It’s official.
For the past few years, Microsoft has meaningfully increased participation in the open source software (OSS) community, becoming one of the world’s largest supporters of OSS projects. Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.
As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge – but other browsers as well – better on both PCs and other devices. The new Edge
Microsoft also has plans to bring Edge to other platforms, such as macOS. In addition, and perhaps most surprisingly, the new Edge will not be a UWP application – it will be a Win32 application that will also be available to Windows 7 and 8 users.
I had hope MS would become the third player in the browser space.
At least Vivaldi keeps getting more awesome.
Vivaldi is also using chromium. Chromium *is* the web as off now and that’s not all rosy.
Unless you go off the reservation with browsers like Links, Dillo & NetSurf
Come on. Firefox and Safari are not that exotic.
Safari kinda is, since it dropped Windows version few years back.
I absolutely concur – we’re looking at a situation where Chrome becomes the Web, similar to the way IE6 did.
Thankfully, Firefox is still around to provide an alternative, but we could do with a stronger showing.
We could do with fewer people complaining that Firefox is becoming like Chrome, and then jumping ship to Chrome.
But but… UWP was the future! Everyone at Microsoft said so! Right? UWP was amazing, and everything should be converted over to it, they said. You can’t be saying the wonderful and honorable Microsoft PR team would lie… right?
</sarcasm>
On a more serious note, if this isn’t the funeral bell tolling for UWP, I don’t know what is.
Nah, the thing was dead when The Real Office stayed a good ol’ desktop app. Since time immemorial, Office served as a pilot to third party developers on how to build complex applications in a new UI, from DOS to Win3.1 to Win95 to Vista. The decision of the Office team to not port The Real Office to support Metro or UWP was a message to third parties that the UI wouldn’t work or that porting existing codebase was infeasible.
Edited 2018-12-06 18:25 UTC
Well, all of us with common sense knew this, but even without Office there was still quite a large UWP fan club. This is a bit different though: this is taking what was a UWP app and deliberately not making the next iteration UWP. Perhaps Office was the funeral bell and this is the nail in the coffin?
Edit: My second typo of the day. Blah!
Edited 2018-12-06 19:21 UTC
“This is a bit different though: this is taking what was a UWP app and deliberately not making the next iteration UWP.”
I disagree, with the move to Chromium, this is simply inevitable. I doubt very much Chromium would be amenable to porting to UWP.
PWAs are UWP apps.
UWP? How so? PWA are just web sites with a few tweaks.
I think that’s the point. PWAs run on ubiquitous platform, and are essentially a collection of web tech. They are a better suited tech for what UWP was stated to achieve.
PWAs are one of the UWP personalities.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa
They aren’t owned or defined by MS though. They are web tech.
They were originally defined by Google (ChromeOS/Android WebAPK) and Microsoft (UWP Hosted Apps), actually.
Edited 2018-12-07 13:06 UTC
Still, it’s not the same as a single vendor/proprietary offering. Even iOS partly supports PWAs.
I didn’t know that Microsoft and Google collaborated on PWA, but I’m not surprised. In fact, glancing at their docs, Windows is supporting PWA better than Google!
Here’s a deeper link that says how to make a PWA and put it in the Microsoft App Store – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/progressive-web-apps
I’m curious: for games, will Microsoft let me create a PWA game that uses WebGL?
Now if we can only convince Apple to allow Chromium in iOS and Mac, I would be happy.
PS: I was skeptical because ever since Windows 8, Microsoft seemed to not support HTML5 apps very well, preferring C# and Win32.
JS/HTML 5 is one of the UWP personalities, as such PWAs get to access all UWP APIs when properly signed, no need for manual FFI.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa
Sad. I’ve been using Edge exclusively on my Windows notebook because of the power savings and smoothness, even though there are a few sites here or there that it doesn’t behave well on. Unfortunately, I don’t think Firefox has the resources to compete and all the web is going to become Chrome/Chromium now (as Safari sucks).
Don’t worry, Chromium/Blink will suck too with no competition. Blink, the new IE6/Trident.
I don’t understand this logic. It’s not at all the same. Chromium is much more like Linux, and Linux doesn’t suck, despite its wide dominance in many markets.
