If you were brave and bored enough to read through this long, long list of enterprise babble from Microsoft, you’d eventually come to the interesting bit:
Our mission to bring Microsoft Edge to the platforms our customers use daily takes its next step: starting in October, Microsoft Edge on Linux will be available to download on the Dev preview channel. When it’s available, Linux users can go to the Microsoft Edge Insiders site to download the preview channel, or they can download it from the native Linux package manager. And just like other platforms, we always appreciate feedback—it’s the best way to serve our customers.
Microsoft announced that Edge would come to Linux earlier this year, but now they’ve set a date for the availability of developer builds. I wonder if it will come with the old and by now well-tested VA-API patches to enable hardware accelerated video decoding, something Google is refusing to enable for Chrome for Linux.
Maybe I’m silly/wrong, but my question obviously is: do we need an other chromium-based browser ? We don’t have enough of those already ?
I understand they are doing it on Windows, as they’ve stopped development of their old browser. But on other platforms ?
Lennie,
I don’t mind competition, it helps push innovation and keeps things from getting stale. When there isn’t competition, often user’s needs get ignored and we’re taken for granted. That said, this being microsoft I am concerned over their old embrace, extend, extinguish practices. Even though edge is derived from chromium, when I checked it didn’t appear to be completely open source, which raises red flags for me.
There is a project that removes the Google bits, Ungoogled Chromium:
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Innovation how? What innovation do the chrome clones have other than a few slightly different UIs like Opera? The guts are 99.9% identical.
FlyingJester
I think it’s unhealthy to be reliant on one single company to provide future innovation. We need competition to make sure web technology isn’t monopolized. Having forks isn’t necessarily as good as having alternative egines, but it can help with some of the anti-features. For example: google taking steps to impede adblockers.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-blocks-adblockers-in-chrome-and-everyone-is-mad/
So yeah, things like this are why it’s important to have viable alternatives. There’s a very real possibility that if chrome becomes too dominant, it could become the next “IE6”.
Except that in this case, there is very, very little difference between Chrome, Opera, Edge, etc now. Calling this competition is missing the point, they all share almost all code. It’s like how you can embed IE in a WinForm, that doesn’t make IE6 not suck if you do that to it. You just put a new coat of paint on it.
FlyingJester,
It’s not ideal, I know there isn’t enough competition. What I’m saying is that competition has value and the lack of competition is very bad for us. It’s important for me to be an advocate for alternatives in tech.. Competition is already dying worldwide and I find this alarming. Giving up just leads to further consolidation and corporate juggernauts gaining more control. Maybe it’s all futile, but at least I’ll be able to tell my kids that at least I tried to support alternatives. IMHO the world would benefit from having more people on the alt-scene.
Edge coming to Linux does exactly zero damage so who cares? People who want to use it, will, and people who don’t won’t. I’m sure there will be plenty of users in each category. There’s nothing wrong with having options.
People who understand this is another big brand who can push Firefox out, and people are going to use it because it’s from so it must be good.
Mozilla begs to differ. Mozilla would also like to beg for spare change.
This comment in an article about another Chromium/Chrome browser. XD You win.
My favorite flavor of vanilla is….
That may be a legitimate concern in the passive user world of Windows but I don’t see it as much of a concern for Linux.
I don’t know what browser market share looks like specifically for Linux but Firefox seems to be pretty popular among the Linux users I talk to. Regardless of talking about Linux-specific, Windows, mobile, or browser market share as a whole, any browser with a model that fails to be competitive or fails in any other way has to take responsibility for it. I’m not condoning bad behavior by giant corporations, just that you can’t blame them when a small company can’t figure out how to stay in `business`.
Speaking of Mozilla, they’re still here. They may be begging for spare change in overall market share, but they’re still here and haven’t been extinguished by far bigger competition with exponentially deeper pockets.
I’ll give you credit for the humor but I hope you’re not suggesting all Chromium-based browsers are the same.
Any damage that Microsoft does pales in comparison to what Mozilla has done to itself. They lost direction and scope of their product(s) long ago. I still use their products but only because I am one stubborn old guy. The countless UI changes for what I can only tell as to follow Chrome. The countless social justice initiatives that I believe have wasted time (which equates to $$$) for zero gain….well, other than feeling good about themselves with no effects on the outside world.
So Edge is bad because communism is better, okay. It’s hardly Microsoft’s fault that Mozilla’s browser sucks. (Though, after the VA-API patches, a little bit less badly.)
