Readit News logoReadit News
saagarjha · 7 years ago
userbinator · 7 years ago
It's just their Chromium shell, and not using their own rendering engine. (In case anyone was wondering if this was about EdgeHTML being ported.)
onion2k · 7 years ago
EdgeHTML isn't getting ported. It's dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML
simonh · 7 years ago
This was just a matter of time coming. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Linux port soon, if fact I'd be surprised not to.

The motivation seems to be to establish a solid consistent foundation layer for Microsoft to deliver cross platform Electron apps, like Teams and VS Code. EdgeHTML is no good for that, so it got ditched for Chromium.

pavlov · 7 years ago
EdgeHTML is being killed on Windows as well. Chromium with Microsoft chrome is their new default browser.
gshdg · 7 years ago
I’m really interested to find out how they’re approaching privacy. If they take a strong stance, this might be a good alternative to chrome for those sites that support nothing else.
uptown · 7 years ago
From a practical standpoint exactly what does Google collect from one’s browsing activity when they use Chrome? Not sure I’ve ever seen the technical analysis of what kinds of exposure users have.
minikites · 7 years ago
I'm sure it's not limited to this but there are a lot of dark UI patterns in Chrome, e.g. any Google web login also logs you in to Chrome so Google "has permission" to record your browsing history and other browsing data.
judge2020 · 7 years ago
Nowadays your Chrome Sync/Backup is encrypted with your G password (and you can change it to a separate password if you wish), but a lot is still sent to Google (and IIRC by default): https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/9116376?hl=en ("Learn about other Google Services")
princekolt · 7 years ago
Why not Safari? It's fast, power-efficient, and native.
tapoxi · 7 years ago
In my case our SSO requires a FIDO U2F hardware token and Safari doesn't support FIDO U2F at all. Someone wrote a third party extension but I can't get that working.
gshdg · 7 years ago
And a lot of stupidly optimized-for-chrome sites break in it. Plus extensibility is limited.
sureaboutthis · 7 years ago
Windows itself is not a bastion of privacy.
nailer · 7 years ago
I see your point, but I'll add that telemetry is focused on making sure stuff works, whereas selling ads based on your data is focused on making money from you.

Telemetry can be disabled on Enterprise: https://www.kapilarya.com/allow-or-prevent-telemetry-in-wind... but I agree it would be good for Microsoft to allow this to be disabled in Pro.

toastal · 7 years ago
Why not just use Brave then?
pedrocx486 · 7 years ago
I personally ditched them due to them pushing BAT to heavily on those that don't want to participate and Sync being broken randomly.
nsomaru · 7 years ago
Broken on Debian stable due to a sandbox issue not solved for many months.

Not willing to compromise security to run Brave which it seemed the workaround at the time did.

Dead Comment

kgraves · 7 years ago
> a good alternative to chrome for those sites that support nothing else.

Edge is literally Chrome with Microsoft slapped on top of it.

nailer · 7 years ago
No. They're working on a big privacy dashboard which blocks tracking cookies as well as other stuff: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/whats-next

Video: https://edgetipscdn.microsoft.com/insider-site/images/whatsn...

adgasf · 7 years ago
Question about MS strategy: why would someone use this over Chromium or Firefox?
night815 · 7 years ago
I think MS is making money elsewhere so they don't need browser market share but they do need to provide a browser.
jpalomaki · 7 years ago
On Windows (and corporate environment) one reason is that it is easier to manage. Comes with Windows, updates via Windows update and Microsoft provides support (for those with agreements).
MikusR · 7 years ago
Chrome based Edge has nothing to do with Windows update
hibbelig · 7 years ago
I don't quite see that I should be using Edge on Mac because Edge on Windows is easier to manage.
nailer · 7 years ago
It's much faster. Microsoft ripped out about 30 different Google-specific components, I think @ericlaw tweeted the list a little while ago.

