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Chrome Chromium Microsoft

Microsoft Is Embracing Chromium, Bringing Edge To Windows 7, Windows 8, and Mac 139

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
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.
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Microsoft Is Embracing Chromium, Bringing Edge To Windows 7, Windows 8, and Mac More

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

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  • As a Win7 user (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I welcome our Chromium Edged overlord.

    • As a Linux user, I can't fathom why MS would support a dead platform like Windows 7 but not RHEL or Ubuntu.

  • ...based browser? So it will download Chrome even faster or/and it will periodically set itself as the default browser?

    • ...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?"

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Privacy would be the obvious selling point.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        It's not google. Therefore likely less spyware.

        • Re:A chromium based browser to download a chromium (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Rob Y. ( 110975 ) on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:49PM (#57761600)

          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.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            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.

          • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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 ch
      • 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

  • 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.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Standards Compliant Finally (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:05PM (#57761292)

      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.

    • I don't recall the last time I did the "two sets of code" hack, pretty sure everyone just lowers to the least common denominator of compatibility now and/or relies on polyfills for everything.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      Edge is quite standards compliant, even doing better in Safari in some cases.
      Yes there may be some things that Edge doesn't support, but one could cherry-pick features that any given browser doesn't support.

    • Re:Standards Compliant Finally (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:13PM (#57761378)

      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.

      • 'd rather Microsoft work harder to implement standards compliance in their existing rendering engine.

        I'm aware of 0 non-standard rendering issues in IE11 or Edge. Also, as far as I know, Edge has fewer non-standard JS issues than Chrome.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shess ( 31691 )

        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.

        The big problem here is that websites can only barely be bothered to test with a single browser, and rolling out standards strong enough to count on is hard hard hard work, so the ground truth is that websites routinely rely on browser-specific behaviour without even knowing it. At the user level, figuring out why a site doesn't work is basically impossible, so you just switch browsers until one works well enough then you stop. Together, these mean that it is extremely hard to have a browser with a render

    • But should Standards Compliant be based off the same code set?
      There is often more then one way to code a product and still follow the same standards, some features will run faster then others, others may be sacrificed. A newer build would be based on current browsing habits vs older ones. Also this could mean greater security issues, as there will be mostly a unified browser engine across all the major browsers, so with the same code set behind it, a flaw will have more of a universal problem.

      • But should Standards Compliant be based off the same code set?
        There is often more then one way to code a product and still follow the same standards, some features will run faster then others, others may be sacrificed. A newer build would be based on current browsing habits vs older ones. Also this could mean greater security issues, as there will be mostly a unified browser engine across all the major browsers, so with the same code set behind it, a flaw will have more of a universal problem.

        I'll give you that. It would be better if Microsoft managed Standards Compliance on their own and had a separate source and perhaps different vulnerabilities to make a hack one place not work everywhere.

        They tried to be standard with Edge, and it was an improvement, but there were still a few issues. (Edge is much closer to where MS needed to be though).

    • That would be nice, but Microsoft switching browser code doesn't magically make IE11 and his older siblings go away. God, I wish it had. Edge was a great step toward standards compliance; any CSS I write for Firefox renders perfectly in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. Edge is even up there with supporting CSS grid. But we still have dinosaurs that use Windows 7 and 8 and don't know how to download and run a new browser. That "e" with the swoosh on their desktop stands for "eeenternet" so they can log into Yahoo M

      • That would be nice, but Microsoft switching browser code doesn't magically make IE11 and his older siblings go away. God, I wish it had. Edge was a great step toward standards compliance; any CSS I write for Firefox renders perfectly in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. Edge is even up there with supporting CSS grid. But we still have dinosaurs that use Windows 7 and 8 and don't know how to download and run a new browser. That "e" with the swoosh on their desktop stands for "eeenternet" so they can log into Yahoo Mail and send their family FWDs about Russian models being better immigrants than Mexican welfare babies.

        As a web designer, I'm ambivalent about this. Maybe Microsoft can contribute something worthwhile to the Chromium project.

        CSS works great on Edge. I still see differences in how Microsoft handles JavaScript compared to the other browsers.

  • Adblocking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:01PM (#57761244) Homepage Journal
    The #1 feature I want on a web browser is adblocking.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Two brands that love ads select the best way to push and track more ads on different OS.
      Adblocking their approved ads in their OS?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      Adblocking is fine until you find that half the results of a typical Google sear...

      This is a free preview.
      To read the entire comment, log in [slashdot.org] or subscribe [slashdot.org] to comments by tepples

  • 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 Apple might have something to say about that

    • Gecko still has like 16% market share, so the dominance is not nearly so complete as IE/Trident back in the day.

    • 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.

      Well, despite Firefox trying to continuously look like Chrome, it isn't Chrome powered.

      Yet.

    • The problem with IE/Trident was that it was closed source -- and worse, Windows-only. Blink is easily forked if Google does anything bad with it, as proved by KTML being forked into Webkit being forked into Blink.

      The great thing about Microsoft switching Edge to Chromium is that web developers no longer need to keep a copy of Windows around to check.

  • I think it's hilarious that by switching to Google technology, MS's new software will run on more MS platforms.

    • What's more hilarious is that Windows users have been able to download and run Chromium on their desktop for a long time. Most of them just didn't know the benefits of doing that.
  • 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.

    • It's speeding "innovation", that is, the ability of Google to supplant W3C as the maintainers of HTML5+, allowing them to add lots more support for ads and tracking.

      It is going to kill competition, for the same reason that IE6 killed competition - there will be no spec to write to (or the Chromium implementation will differ from the spec), so you'll have to use the supplied engine or GTFO.

  • Yayyyyy ... Just what I haven't been waiting for. [ shoots self in head ]

  • What about Windows XP (Score:5, Funny)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:08PM (#57761326)
    Don't leave out all those users with pirated copies of XP.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jezwel ( 2451108 )
      I needed an XP device to setup some old ethernet over power devices this last week. Lucky I kept that tiny old Dell laptop with XP! Some complaints about the BIOS battery, but otherwise it worked perfectly.

  • C'mon MS, leave OSX out of it, go screw with the other platforms.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:25PM (#57761470)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Lynx (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Seriously... it's all you need.

  • SO: Microsoft is pushing Edge over the ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by grep -v '.*' * ( 780312 ) on Thursday December 06, 2018 @04:02PM (#57761696)
    ... Edge?

  • There are 2 use cases where I still need to use IE11:
    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 .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 th

  • For the sake of browser diversity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Thursday December 06, 2018 @04:59PM (#57762050)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What's the point in that? If chromium goes evil simply fork the code and carry on - hardly difficult and you could even do it yourself if you had the time (which ms probably has lots of)

  • Embrace Extend Extinguish

  • 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.

  • 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.

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