Microsoft is ditching the Edge browser for Windows

That's kind of surprising. To be fair to Microsoft, they were doing really well with EdgeHTML (the underlying rendering engine). We've had very few issues with Edge in terms of standards and compatibility.

The only problem we've had is that not enough people are using it, ironically. People still seem to be heavily reliant on the oldest browser we still support - IE11. If they all start flocking to use this new browser (and honestly it's about time that Microsoft were bold enough to ditch IE11 completely, and no longer ship or provide it) then maybe by 2.2 or 2.3 we can ditch IE support entirely.

This could also be a gain for Chromium. As I said, Microsoft have been doing pretty well with EdgeHTML. If they continue to do well while contributing to Chromium then that also benefits everyone who uses a Chromium based browser across all OSes.

Except iOS. Of course. Apple need to take a long hard look at themselves where WebKit is concerned. Chromium engineers were obviously feeling stifled by the WebKit engine which is why they decided to fork it and build their own rendering engine (Blink) on top of it. Maybe Apple would benefit from ditching WebKit altogether and start shipping their products based on Chromium.... yeah right. 🥴
 
Oh look, another new browser from Microsoft that nobody is gonna care about and that is only going to cause problems... ¯\(ツ)/¯
At this point they might as well could've opted in to just ship with Chrome or any other existing project and do everyone a favor.
Using chromium might be a step in the right direction, but knowing Microsoft, they're gonna build something that is comparatively unusable, as always, when they attempt to build a web browser.
 
Lukas W. said:
Oh look, another new browser from Microsoft that nobody is gonna care about and that is only going to cause problems... ¯\(ツ)/¯
At this point they might as well could've opted in to just ship with Chrome or any other existing project and do everyone a favor.
Using chromium might be a step in the right direction, but knowing Microsoft, they're gonna build something that is comparatively unusable, as always, when they attempt to build a web browser.
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It's unfair to judge Microsoft by their previous failures. Sure, let's all forget about IE as soon as possible. Edge itself isn't so bad. I really don't recall many, if any, support issues with Edge. Certainly not the most recent versions.

And given that Microsoft are actually driving and supporting modern web standards in Edge that expertise could be a welcome addition to the Chromium project, assuming their engineers will start focusing on that, rather than their own engine.

Honestly, right now, if there was a choice between two browsers and they were both platform agnostic across all platforms and that choice was WebKit with Safari or EdgeHTML with Edge, I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest to pick Edge. WebKit is the new Internet Explorer.

There, I said it.
 
Yeah, I wouldn't write it off too early either. The whole company has really turned itself around the last couple of years since Satya Nadella took over.

Their stock price has tippled.

Their Azure cloud division has nearly doubled in the last year, putting it number 2 behind AWS, and ahead of Google.

They're betting big on cloud computing and web services, with it making up about a 1/3 of their revenue at the moment.

They recently acquired Github.

I'm cautiously optimistic and interested to see what they do to push browser capabilities forward if they go down this route.
 
Chris D said:
It's unfair to judge Microsoft by their previous failures.
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I mean it's not like they don't have a history. I wouldn't be so biased if it's only their browser and only this one time. But as someone who's used every major windows version dating back till 95, and seen their evolution, it's pretty clear to me that there are mistakes they just never learn from.

Chris D said:
Sure, let's all forget about IE as soon as possible. Edge itself isn't so bad. I really don't recall many, if any, support issues with Edge. Certainly not the most recent versions.
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What I recall is a promise to run both, Firefox and Chrome plugins on launch, as well as an "up to date rendering engine", which, as it turned out, both wasn't even remotely true. In it's early months, Edge supported even less CSS rules than even IE11, which turned it into an even bigger nightmare. Not even stuff like box-shadow was supported. Not to speak of the fact that Edge wasn't even able to properly handle things such as the built-in windows display zoom. It was a complete utter nightmare. They might've improved stuff since, but I open it up, I still feel like I look at 95 version internet explorer, I can't help it. In conjunction with their more than aggressive campaign to enforce Edge onto people, I think they dug their graves themselves, and it's no wonder Edge picked up so poorly. EdgeHTML was in my personal opinion only the cream topping.

