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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.
And yes, this means Chrome extension support.
I welcome our Chromium Edged overlord.
...based browser? So it will download Chrome even faster or/and it will periodically set itself as the default browser?
Is this a repeat or just an old story?
Either way- my thoughts on this are the same as they were back when I first heard about this: excellent news for web developers. 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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
...based browser? So it will download Chrome even faster or/and it will periodically set itself as the default browser?
I think they're hoping "why would anyone download Chrome if they have the same thing in different colour paper with our product?"
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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The #1 feature I want on a web browser is adblocking.
Yet another reskinned Chrome, can never have enough of those. It wasn't even 5 years ago when we had a healthy selection of browser engines, some of them even web standards compliant. Now Chromium/Chrome devoured the entire market, and Google has final say on how the web is rendered.
I think it's hilarious that by switching to Google technology, MS's new software will run on more MS platforms.
Will this not just slow innovation? Now there will basically be one browser that is run by a single committee that filter & block new features as they see fit. Back in the days of IE vs Netscape at least MS was doing whatever they hell they wanted trying to be innovative and trying lots of new features (for better or worst). Seems like the whole tech industry is trying to force everyone to adhere to the "standard" and that will eventually kill competition and innovation.
Privacy would be the obvious selling point.
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Yayyyyy ... Just what I haven't been waiting for. [ shoots self in head ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Don't leave out all those users with pirated copies of XP.
If you're paranoid that Google is taking your personal information and using it for profit you may now consider the, equal, alternative Edge. And perhaps Edge will be more optimized for the OS than what Google has been able to achieve, so it could be a better experience....all theoretical of course.
I would assume that the browsers would be competing against features (the stuff outside the actual web page)
Things like developer debugging tools, handling hot keys and bookmarks.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's not google. Therefore likely less spyware.
C'mon MS, leave OSX out of it, go screw with the other platforms.
While it wasn't the original web browser, Mosaic was probably the web browser that did the most to popularize the web, with Netscape - which was a ground up rewrite by some of the original Mosaic team - taking that and pushing it even further forward.
In the early nineties, Spyglass licensed Mosaic, and implemented a much modified version called Spyglass Mosaic.
In 1994, Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic, and the first version of IE was essentially a reskinned Spyglass Mosaic.
Since then, the code has been built upon multiple times. So IE11 still has some traces of Mosaic in it. Edge is a fork of IE11, so it's fair to assume that trace elements of Mosaic are in there too.
This is basically the end of that chapter of history. Chromium is based upon KHTML. Firefox never had any links beyond shared developers with Mosaic, both Netscape 1-4, and Netscape 6, were complete ground up rewrites.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Because Microsoft will support it. Ticking the "Vendor support agreement" box is a requirement for a PHB signoff
I never had a desire to use Edge, but do use Chrome from time to time as a secondary browser, and would love to have an option not from Google. I'll probably switch to using Edge for secondary browsing unless I encounter some major issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Seriously... it's all you need.
Bingo
Because organizations want support for products and Google provides absolutely zero for Chrome(or much of anything, really). Google is a really shitty company to get software support from, unlike Microsoft, whose business model is at least partially centered around customer support.
You also have to deal with software certification for governmental organizations and other certain industries. Chrome may not be on the list, but Microsoft's browsers almost universally are if Windows is the desktop OS of choice.
... Edge?
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
google is still tracking u buddy. whether u use Google services or not
Google is not tracking me. I have all of their domains and ASN blacklisted. Their universal presence on other websites is a NOOP. I'm happy with startpage.
There are 2 use cases where I still need to use IE11: .docx file and edits it locally. I'm sure Slashdot will poo-poo this but it is super useful. If they push Chromium, they ought to make an extension so that these office features work seamlessly.
1) Windows IoT and Windows Server. For reasons I don't understand, Microsoft does not ship Edge onto those OS editions.
2) Office integration. If you put a Microsoft Office document onto a Sharepoint or OneDrive site, using IE11 gives you the integration. On other browsers, it just downloads the
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.
Are you aware that Win10 telemetry was pushed on win7 via updates something like a year ago? It makes no sense to fuck themselves over as anyone who doesn't care about telemetry already has it installed.
remember Chrome implements a bunch of standards like SPDY (Google-only extension)
I thought SPDY had been standardized as HTTP/2. Do you refer to old draft versions of the protocol that should have been phased out by now?
and enforcing https on .dev
The owner of any top-level domain can set HSTS preload guidelines for that domain.
except what if I'm not on the public internet?