The key difference between this and MS style vendor lock in, is the number of key players working on a single code base. If things happen that one or more of them don’t like, they can always split from the group as Google did when they ditched Apple years ago.
Think of each branded browser built on Chromium as a distinct “distro”. It’s really not the same as a single vendor dominating with a single piece of tech like the old IE6 days.
The Chromium project isn’t like Linux though. They often consider any downstream patches that don’t directly benefit Chrome to be unimportant or simply bloat.
As a longtime user of V8, I saw this over and over again with patches from the Node.JS team (and some of my own). Unless this it’s something Google wants for Chrome, your patches are likely to be ignored or rejected from Chromium.
Agree. One browser to rule them all (ignoring those Firefox hobbits) and especially to destroy the good guys of Safari.
Actually what is happening is that on several projects, Google and Microsoft are working together against their common enemy … Apple.
How much share is Firefox losing these days? I like some of these other browsers (Brave and Vivaldi) and Opera, but they’re all Chromium under the hood.
I wasn’t surprised about Edge at all. It is nearly impossible to make an HTML5 browser from scratch and the new Edge just couldn’t do it. Though there were still persistent rumors that Edge was still really Trident under the hood, the same way that Windows still has OLE/COM deep down. “It’s OLE all the way down” as an ancient sage once said.
Let’s just all admit it and go back to OLE.
It’s a little early for April fools jokes, isn’t it? I mean…..Chrome as the underpinning to MS web browser?
I’m not sure I believe any of that.
Did you believe it when they started running their own linux distros?
How about when they started open sourcing their software?
What about when they started giving their OS away for free?
Nothing in this life is truly free. Everything comes at a cost somewhere.
…and you of course will be saying the same thing in some future discussions about Free Software.
Not sure why no one is poking fun at them porting Edge to macOS yet, but I sure will!
What’s the point? Who is going to use that browser under Mac?
Bill Gates and his wife.
The same people who used IE on the Mac … long ago. The demand to bring back IE to the Mac was overwhelming.
This was also before IE 6 become a meme. IE for Mac was also a totally unrelated program to IE on Windows, using the Tasman engine which was totally separate from Trident.
I didn’t know about Tasman. Was that the same team that produced Office for the Mac?
I’m still convinced that Trident was hidden deep in Edge and that Trident just couldn’t take another patch. ::-)
If the dev tools are better than Chrome’s (highly doubtful, but who knows) or it has some other compelling feature I like I might give it a wack. I suspect I would end up going back to Chrome, but if my choice was this or Safari it would be a no-brainer.
People used to say Safari was the new IE… It’s not anymore, now its the old IE. Its like IE6 bad at this point.
Great irony and most probably a very good point!
But since I’ve not been on that side of the Fence since they started not to think different, but rather to “think alike”–by which I obviously mean the switch to Intel/Inept–I’m locked in the Android ecosystem. Much as my little sis is locked into her iPhone/iTunes one.
Walled gardens suck, do they not?
Cheers
Haven’t used Safari in quite some time but your comment made me laugh o-so hard!
Cheers mate & thanks!
They already have Edge on iOS and Android. If you are curious what their value prop is, just go ahead and check one of those out. Mostly it’s about accessing Microsoft’s highly profitable cloud based services.
Yeah, I know of course! But as I’ve said I’ve been a Firefox user since its beta-ish days (2002/2004 cant’t be quite sure right now).
Sadly I’m stuck on W10, Ubuntu really hates my printer!
Edge per se is not bad at all from what I’ve seen. I’m simply glad that finally we’ve got many different options…
Oh, and it’s not just Firefox: I believe that what the Mozilla Foundation has done over the years is great for us all…
Ciao
When they voluntarily open source, or adopt open source.
They haven’t really “lost” – they just became the most profitable company again. What does lost even mean in that context?
Ditching unpopular and unadopted – and duplicated for no good reason – tech efforts makes a ton of sense, especially when their profit center is not tied to any of those technology platforms.
– Hey, we have a this new browser we invested so much on, which bears a defective UI and violates privacy by constantly phoning home, and though the rendering engine is pretty decent, no one wants to use it. What can we do about it?
– …
– Let’s replace the engine!
And reallocate the team and other resources supporting Edge to something more likely to drive some profit. The browser vendor lock in strategy doesn’t work any more, so why keep doing it?
