Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share(computerworld.com) |
Microsoft's browsers return to losing habits, fall to 25% share(computerworld.com) |
(This is a generalization; Goog certainly owns access to plenty of input: email, docs, and hosting. But it is not, I think, on the scale of FB, because frequent, casual input requires a social context.)
Google's nightmare scenario is that everyone starts to use FB Pages for content, FB ads for that content, and something FB payments to pay for services, etc. In this way FB manages to build a private (but very large) vertically integrated internet. Like Alibaba. There are only three ways to disrupt this trend: the browser, the operating system, and the hardware. Each of these mediates between FB and the user, and each one is Google's opportunity to capture attention. (And this, I think, is why engineering talent is so valuable, just as much to deny FB from making things as to make things yourself.)
The nightmare scenario for the open internet is a Facebook Phone running Facebook OS.
Then there's things like adding DRM, a user hostile "feature" google shoved down our throats. Visit netflix on a linux box and you'll discover that "works with chrome" is the new "works with IE".
Edge is a decent browser, but Microsoft was not kind nor to be trusted back then. They have to earn their new trust.
On the open-source front we now have several great browsers - Safari/Webkit (which is very strong on mobile), Chrome/Blink (was Webkit) which dominates, and Firefox/Gecko which is a solid reliable browser thats crossplatform.
Why should anyone choose Edge?
The rest I'm not really sure that there is much benefit to it save the UI lag fix. The oft-tossed about technical debt is incredibly real with Microsoft's browsers, and I believe a lot of the debt that IE had was inherited by Edge to ensure a transition for Microsoft's clientele relying on the IE support for their sites.
Unless Microsoft wants to branch into having a "business browser" and a "consumer browser", they can't give users a clean and non-burdened version of a Microsoft Internet Browser. I really doubt they're going to want to deal with the headache of splitting the focus to two versions. They can make all the changes they want public facing, but as long as they have a sacrosanct part of the browser that can't be altered or removed, they're destined to be an afterthought if a thought at all.
p.s. when the page loads in Edge its actually quite fast and scrolling feels smoother than other browsers - but the initial delay breaks the whole experience for me.
- the search / address box are not obviously that until you click on it
- the window bar area to click on and drag the window around is small and not obvious
Not major things but it makes it less intuitive to use than chrome in my opinion.
Using basic functionality of a browser (opening multiple tabs at a time) is an edge case? Every person I know that uses Chrome has at least 5-10 tabs open at a time. I wouldn't call it an edge case, but I would guess that the minority uses less than 3-4 tabs at a time.
I'll admit that I don't actually like edge's scrolling very much, I think it's the [de/ac]celeration curves - but that's a purely preference thing.
I agree that in the recent years there's been a major push to make browsers great again, but the speed comes at expense of memory bloat. This might be an acceptable tradeoff - until you need to do something non-browser as well.
Even now, for me Chrome cold boots far faster than Firefox does - after doing a taskkill /f /im chrome.exe, chrome opens anywhere from 0.4 to 1.2 seconds after hitting "ok" on a run dialog with "chrome" entered in it, but the same thing with "firefox" in it takes from 3 to 8 seconds to open.
And that's not even a fair test either, as chrome has about 20 or so extensions installed and firefox has none.
Don't even get me started on the android variants of the two either, firefox just feels sluggish and unresponsive next to chrome.
I think that as web developers we have the responsibility to consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences. If not us, then who?
Have you worked with Edge/IE? The pain starts with, as a Mac user, having to boot up a VM and ends with the, in my opinion, horrible development tools compared to Chrome or even Firefox. In this state Edge will never be more than an afterthought.
Only IE, Chrome and FF and their mobile versions are relevant on my daily workflow when working on web projects.
Then I get hold of one of our pool Macs and iDevices and check Safari for a few hours.
So are you a developer, or a Mac user? Do you develop for Mac users, or users?
I'm all for being idealistic, but you can't expect developers to use a software that lacks in performance, features and security. I'm talking about Firefox by the way, because if you really
>consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences
that is the obvious choice, not Edge.
This has been especially evident on some Google properties like Google Docs, or the incident where Inbox couldn't support Firefox because it implemented a function correctly where Chrome didn't.
That said, I hardly notice any performance difference on most sites, and IMHO Firefox behaves much better with a large amount of tabs. Security is the main issue, but Firefox sandboxing is starting to roll out.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mo...
We still have new browsers popping up, like Brave and Vivaldi. We still have Firefox, which is decent.
I don't understand what your concern is in this context.
That time would be better spent elsewhere.
(Note that Brave doesn't have its own engine, it's Chromium. Unsure about Vivaldi - is it Blink based or Presto based?)
What actually happened is that Android phones got stuck on several outdated WebKit versions, Safari on another, and then Chrome forked WebKit into Blink.
So instead of one engine, you now have...like 5 or 6, realistically.
Trying to target standards compliance instead of relying on browser quirks is still the best strategy, both for devs and the ecosystem. It was in 2002 and it still is in 2017. Without it, we wouldn't have iPhones, Android phones or Chrome, for crying out loud.
Then there's the developer tools that slow everything down even more in FF, to almost a halt/crash on some sites, while on the same sites they have no impact on performance in Chrome at all.
That is with an i7 and a mid/low range GPU.
While Chromium does beat Firefox in speed in several individual tasks the overall experience does not differ all that much between the two. Chromium is noticeably more memory-intensive than Firefox, this can go so far as to have the system slow down to a crawl with only two or three tabs open. With Firefox this is much less of an issue, it handles dozens of tabs without a hiccup.
Development tools are more or less on-par between Chromium and Firefox+Firebug (or Aurora). I do not notice the slowdowns you mention when using the developer tools - at least not when comparing between FF and Chromium - even though my system is much slower than yours (1.8GHz Pentium M, 2GB, ATI FireGL Mobility T2 + 128MB). Of course things just are slower on a system like mine so maybe I'm just used to waiting those extra few milliseconds here and there?
In my opinion Firefox has a much better user interface than Chromium, partly due to the fact that Firefox uses GTK (and as such looks (or can be made to look) like most other applications where Chromium comes with its own toolkit.
Once I'm done I test whatever I made on Safari on iOS (the 'new IE6'...) and prepare to jump through some hoops to work around the problems which invariably crop up.
This is a non-issue for cross-platform browsers.