Man, this sucks. I really wish they had open sourced their new engine and stuck with it. I would have volunteered time porting it to Linux/POSIX as well.
This is probably going to get a bit "rant-ey", it's not directed at you, but at the ecosystem at large (and kind of at myself).
Everyone keeps saying this, but nobody is actually doing anything about it. People (myself included) talk about how a monoculture is bad, but we still don't use Edge. We talk about how more competition in the browser space is a good thing, but we still complain when the latest features or security benefits are missing from a browser. And then when the feature lands, nobody cares.
We complain about how bloated and slow browsers are getting, but completely ignore those which are/were slimming that down. And we talk about how Chrome and V8 are taking over the world, but we won't use tech like node-chakracore[1] despite it being a very positive experience when I last used it.
I'm assuming that Microsoft is spending a shitload of time and money on their browser engine, and it was still getting very little usage. They have great performance, some really cool security features, lots of great user-oriented features, and it very rarely gave me issues as a developer, but still nobody (again, myself included) used it. Can you blame them for not wanting to continue?
I feel the same as you, this sucks. But I can't blame anyone but myself, because I don't use Edge (despite using Windows as my daily-driver), and I most likely won't switch to it, and it has very little to do with its capabilities as a browser, and more to do with network effects (i'm used to chrome, my information is in chrome, I'm used to the dev tools in chrome, and I personally and selfishly have no reason to switch to Edge, even if it's technically better)
You can't blame the company for not wanting to continue pouring money into something which is getting very little usage or return on investment at all. At least by working with Chromium more people are going to get the benefits of their work.
> (i'm used to chrome, my information is in chrome, I'm used to the dev tools in chrome, and I personally and selfishly have no reason to switch to Edge, even if it's technically better)
Yep, the same can be said for Firefox. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds of comments on places like Hacker News and Reddit and Ars Technica, all grousing about how Google is the behemoth that is taking over, Chrome is bloated and slowing down and e-mails all of your personal bits to Google, oh woe shouldn't there be a equal competitor in the market, blah, blah...
But too few people actually put their clicking where their talking is and switch to any other browser. People seem hardwired to say "yeah I know it sucks but I want to use Google and thus I want to use Chrome."
Far fewer people with software development skills--that I sorely lack--bother to contribute to Firefox (or, heaven forbid, Thunderbird) development to fix those problems.
Meanwhile, I hug Firefox just a little bit closer every year, wondering if this year is the year that the project fails or simply stops moving forward or whatever. I'm thrilled that companies like Privacy, Krypt.co, and even Capital One still make Firefox extensions and I use them daily. But for how long, when every technology-oriented person on the planet seems hell-bent on using Chrome, outcomes be damned?
It's also hard. Despite the complaints of Google dominance, Chrome is just a really good browser.
I tried to switch to Firefox Quantum earlier this year as my daily driver. I had some minor annoyances, but I ended up switching back to Chrome for the devtools.
Web dev tools are something I have to take people's word for (and, to be clear, have no reason to doubt) since I don't do that kind of work so I have no clue what makes for good tools versus bad ones. But, my overall point still stands: If this is such a major failing in Firefox, is there nobody passionate enough to help keep a browser--that lots of people claim to want to use but for those tools--up to par with the competition?
Firefox' devtools live in GitHub these days and can be patched without needing to build Firefox. I'm sure they'd welcome contributions from passionate developers.
The original “wow!” development tool for Firefox wasn’t event developed by them, if I recall correctly - Firebug was just an extension, developed by one guy, but the extendion system and developers’ interest in platform were in place
I use Firefox day in and day out and the only time I have found myself using Chrome is when I have to do profiling and even then that is because profiling tools in all browsers kinda sucks.
I have often wondered what is the killer feature that Chrome dev tools has that Firefox does not that forces people to switch back to Chrome as this seems to be a common refrain and while I don't work on the dev tools I sometimes wonder what awesome feature I am missing in Chrome...
In some cases, I actually find Chrome lacking. For example, the ability to see what events are attached to a dom element.
DISCLAIMER: I do not work on the developer tools for Chrome or Firefox and don't do much CSS.
> But I can't blame anyone but myself, because I don't use Edge
The problem is not with you or other users, the problem is with using adoption as a metric to determine success/failure of a browser. Sure FF needs adoption for funds, but for companies funded outside of that model a browser needs a BDFL not subject to the whims of adoption levels during different internet periods for us to have a vibrant ecosystem. But it won't happen because renderer implementation count is the least important and most costly metric.
IMO, what's happening here is not based (mostly) on adoption, rather it's about upkeep. The level of effort for browser maintenance outweighs its value for most regardless of user count. Hence the want to leverage existing codebases, share code, and add little flexibility that would exponentially expand the maintenance surface area. This will remain the general trend until a new form of hypertext (or a reduced form of existing) is in widespread use with the goal of implementation ease instead of just targeting ease. I don't suspect that'll happen anytime soon either if ever.
Even if Edge did run on Linux and were open source . . .
. . . and I'm just being honest here, and I'm probably not alone . . .
I just don't trust Microsoft.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they've truly changed. I'm not trying to imply anything about Microsoft, but merely express my own internal feeling about them. I doubt I am alone.
I do not think it is trivial to port EdgeHTML. Don't forget it is a fork of Trident with the legacy parts clipped away and some cogs polished, replaced or added. Not meant to run multi-plat, not even meant to run outside Windows 10.
Wrong person to reply to :) I don't really think it's worth porting it to Linux either. Although I'm sure the Wine people would have a field day with it.
But open sourcing it for the sake of practical domain knowledge, if not history, would be good.
Note they dropped the Spyglass licensing thing from the about prompt in IE7 (8? I don't quite remember), following an internal audit of the codebase. They certainly believe it to be free from Spyglass at this point.
Oh enough of this meme, please. It should be required that anyone who tries to be clever with it actually justify it with a full explanation on what they think the three matching steps are/will be.
I disagree that EEE has been "so common for decades". It's a tactic Microsoft employed for some time and, as far as I can see, hasn't used since (not as a common strategy at the very least).
The only company I can think of that EEE-as-a-strategy might apply to is AWS, and I say this with huge reservations because their priority is still their customers.
It's step 1: embracing the open standard. They'll extend it next. Another commenter already pointed out that could be as easy as just using Bing to send revenue to them using Google's tech. They'll come up with other ideas.
Far as open-sourcing their stuff, I think they're holding off on that to preserve their profitable lock-in in legacy market. Harder to clone their key dependencies if the code isn't open. Even opening the data formats like for Office wasn't enough to make a copy that renders all existing documents perfectly. That was by design, too.
I think it makes more financial sense for them to keep existing stuff closed followed by Embrace with Microsoft-oriented Extend on open stuff. I doubt they'll Extinguish since they don't have enough clout to do that in this market. Probably in most markets now.
