Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

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So, I'm glad that Microsoft is focusing on a real-world pain point for people on Edge. I don't think people can be talked into switching browsers by stuff like the Cortana integration, but this might convince some. One problem is that Edge really isn't quite ready for primetime yet. There's a few sharp edges here and there that make using it about 90% pleasant enough and 10% really painful. Some of it is that I don't think the UWP is as fully-baked as the old Win32 ecosystem yet, and it makes weird compromises. The multitasking model of UWP seems to be phone-first, which is just out of place for me. When I have a desktop PC that's plugged in and has 16gb of RAM, my web browser should never just spontaneously CLOSE because I tab out to another window. I get why Edge does this, believe me. (I just got out of a two-week stretch of using a cheap Nokia Lumia as my smartphone because of problems with my main device overheating, and there's such a tension between being impressed at what Windows 10 for Phones or whatever the hell they're calling it now can do in 512mb of RAM and thinking that 512mb of RAM is incredibly frustrating to live with.) But it doesn't make sense on the majority of devices that Edge runs on. Leave my browser window open. I'm going to come back to it. Also, Microsoft really needs to break the link between Edge updates and Windows updates. This doesn't affect me much at home because I'm Fast Ring so I get Windows updates more often than I eat meals sometimes, but in general I don't think it's great for the ecosystem.

Also, if by any chance someone working on Edge is reading this thread, can you make it so I can resize the text box for adding comments to Hacker News? Chrome lets me do this, and I would probably increase my Edge usage significantly with just that fix.

> The multitasking model of UWP seems to be phone-first, which is just out of place for me. When I have a desktop PC that's plugged in and has 16gb of RAM, my web browser should never just spontaneously CLOSE because I tab out to another window.

What aggravates me more is that apps also suspend when you switch to other windows. When watching something on Netflix, I usually like to switch over to doing something else when a show's opening credits are playing. I can't do that in Netflix's UWP app because it suspends as soon as I switch to another window.

Power use is 99% of why I use safari over chrome for my daily needs.

An extra hour or more of battery is nothing to sneeze at.

I regularly have 50 tabs open on my 8G MBA in 4-5 windows. Recently I moved from Chrome to Safari thinking it would save me battery. Well it didn't. Because Safari used so much more memory it started trashing. And I could forget about running virtualization...

So now I'm back on Chrome....

I've 16g of ram for a reason. At the same time I'm only a bit angry with the modern web in that seeing a single tab take up 2g of memory is really starting to get to me. Not even flash was this bad.

I'd encourage you to try stuff like pinboard.in, having that many tabs while fun, and I probably have more right now, really does a number on battery life. I try to keep it to one window with full tab titlebars.

It's not suspending. That's a crash.

> The multitasking model of UWP seems to be phone-first, which is just out of place for me. When I have a desktop PC that's plugged in and has 16gb of RAM, my web browser should never just spontaneously CLOSE because I tab out to another window.

I haven't used Windows in a decade. This really happens? UWP programs just spontaneously close on desktop computers? I really can't believe that.

I guess there are a couple things this could refer to -

* On desktop Windows in desktop mode, modern apps are suspended when they're minimized or the user switches away from the virtual desktop they're on. Background operations that need to meant to continue are supposed to use various officially supported background task APIs. This is intended to be transparent to the user.

* AIUI in situations where the OS detects an app is hung and would put up a ghost window with a "not responding" message if it were a classic app, the OS will just straight up kill a modern app. The theory is that this will force developers to make more responsive apps.

So AFAIK there are no situations where a "well-behaved" app is supposed to spontaneously close from the user's POV, but for modern apps the OS is stricter about trying to enforce "good behavior". TBH though I think what the GP was seeing was probably just Edge crashing on its own.

So, open/close is a bit of a weird distinction here? The program doesn't close in the way a Win32 program does, if I open Edge back up everything is as I left it -- all the tabs are still there, everything is where I left it, if I'm halfway through filling out a form everything I've filled out is still there. But yeah, at least when I first started using it, Edge would just vanish sometimes. I should note that I don't know if this is still an issue, I've basically given up on sustained Edge usage for now.

I've not seen that but I thought UWP apps don't really close either. They sort of hibernate because they should restore in whatever state you left them.

I think he means it auto minimizes to the tray

Dear Microsoft, I'm staying on Windows 7 (telemetry windows updates declined) with most of my work done on Linux because of stories like this. The whole stack comes off sounding like confusion and delay with zero payoff.

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