> Didn't they already do that? I remember receiving a spinner whenever I changed between tabs very often since they introduced that multi-process thing.
The spinner is not for discarded tabs. That's when the main window is trying to connect to a different back-end process than the one you were using for the previous tab.
I think people are paid based on supply and demand. I don’t think it’s accurate to say this is the person’s worth as it’s easily confused with other factors.
I'm having trouble digging it up now but at one point there was a domain associated with promoting Exchange 2003 that Microsoft let go of. It was still linked from all their docs but the new owner had it redirected to a Youtube with a fly fishing tutorial. Strangest hijack I've ever seen.
I see it as a version of Blink (the fastest and most secure rendering engine there is) which is not controlled by Google. To me, it is something to consider.
Blink is still controlled by Google. Microsoft doesn't control anything.
They obviously don't control Google's Blink. They could fork it, but in that case they'd have to maintain a browser engine again. If Microsoft could/wanted to do that, they could have just stayed with the old IE Edge.
Since it's in their interests to have a browser installed on Windows by default, if Google did something wrong, they will definitely fork Blink. What alternative do they have?
They have no alternative. Like everyone else, they're at the mercy of Google.
It doesn't matter if it's in Microsoft interests to fork Blink, as that would require maintaining their fork. Which they can't. If Microsoft were able to maintain a browser engine, they would not be switching to Blink in the first place.
The history of "Blink" has been Company X using it, then eventually forking, and winning:
Apple decides to use KHTML instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows a very small team to focus on user experience, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Safari. Eventually Apple forks KHTML into WebKit.
Google decides to use WebKit instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows Google to focus on unique features like process isolation and the new V8 javascript engine, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Chrome. Eventually Google forks WebKit into Blink.
Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of developing their own browser engine from scratch. This allows Microsoft to focus on privacy-related features, instead of the monumental task of replicating the entirety of the historical W3C standard, and ship Edge Chrome. [What will happen next?]
The HTML spec is HUGE, and getting to a point where a new engine can successfully render all the quirks of HTML, CSS, and JS (and WebAssembly, and...) is a harder and harder task every year. Look how long its taking Firefox to get their Rust rewrite going. If you want to focus on end-user features, it makes no sense to start by arbitrarily making a new browser engine that's goal is to... successfully replicate the behavior of existing competing engines (since that's the real standard). If your competitor is open source, then just use that, and focus on what you want to provide.
It is my opinion that people have severely misinterpreted the power dynamic here. Every Windows machine will soon ship with a browser that, as is evident in this very thread, is "basically Chrome"... minus all the Google ID stuff. This is a nightmare for Google, what do they have to offer? "Download Chrome so we can track you!". That's the way its going to sound if Edge Chrome correctly puts its privacy features front and center. Meanwhile, they're getting support for CSS grid or whatever-js-feature for free from Google's hundreds of workers on Chrome.
And the best way to fight this is with a browser that ships with the OS that takes you to Bing instead of Google.
Either way, this seems orthogonal to the question at hand. Google will push Chrome in all those places regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. Having complete parity with Chrome rendering seems at worst neutral, and at best competitive as Google now needs to rely entirely on marketing (or on features present exclusively in Chrome and not Chromium). I'm not saying Google doesn't have many cards left to play here, but this move is absolutely a net positive for Microsoft in this fight.
I fear that Microsoft has given up the fight, and is content to enjoy the seigniorage from defaulting the home page on Windows, while allowing Google to completely dominate the evolution of the web. Time will tell.
> Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of the browser engine they already had.
The stated goal of the EdgeHTML rewrite was to "be fully compatible with the WebKit layout engine used by Safari, Chrome and other browsers. Microsoft has stated that "any Edge–WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing."" [1] It seems the hardest way of doing this is black-boxing WebKit and making a parallel implementation.
What's going on here is that browser rendering is being commoditized. Just like OpenSSL, or Clang, it doesn't necessarily make sense to implement these on your own anymore, there's no clear business reason. There is little to be gained from having a better flex-box implementation, but lots to be lost by having a worse one than the dominant browser. Using Chrome's source disarms this problem.
> "Download Chrome because it's a better and faster browser!" It doesn't have to be true, people believe it anyway.
I mean, maybe... that's not what's won every previous iteration of the browser wars. Its been either through exploiting an existing monopoly (IE, Safari on iOS) or merit (FireFox). Sure, doesn't have to go that way now, but I don't know why we assume that people are going to be moved by "Chrome is faster!" advertising on something that most people prefer not to care about probably.
> "Download Chrome because Edge doesn't support Youtube!" They totally didn't intentionally break Edge.
They can do this regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. If anything, using Chrome makes it more blatant that they're purposely doing it since there's no plausible deniability that its a weird rendering bug in Edge's code. So this seems neither here nor there, if any Edge with any engine got popular then they could choose to go this route and then maybe we'd have an antitrust case on our hands. Unless the argument is "Microsoft should stop making browsers altogether", not sure what the point of this is (maybe that is the thing that is being proposed?).
The entire reason they adopted blink was YouTube putting invisible divs over the video and breaking edge’s hardware acceleration for video.
They rewarded googles shitty behaviour by becoming dependent on them for a rendering engine, and any chance of forking is pointless because they’ll be back where they started: using something different than google, and thus ripe for shit code on google properties.
A browser that can't hardware-accelerate <video> if there's an invisible <div> above it is broken. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do and any other browser can handle that.
I agree that they should have just fixed the issue but my point was that there’s zero chance they’re going to fork blink because their reason for adopting it was google properties doing weird things in their own engine - after enough time google properties will do weird things in their forked engine too.