Additionally Microsoft pay attention to developers. Chrome Devtools has has a Headers tab, with response headers and then request headers. There's a seperate tab called 'Response' which only contains the response body. I fed this back to Google (suggesting a request and response tab with headers and body) and (per Google) the response was from an engineer saying they personally liked it so therefore there was no reason to change it. Microsoft's feedback was they're actually looking at more logical layouts.

nicoburns · 7 years ago
Well if it comes pre-installed with windows then that's one big reason. As a power user, I'd probably install another browser. But given that this is basically Chrome, there's not a lot of reason for an average user to switch.
DHPersonal · 7 years ago
If Microsoft integrates all the functionality of the original Edge into Chromium Edge, then it will be a great browser to use on their Surface line of tablet computers. Without those features, it’s a non-Google Chrome with a large company backing its feature updates and contributing to the codebase’s continued improvement, along with syncing features and potential better integration with Windows. Firefox has a lot of good features still, but its small usage amount has made some development budgets ignore it or drop support of it on some sites I have visited.
butteroverflow · 7 years ago
Yeah. Our postal service's website has a small badge on every page. It translates to something like 'developed for and in Chrome'.

They must be bragging about it, or something.

It reminds me of all those 'best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600' from the beginning of the century.

sorrowfulgeek · 7 years ago
This is Chromium. Maybe you mean Chrome. Someone would use this over Chrome if someone doesn’t want to be surveilled by Google. Of course now you’ll be surveilled by MS. It is better when your surveillance dossier is split among multiple entities.
adgasf · 7 years ago
Chromium _is_ Chrome minus the Google stuff IIRC
SentientNo4 · 7 years ago
I assume they bet on people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff and corporate people who use macs but work with MS infrastructure (like Exchange and Sharepoint).
ernesth · 7 years ago
> people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff

Why would those people not use the chromium browser?

aardshark · 7 years ago
Well speaking for me personally, Firefox runs terribly on my Macbook and it would be nice to have an alternative to Chrome.
tshanmu · 7 years ago
this is not my experience, firefox quantum has been always faster and reliable than Chrome on MBP.
Angostura · 7 years ago
Nothing wrong with Safari, in my experience.
chapium · 7 years ago
I have similar problems, Firefox is noticeably slow.
chapium · 7 years ago
Firefox runs rather poorly on Mac.
jfk13 · 7 years ago
That's a terribly sweeping generalization, and is clearly not everyone's experience (see for example tshanmu's comment a few minutes before yours).

Have you filed a bug report with specifics of the poor behavior you experience, so that Mozilla engineers can potentially investigate the issue?

darkpuma · 7 years ago
That's not been my experience.
jaabe · 7 years ago
I think you can ask yourself that question with a lot of Microsoft products these days, and we use (and like) a lot of them at my place if business.

I mean Microsoft has the upper hand compared to Google or AWS because they are better at GDPR and privacy shield stuff. Microsoft is also miles better in terms of enterprise support, but it’s those reasons and not their solutions that sell.

fnordsensei · 7 years ago
How come that every single Microsoft application for MacOS requires an installation? It makes me suspicious that they're gunking things up unnecessarily.
eddyg · 7 years ago
jorisw · 7 years ago
Microsoft's added value right there.
rsweeney21 · 7 years ago
Let's say Microsoft finds a way to gain a large market share with Edge. Couldn't they cause significant damage to Google if they enabled ad blocking by default? 90% of Google revenue is still ad revenue. Say they got 50% market share. If all of the sudden 50% of internet users started blocking ads, wouldn't that be a pretty bad thing for Google? Like put them out of business overnight kind of bad? While not hurting Microsoft at all?

I wonder if Google saw this vulnerability years ago and so they decided to build Chrome to protect themselves.

tcper · 7 years ago
Finally, IE come back to Mac, since IE5 in Mac OS 9.
pavlov · 7 years ago
IE was the default browser in original Mac OS X as well. Safari didn't ship until 10.2 I think.
gshdg · 7 years ago
10.3 or 10.4, IIRC.
Angostura · 7 years ago
IE 5.2 was damn good.

Deleted Comment