If Microsoft simply releases a new browser without any malicious gimmicks to harm others, then nobody can have an honest word against it.
The breed of Linux users who flock to Microsoft software is a really tiny one, by the way, and every single one of them is probably running their Ubuntus hosted atop Windows 10 anyway…
Mozilla has to succeed on its own. Its competition is Chrome on Windows/Android, not Edge on Linux.
There are no major technical issues to solve – they just have to start listening to their users and get rid of their arrogance. Some of their recent decisions (like disabling about:config) were done strictly to piss off their users – there is no other explanation. They get what they deserve. And as a long time Firefox user I am happy with that.
Wait. What? When did this happen?
Drumhellar,
Well, that would depends on if you were referring to pissing off their users, or disabling about:config. 🙂
I don’t see it blocked in the normal version yet, but it’s apparently blocked in beta/preview versions.
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/01/06/aboutconfig-is-blocked-in-firefox-preview-stable-and-beta/
I agree with ndrw, I would really hate to loose firefox, but I’m quite disappointed in their management and their frequent “our way or the highway” approach against their own users. I’ve been very tolerant of mozilla’s BS over the years, but ugh why do they keep doing this crap? Once users click past the warnings, that should be that and mozilla shouldn’t get in the way of what we need to do.
About:config has been removed in the infamous v79 update of Firefox for Android. I didn’t know they are considering removing it from the desktop version as well.
Obviously, yes. I’m building my own Chromium based browser. It will send everyone’s personal information and browsing history directly to the dark web. It will have a malware and cryptominer dev kits. People are going to love it.
You heard it here first, Facebook the Browser is coming soonish. Everyone’s going to get Facebooked!
😛
The world belongs to ChromeOS. I’m running 10 Chromium instances already today, and I don’t use Chrome/Chromium.
MS needs to rehab their image to sell Azure, and things like Edge, VS Code, and Github are the Trojan horses to do it. They’re gateway drugs, and it’s working. People are eating their sh*t up.
Microsoft is already shipping Edge (derived from KHTML via Safari and Chrome) on their Linux (Android) device. Adding a desktop GNU/Linux port means Linus Torvalds wins.
— Linus Torvalds
Its great because now I can test all browsers( well, except safari… the ie 6 of this generation ) on linux! No more needing a windows machine! Or at least I won’t need a windows machine once ie 11 dies along with old edge… But progress! Kinda. I mean There are much better ways to qa web interfaces than manually via browser, but for quick confirmation I don’t think there is anything better.
Anyone else aware of ie only sites still around in cooperate networks? I know of two outside my company that I have to deal with. I forget every time then wonder if something broke…
At my last job there were a few. For example, one relied on a CrystalReports ActiveX control to render database reports; the site also (in newer releases) provided the option to render via a (HTML5-based) SQL Server Reporting Services control, but each report would need to be re-written to take advantage of it, and the apps team had higher priority work items to finish first.
What’s nice about Edge is that you can use policy (GP or MDM) to provide an URL to an XML file that specifies which sites should render in which compatibility mode. Whenever a user navigates to a site that matches the compatibility list, that tab transparently switches to the IE engine. When you then navigate to a non-matching site, it reverts back to the native Chromium engine. The net result is that users can navigate between modern and legacy sites pretty seamlessly in most circumstances, and there’s no need to remind people which sites they need to always load via IE.
Unfortunately, this is Windows-only, since bringing it to other platforms would require not only porting the IE components but figuring out how to install third party components (such as ActiveX controls) on those platforms. In these cases, the better solution would probably be publishing those sites as RemoteApps (via Citrix, Windows Virtual Desktop, or something along those lines).
(Also, FWIW, Chrome has a Legacy Browser plug-in that allows you to specify sites that must open in IE, but it opens a separate IE window and so it’s not as seamless as what Edge offers. There are other plug-ins that try to embed an IE frame within a Chrome tab, but in my experience, they’re prone to crash; in an enterprise environment, they can create a net increase in support tickets, so we discouraged them.)
Thom Holwerda,
I don’t know, google hasn’t handled it well, and so if microsoft does then it could convince some users to switch and google would perhaps feel pressured to do the same.
However I was disappointed to learn that microsoft’s source code is incomplete when I tried to look at what ms changed. Microsoft open sourced as little as they could get away with under the license and consequently I couldn’t build edge from source myself, this looked intentional. Maybe someone else can check if this policy changed recently but if not it would mean that edge on linux is going to be a proprietary browser, which irks me.