> how long its taking Firefox to get their Rust rewrite going
Nobody is rewriting Firefox into Rust. Servo is a new research engine not intended to replace Gecko, and some Servo components are being reused back in Gecko (Stylo and WebRender). These are fairly self-contained. The bulk of Gecko is still that C++ codebase and it's here to stay.
"Look how long Servo, one of the few examples of a mostly-from scratch browser engine that we can look to and thus compare (although technically some components of Servo are borrowed from Gecko so even it is not fully a from-scratch effort), is taking to write."
The point was to find any comparable effort to demonstrate what an undertaking this is. Servo was started 7 years ago by one of the few companies with engine expertise. Although, granted, I agree that perhaps framing it as a rewrite might lead you to believe more effort is being placed there than actually is (although I don't think it's totally unfair to look at it that way given their original embedding goals).
MS are able to maintain a browser engine, it just isn't worth them to do it when IE compatibility is an afterthought for a great many sites. Maintaining a fork of Blink would be a lot more worthwhile.
There's a big difference between writing their own engine from scratch and forking Blink. For starters, even if they fork, they can still keep cherry-picking fixes and new features from Google's Blink. After all Webkit is under the GPL so they can't just close the source.
They were able to maintain and extend it. But they were starting from way behind while Google was rapidly adding new features.
Microsoft had to choose between adding their own enhancements and standards (the reason for having an engine into the first place) and playing catch up to Google. With Blink they can have both.
They didn't really have an option: the same organisation controls GNOME and systemd, so they introduced systemd as a hard dependency of GNOME to force distros to adopt systemd. And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME, so...
Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly. Even Gentoo struggles with that, as it takes them a long time to release new versions of GNOME because they have to write the patches to strip out systemd first.
>And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME, so...
LxQt and any KDE-powered distro would beg to differ.
But I agree, in general, that KDE-default distros are few and far between. And the KDE team probably has better things to do with their time than try to maintain a systemd-less fork.
They're rare in the US. KDE-as-default is close to the norm in Europe.
KDE has long been a more crossplatform system than Gnome (much better windows support (and even e.g. solaris), BSD is treated as first-class) so I'd hope they'll continue to avoid being systemd-dependent.
> And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME
cough cough Slackware cough cough Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu cough cough Tiny Core Linux cough cough the literal dozens if not hundreds of distros that ship with a desktop environment that's not GNOME or MATE or Cinnamon or some other derivation thereof cough cough cough
> as a hard dependency of GNOME to force distros to adopt systemd
Or because they like systemd and they think the abstractions it provides are useful and its better to not have that code in GNOME. But sure, lets go with the conspiracy angle.
Also, pure serve distros also adopted systemd.
> Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly.
OpenSource project not implementing the features some users want them to implement. Shocking stuff. Its almost as if that's the bases of Open Source. If you don't like the choices of the project you can take the source and do your own thing.
There are other groups who heavily use these features. We've got over a thousand custom emojis in my Slack at work. Our interactions would be just slightly less rich without :badpokerface:, :sadpanda:, or :superhero:.
For some reason these IRC vs X discussions always have the IRC party attributing character flaws to everyone else.
Like not being creative enough to read the same amount of information from ":)" and specific, rich, custom emoji like, I don't know, someone simply shrugging. That's some bizarre self-aggrandizement.
I encourage you to go on a Twitch channel and tell me the :) equivalent of all the custom Twitch/channel images you see in chat.
And that's fine. None of us want to take IRC away from you. And it's fine as well for you to advocate for IRC, so new people can find out about it and join it. Some of us like other chat services though, for various reasons, and we enjoy using emoji in playful ways and to supplement the lack of body language in written communication.
> If you decide to browse the web without uBlock Origin or if you decide to use Android, you know what you're being exposed to.
Time to step out of the bubble of tech-savvy people and talk to everyday users. It's unrealistic to assume everybody understands technical consequences, and it's unreasonable to require everybody to do so. That's why there is regulation. This applies to all fields, including medicine, food, and IT.
1. No, you don't know what you're exposed to. There are multiple ways to get data on you regardless of uBlock Origin or non-Android OSes.
2. No, it doesn't matter if you use Android (what does using Android have to do with Facebook?) or not, Facebook can and will collect info on you through other means: analytics, logins, sharing etc.
3. You have very little to no idea of how pervasive tracking is especially in the case of large social platforms that everyone integrates with.
I think that even within a relatively tech-savvy audience, most people don't realize both the extent of the data facebook may be gathering and the implications of facebook hoarding this information and turning it over (intentionally or accidentally) to untold third parties at some point in the future. Lots of information is harmless... until it isn't.
Consider, for example, giving your genetic material to a company that researches genealogy. Mostly harmless fun. That company is later quietly purchased- along with its databases- by a medical supplier. Meanwhile, cancer research has found that people with a particular gene sequence are at elevated risk for lung cancer. A partnership between the medical supplier and a medical insurance company means you can be screened for that risk without your knowledge, and suddenly you're screwed.
Even for those who don't see facebook as a malicious entity, there's considerable evidence that they do not exercise due diligence in storing and securing this information- see, for example, the recent case of leaking an enormous quantity of plaintext passwords via log files.
Enormous risks to individuals exist because the current regulatory environment poses no penalty to private entities for gathering personal information, sitting on it indefinitely, and transferring it to other entities until some purpose is identified. These risks may seem very small, but I believe that is mostly a fault of our collective imagination.
Maybe Average Joe won't care, but he's informed about what is actually happening, and he should care and take his decision based on that. The fact that he's proud of blaming the wrong party is not something to be applauded.
Didn't they already do that? I remember receiving a spinner whenever I changed between tabs very often since they introduced that multi-process thing.
>More power to you with every update
*Except when we decide to remotely execute code on your computer using Studies/Normandy/whatever