So why the hell make a browser at all?
Because every operating system these days needs one, and Microsoft’s pride won’t let them include someone else’s product. Funny, they pollute every machine with other third-party crap that I most certainly did not ask for and ads for everything else, but won’t include a decent web browser that isn’t there own.
They’re old strategy was embrace, extend, extinguish (some fear that may be their current strategy – but I wouldn’t worry about it with open source, because it won’t work). They did exactly that with IE – they embraced web standards, extended it with CSS, and ActiveX and some other stuff, then when they owned the browser market (mostly due to legal agreements, rather than technical merit, though IE was actually better than Netscape in many ways), they sat on it for 5 years, trying to extinguish it. I would argue that Flash it the only thing that kept the net moving forward at that time – it was THE cross platform games and app platform. Historians are starting to come around to this idea.
Pretty much the real history of IE. When they decided that IE was successful, they killed the team and had them work on something else. Then when they decided to bring back IE 8 or 9, they had to hire all new people who didn’t know the code. This allowed Chrome to shoot forward and never look back.
At least its UI is native …and phoning home (even more…) didn’t stop wide Chrome adoption.
MS has done an incredible turn-around when compared to Ballmer’s Era. Kudos to them all if they can keep up the good work. And huge kudos to Nadella, this guy has some incredible courage!
By a loyal fan of Firefox since Beta 0.4 or some such…
Ciao!
Did you use it when it was called Phoenix? I started doing web development when Netscape Navigator was on version 2.x (but really when it was on version 3 – I was a master at building nested tables that didn’t crash that beast – don’t nest more than 3 deep!).
SatNad has done a great job in the eyes of Wall St and friends.
For us mere mortals, the problems with the October 2018 release of Windows 10 should be apparent enough to tell you that the ‘great’ job he’s done is all smoke and mirrors.
In reality the quality of their software sucks big time.
Probably not the same and not similar contexts but…
Though those moves from Microsoft are nice for the open source community, I cannot avoid relating them to what Jonathan Schwartz did ten years ago open sourcing everything from Sun (OpenSolaris, Java, MySql, VirtualBox, OpenOffice, etc.) and then sending it to bankrupt.
Edited 2018-12-07 02:15 UTC
None of this is even remotely similar. MS has been opening their source for years now, and they’ve become the most profitable company again. It’s all about their online services – and projects like EdgeHTML don’t help that in anyway. Why keep spending the resources on that project?
Whether they keep the Edge branding will be an interesting thing to watch for – my bet is they use Cortana branding or something new instead, but they already have Edge on other platforms (Android and iOS) so they may just keep that around.
I mean, a proper browser on Windows bundled with Bing+Outllook will surely improve their numbers a bit specially with users that can’t be bothered to change the defaults.
The rise of Chromebooks might also be tied to this: with Windows Lite + the new Edge it might be the shortcut way of MS trying to stop the bleeding to Chromebooks on the lower side of the equipment and still tying people to their system.
And of course, Office 365, Skype, OneNote, etc all can be running in their “own” browser.
Might be a good move for them though.
Mozilla:
This.
Having nearly all of the competing browsers using the same code-base is not a good thing for standards compliance. I said this in my post on the last news article. My view still stands
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?665955
Edited 2018-12-07 08:26 UTC
If Mozilla hadn’t become scumbags by silently turning “studies” along with turning Firefox extensions into a walled garden, I might agree. As it is, I fail to see how they’re any different and, in some ways worse, than others at this point. Gecko might become important as the competition to Blink/Chromium, but at this point, Mozilla as an organization is no different than what we already put up with from everyone else.
I’d rather have some competition than no competition. I’d in fact rather Microsoft stuck to their own renderer for Edge
This is not so dissimilar to saying that Northern European social democracies are just as bad as Pinochet’s Chile was.
They’re worse than Pinochet’s Chile. They allow Communists to live.
Just realized that means Microsoft is going to integrate LGPL software into their OS. Makes me remember quotes like “This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it.” and “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”.
LGPL != GPL. The LGPL was specifically designed to address the viral aspect of the GPL, where by GPL’d components could not be included in non-GPL’d software. But please, do keep trolling.