Chris D said:
Honestly, right now, if there was a choice between two browsers and they were both platform agnostic across all platforms and that choice was WebKit with Safari or EdgeHTML with Edge, I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest to pick Edge. WebKit is the new Internet Explorer.
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Fair enough. Luckily we can just ship a different engine to all mobile devi... oh wait. We can't. 😭
 
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That's unfortunate.

It only further enforces Chrome and Google monopoly. I'd prefer if they forked Firefox. There needs to be variety. Current Edge browser is fine, Safari is the one stuck behind. With Chrome becoming a monopoly, they can do whatever they want and get away with it. It might end innovation.
 
i am not sure if microsoft developers have commented about the article that started the whole debate about the demise of edge. chrome developers indicated that this was too much to expect based on recent developments. i personally do not see it happening. i mean people install chrome by choice on windows (and edge is not really available on mac or linux. they are using native engines on ios and android) so it's not like a chrome based browser preloaded with windows 10/11 would change user behavior. unless of course they take the route taken by vivaldi etc where one can just use chrome app store to install apps on their non chrome browser.
 
Arty said:
That's unfortunate.

It only further enforces Chrome and Google monopoly. I'd prefer if they forked Firefox. There needs to be variety. Current Edge browser is fine, Safari is the one stuck behind. With Chrome becoming a monopoly, they can do whatever they want and get away with it. It might end innovation.
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Chromium, upon which Chrome is based, is a free & open source project (mostly BSD license if I recall correctly). Microsoft can do nearly anything they want with Chromium with no impact from Google, the same as what Amazon does with its Silk browser or Opera who switched over to the Chromium engine or a number of other browsers out there. Heck, MS could the same thing as what Opera did and just switch engines as part of a major point release and most users wouldn't know that "Edge" was now based on Chromium instead of a bespoke engine. This change, if it happens, will just make the lives of some devs easier & possibly happier.
 
Chris D said:
The only problem we've had is that not enough people are using it, ironically.
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It's hard to use continuously without menu bar:
Click on the three dots at the top right-hand corner of the page (More actions). Click on "Open with Internet Explorer". You are now back to using Internet Explorer as your Web Browser, with all it's Toolbars, Menus and Favorites, which are still saved.
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A real shame, so what does that leave now, Firefox with Gecko and Quantum, and everything else with Chromium.

Anywhere else such a huge consolidation of market to such a limited number of suppliers would be met with massive concern.
 
Chris D said:
It's unfair to judge Microsoft by their previous failures. Sure, let's all forget about IE as soon as possible. Edge itself isn't so bad. I really don't recall many, if any, support issues with Edge. Certainly not the most recent versions.

And given that Microsoft are actually driving and supporting modern web standards in Edge that expertise could be a welcome addition to the Chromium project, assuming their engineers will start focusing on that, rather than their own engine.

Honestly, right now, if there was a choice between two browsers and they were both platform agnostic across all platforms and that choice was WebKit with Safari or EdgeHTML with Edge, I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest to pick Edge. WebKit is the new Internet Explorer.

There, I said it.
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The problem with Edge is using it. They tried to do things that made no sense with the U.I. The little things that make it annoying leaving the most popular browsers and trying to switch to it.

Want to pin a tab? Great! Lets make the pinned tab the same size as the Set Aside Tab button and place them right next to each other. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally set aside 30+ tabs just because I had a pinned tab sitting next to that stupid useless button.

Want to use the find feature on a tab? Great! Lets make it behave differently than the rest of the mainstream more popular browsers by keeping the stupid find window open across every single tab you have even if you close the tab that you initially used the find feature on. Makes complete sense.

I could go on with just mind boggling UI crap that makes no sense. Its like Microsoft is hell bent on trying to be different just for the sake of it. It sucked to use it right out of the box because most people doing so are trying to leave Chrome or Firefox and the things they decided to make different make no sense.

I have no faith that them using Chromium for the backend will solve their complete lack of ability to make the front end usable.
 
Bring back this guy
190036
 
graham_w said:
Bring back this guyView attachment 190036
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Developers, designers, and strategists, here’s something you can do for the health of the web: Test all your sites in Firefox. Yes, we should all design to web standards to the best of our ability. Yes, we should all test our work in *every* browser and device we can. Yes, yes, of course yes...
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