Use an explicitly reserved TLD, not a TLD that someone else owns. For multicast DNS, use .local; for static allocation on a private DNS server, use .internal.
Embrace Extend Extinguish
. .
Chrome hasn't done that for a long time.
There are still plugins available to have backspace go to the previous page, for those who want that.
You put the cart before the horse. This is a story about edge coming to win7 and win8. Both of which can simply not install telemetry, as on both operating systems, user has full control over updates.
It therefore makes little sense for MS to put additional spyware to the similar tune as google into their version of Chromium. Those who don't care about spyware on win7 and win8 already installed it via windows update. There's no benefit in having second layer of spyware for these users.
There's only benefit if you could get users who chose not to install spyware via update to install edge with spyware. But chances of this happening are near zero, because it takes a whole lot more effort not to accidentally install spyware via windows update than to simply not install that new edge.
So it would make sense to not include spyware in that new edge. It's a low benefit, high risk proposition. It obviously doesn't mean that they won't do it. There are plenty of dumb people making these decisions based solely on some internal company benchmarks without considering the overall situation. But it's very likely that someone in the leadership chain will have the foresight.
Who created and implemented those drafts [of HTTP/2]?
Google. But who should have created and implemented them, if not Google?
As I understand it, the .dev constraint is enforced in chrome's source code, not in any DNS record
The same is true of other ICANNverse domain names whose owners have set the HSTS preload bit. If you were to create a site called google.com in your air-gapped private parallel internet, the major browsers would force HTTPS on that as well.
Who do you think will define HTML5? It isn't going to be W3C. Or Google saying all http is 'not secure'
"Secure Contexts", a policy to block JavaScript from doing sensitive things on cleartext HTTP sites, is in fact a W3C Candidate Recommendation. Besides, Firefox has similar behavior. Visit some random cleartext site, and to the left of the URL bar, you see a lock with a red slash through it. Click it to show the warning: "Connection Is Not Secure / Logins entered on this page could be compromised."
There's certainly an opening here. Chrome is too much of a memory hog and the latest firefox doesn't support as many extensions. If they can produce a non-memory hog version of chrome that supports all it's extensions that will make it a compelling alternative.
Enough of this FUD. Telemetry is a modern method for reporting back to developers what the fuck went wrong when your app crashed, not to ping Uncle Sam when you post about overthrowing the government on the Fourth International forums. The future is data analytics, and your operating system is hardly the main candidate for tracking your behavior. Want to remain untraceable? Go read a newspaper.
At first glance, I'd say this is a bad thing because it reduces competition, but since Microsoft Edge is a Windows 10-only browser, it's probably a good thing; developers eventually won't need to code for a Windows-specific browser unless Microsoft forks the rendering engine.
You have an option not from Google, it's called Chromium, the open-source project that the new Edge will be based on.
Probably will evaluate Chromium also, I honestly had not heard there was a standalone Google-free variant.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I despise Google and try to avoid them as much as possible, but unfortunately there's a few domains of theirs that there's no getting away from...
namely, GoogleApi, Google Captcha, their cdn, as well as arguably the products: Maps and YouTube.
Without some of those domains, a large portion of websites would be broken, including many of those that require authentication using Captcha.
How do you possibly get around that?!
It's both. The purposes are not mutually exclusive.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Because Chrome, while having a great engine, isn’t actually very good at anything else. For example, it’s history support is downright terrible - history searching via the url bar is awful at actually finding things compared to Firefox, you can’t configure the duration to keep history, and even the history page itself is worse. And that’s just one area. If someone were to implement Chrome’s engine in a browser that didn’t suck, it would easily be the best browser.
I’m not saying MS will pull any of that off, since their browsers have been universal laughing stocks for almost a couple decades, but it would be great if they did.
Are YOU joking? MS sells software. They are giving you ads. And they don't even do that if unless you use the cheap ad-subsidized home version. That's not really related to privacy and demonstrates nothing about how MS operates.
Privacy is a problem with a few types of companies: advertisers who profit from your personal data, smash and grab service providers who develop minimal products which they support with ads, failing companies trying to trump up revenue by selling lists, and companies with incompetent security. Microsoft is none of these and has a decades long track record of keeping information private.