It’s completely unsurprising that parts are proprietary, and that users are unable to compile it. It also wouldn’t be surprising if those parts contained things like the obvious – tracking and data mining that people would obviously want to rip out. However, this isn’t a world where free means free and open means open very often.
Surveillance, data miner, and and a cryptominer, because might as well get some of that cryptocurrency hype.
Unfortunately. Everyone wants to be a part of the FOSS game, but they want to do the bare minimum to play. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s time to rethink FOSS licenses. There are holes which need to be closed, like the shenanigans which keep people from building a supposedly FOSS project.
Maybe it’s time to think about project level licenses instead of on the per file basis. The point of FOSS is to empower the enduser and contribute to our collective knowledge unlike proprietary software which is designed to subjugate the enduser and hoard knowledge.
It’s time to take a hardline on this.
The reality is that these types of projects require a huge amount of labor well beyond what you get from bits & pieces of free time. Better licensing is moot without the workforce needed to actually develop the software. The bottom line is FOSS or not, projects of this size need funding, which has to come from and be justified somewhere.
I think different parts of Chromium are licensed under a variety of licenses, some of which don’t require source disclosure, so I don’t think there’s anything suspicious about MS releasing some parts of the code and not others, or that this indicates the license(s) aren’t working as intended.
And about a dozen people will use it.
So the 10 Firefox users will switch plus 2 Opera users?
I’m guessing Edge will pick up 5-10% of the Linux market pushing out Firefox.
People dumb like that. They see something from a giant corp, like VS Code and Chrome, and go into loose their minds in love of it.
All snarkiness aside, I can see IT ops departments being super excited and mandating this as the default browser. It integrates with MS tech very deeply, you know the reason IE6 was the corporate default.
Firefox would be a lot healthier today if Mozilla had focused on deep Active Directory integration back when they had mindshare and momentum.
From the article.
They’re building their own ChromeOS around O365 and Azure. This is a carbon copy of Google’s playbook for Gsuite and GCP.
I don’t see it that way, the new browser probably doesn’t support all the old legacy stuff when running on Linux (haven’t even checked if it does on Windows). Also Active Directory integration for Edge on Linux is probably non existent ?
But I guess we’ll see what happens. I do agree this is a move to sell more O365/Azure
AD integration for browsers is usually things like SSO, homepage, bookmarks, security settings, etc. That would all work just fine on Linux so long as there’s a Samba client or similar to receive them.
If they want to be heros, they can start porting Edge to platforms Google doesn’t already support. Chromium officially only runs on Win/Mac/Linux/Android. Of course they have the frontend to webkit on iOS called “Chrome” also.
The “unofficial” BSD patches are getting pretty big at this point. Then there’s Solaris/OpenIndiana, Haiku, ArcaOS, etc. A lot of people need a browser now that Mozilla and Google have both said no to most of the platforms. Mozilla will sometimes take patches if you can first get rust working which means getting past the LLVM devs, paying for the AWS build servers for them, then getting someone to dedicate their life to your port and constantly contribute.
The amount of work required to support those smaller OSes is wildly disproportionate to the benefit that supporting those OSes will bring. Systems like ArcaOS, Haiku, AmigaOS etc are so far removed from *NIX and other mainstream OSes, porting Edge over would require vast amounts of developer time and money in comparison to porting from Linux, to say, BSD.
However, given how similar BSD and Solaris are to Linux, there’s not really any excuse not to support them. I imagine a usable beta port could be cobbled together in a week or two from Linux source.
FreeBSD and some of the other projects already have huge patchsets for chromium They just need to get upstreamed. We’re not even asking microsoft or google to do the work, just take the damn patches.
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Well I don’t know about you lot, but I’m hugging myself with excitement.
> or they can download it from the native Linux package manager.
Huh? And which one might that be?
Why does this announcement sound to me like one of those amateur ghostwriter articles about the advantages of Linux where they obviously have never used it and clumsily thrown around terms just to sound techy? Does MS just expect their browser to start appearing in my distro’s “package manager” by magic? Or maybe it will come from the cloud… /s
Probably Flathub since that supports proprietary packages.
Will it have native scrollbars, or those shitty flat (barely visible) ones that chrome uses?
It fit’s their cloud initiatives, as Linux is not a threat to their core business anymore.