd rather Microsoft work harder to implement standards compliance in their existing rendering engine.

    2) Google seems to be doing the same thing Microsoft did 10-15 years ago - trying to push people into adopt Chrome-optimized web sites and Google-specific coding. I hated it when Microsoft did it, and I hate it now.

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  4. Re:A chromium based browser to download a chromium by Rob+Y. · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nice try. But, now that they've announced versions for Windows 7 and Mac, it's pretty obvious that, in addition to not wanting to spend development resources on a redundant browser engine, they're real goal is to get Edge telemetry onto non Windows 10 boxes. So if you want to get rid of spyware, you're gonna have to use vanilla Chromium.

    I guess if desktop Linux were a factor, they'd be 'porting' it there too - but (much as they 'love' Linux these days) they're still not fond of the idea of desktop Linux as a viable competitor to Windows.

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  5. For the sake of browser diversity by xack · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Microsoft needs to release the old edge source and keep it going as a back up in case Chromium goes evil. Plus we need to get Firefox to be a good browser again wih XUL support for extentsion diversity.