I have this strange hypocritical mental model which simultaneously dismisses improvements to Edge as irrelevant while also wishing and rooting for more browser competition elsewhere.
We aren't rooting for browser competition, but browser engine competition. Microsoft is clearly not interested in maintaining their own engine, so any users that switch to Edge are ultimately still giving market share and consequently power over the web standards to Google.
IMHO, 2.5 good engines are enough (webkit, blink, gecko - in the sense that webkit and blink are very similar). We just need more really good browsers which use gecko.
And when they had EdgeHTML which wasn't even that bad, people pissed on it and said it's worse than Blink, idk man, this is an impossible case of getting the monopoly out of Google's hands.
I find it a very funny meme that Google controls web standards. Well I used to find it abstractly okay to worry about, then funny, and now annoying because it's used as a thought-terminating cliche.
Edge was never going to be that once Microsoft gave up on their own renderer. It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now.
On the other hand, it's exciting that Kagi is working on Orion. Ladybird will be interesting too. Maybe manifestv2 deprecation will start another browser war...
Microsoft could've made it look like IE and attracted a lot of that crowd with "same familiar UI, better rendering", but instead they decided to take the dumbed-down UI that Chrome had and add more MS-specific yet largely-useless or hostile features.
Very few people are going to want to go up against Google and do it for nothing. At the end of this monumental quest, you only have just another browser.
If it doesn't even make sense for Microsoft when they have an entire, ubiquitous operating system to take advantage of, I don't see how we do anything except declare Google's engine the winner that takes all.
It was nice when KHTML was forked for WebKit. It seriously seemed that open-source was taking root (pun intended). However, the situation has unfortunately evolved into a “not like that!” scenario.
I checked what "Windows Blog / Microsoft Edge" is about. It says "Microsoft Edge news and product updates for developers focused on Microsoft Edge". If it was for end users, I'd have no problem with such superficial articles. But targeting developers - this is a shame and shows again and again Microsoft's culture around not supporting technically minded people (I don't even think of mentioning the term "hacker" in connection with Microsoft) with understanding what's going on under the hood. This is exactly the core promise of FOSS software and should be an eye-opener for not using proprietary software whenever possible (in this case, MS Edge).
They made a chart where the the 28 bar is 40% of the size of the 32 bar. How to lie with charts. Their intended audience is made of IT news sites publishing filler.
IANAL, but when I asked a person somewhat involved in EU anti-trust processes, osx and macos aren't even close to be classified as monopolies in most of the EU, so the idea that Apple is abusing their monopoly to enforce their own tech on users, doesn't apply that clearly.
> These results come from our field telemetry, which represent real-world web usage on all types of hardware and websites.
I wonder what the speedup would be without field telemetry. Also what is the electrical consumption for all the telemetry-related packets hopping around the internet? What would the speedup be like for the internet itself if we stopped using telemetry on everything.
Most websites send massive amounts of telemetry data which is never mentioned but somehow MS doing this for Windows/Edge etc, which they fully disclose, always is.
They could probably just load one fewer ad and postpone all the Copilot and Bing Rewards crap for a few seconds...
Sigh. Edge on Chromium was actually light and fast when it first came out, before Microsoft polled a Microsoft and enshittified it with all the unnecessary crapware.
We are using the same medium/platform (browser with HTML/JS/CSS) for decades (plural!) now and mostly using the same, boring websites.
How come there is still so much performance to gain and how come there is still so much NEED for it?
In the time CPU's and browsers got twice as fast together, it seems like web apps got twice as slow.
The only web app that people use a lot that has any justification to demand this is probably google maps 3D mode -but then again, we already had that webgl magic a DECADE ago as well.
Look at the most used websites. All of them are mostly text, images and sometimes (4k) video. All of this should be blazingly fast by now.
Readit News
Deleted Comment
On the other hand, it's exciting that Kagi is working on Orion. Ladybird will be interesting too. Maybe manifestv2 deprecation will start another browser war...
Microsoft could've made it look like IE and attracted a lot of that crowd with "same familiar UI, better rendering", but instead they decided to take the dumbed-down UI that Chrome had and add more MS-specific yet largely-useless or hostile features.
If it doesn't even make sense for Microsoft when they have an entire, ubiquitous operating system to take advantage of, I don't see how we do anything except declare Google's engine the winner that takes all.
2 questions the article didn’t address:
1. What were the changes, and what was each one’s contribution to the total?
2. How much - if any - of this improvement be observed in other Chromium browsers?
IANAL, but when I asked a person somewhat involved in EU anti-trust processes, osx and macos aren't even close to be classified as monopolies in most of the EU, so the idea that Apple is abusing their monopoly to enforce their own tech on users, doesn't apply that clearly.
The way I understand it, the EU doesn't care about Mac at all since it has so low market share.
1.7% faster navigation times 2% faster startup times 5% to 7% improvement in web page responsiveness
I'd say in practice a 2% faster startup time is probably barely noticeable?
Also, you would barely see the difference in the chart if they actually used a zero axis.
Here is a better (more honest) chart:
I wonder what the speedup would be without field telemetry. Also what is the electrical consumption for all the telemetry-related packets hopping around the internet? What would the speedup be like for the internet itself if we stopped using telemetry on everything.
e.g. Netflix/YouTube
Sigh. Edge on Chromium was actually light and fast when it first came out, before Microsoft polled a Microsoft and enshittified it with all the unnecessary crapware.
How come there is still so much performance to gain and how come there is still so much NEED for it?
In the time CPU's and browsers got twice as fast together, it seems like web apps got twice as slow.
The only web app that people use a lot that has any justification to demand this is probably google maps 3D mode -but then again, we already had that webgl magic a DECADE ago as well.
Look at the most used websites. All of them are mostly text, images and sometimes (4k) video. All of this should be blazingly fast by now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites