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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

We lost some diversity when Microsoft decided to adopt chromium[1].

I assume, though, that Google will eventually make some change that Microsoft doesn't want, and they'll be forced to fork chromium.

The recent proposals from Google[2] that hobble ad blockers and extensions like tampermonkey might even be enough.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125238/microsoft-chrome...

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extens...

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> I assume, though, that Google will eventually make some change that Microsoft doesn't want, and they'll be forced to fork chromium.

This assumes that Microsoft still has a browser engine division by then. I suspect that adopting Chromium was largely a cost-cutting measure and this division is on the chopping block already.

Yes...you have to make the leap that they would see some opportunity worth reincarnating a browser group for.

That set of proposed changes from Google looks like one to me, but it's possible they don't to MS.

They're implementing some features in Chromium, so they still have that division.

Well, I know one-person teams who implement individual features in a browser. Maintaining a fork, on the other hand, takes a much larger team.

I think it was a cost cutting measure too. But more about removing duplicated effort based on the premise that Microsoft was already spending a lot of time working on Chromium compatibility. And Google was inside Microsoft's decision loop. Microsoft was in the position of having to port every arbitrary evolution Google made to Microsoft products...browsers and tooling.

I think they they had to kill their own rendering engine to keep Edge alive.

Sticking to their own engine would have eventually killed both. Hard to get people to adopt your browser if webdevs are not testing sites with it. And webdevs don’t care if your market share is marginal.

I believe the alternative would have been most of the enterprises deploying Chrome on Windows to access their apps. With this move Microsoft might still retain control of the app level. This is valuable because then they can for example provide integrated windows authentication for the apps.

Would have been nice if MS went for Gecko, would solve a lot of these concerns.

I was just starting to get that butterfly/stomach feeling for Edge, I don't think I'd ever leave FF for it but Edge was pretty attractive and I started to developed some warm fuzzy feelings for it. My initial revulsion has long since been replaced by a sort of curiosity which had the potential to grow into even more... That chromium news killed it though.

I don't think I ever tried Edge - what advantages did it have?

Starts fast, minimal UI, low battery usage, good built in pdf reader, fancy visual tabs (pull tabbar down, see miniature pages), set tabs aside feature is nice. But mainly it just feels very fast. This probably won't change with when they start to base on blink but that leaves the issues discussed here.

The sandbox in Edge also seemed well thought out: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/03/23/strengthening...

I used it few months and it mostly worked just fine. I had few crashes but those were rare. The main drawback was that their developer console was somewhat buggy, so eventually I switched back to Chrome because I needed it. Also 1Password extension for Edge was buggy as well.

And, oh my god, how many times Google asked me to install Chrome. They are really annoying with those ads which never stop to appear. I suppose that for many users that might be the reason to switch to Chrome, to stop that insanity.

Microsoft should have put an anti-trust lawsuit on google for that. Google has enough of a monopoly that asking users to install chrome qualifies as abuse.

I opened microsoft site and it only showed me microsoft affiliated products. I think an anti trust lawsuit should be filed for that.

That is sort of equating a business with the road that leads to it.

> And, oh my god, how many times Google asked me to install Chrome.

Interesting - I've never seen that in FireFox

Yeah, it's a shame they didn't open source MSHTML instead...

Technically it was the "Trident" engine

MS waited far too long to add things liken Ublock and Ghostery to Edge. I see they are available now, but for at least a year after its release, there were no such extensions in the app store. In this day and age, using a browser without an adblocker makes it hard to consider switching away from your current setup.

I'm not sure everyone sees how lousy Chrome adblockers are going to be after this set of Google proposed changes.

The API doesn't let you add to the list of blocked uris outside of posting a new release of an extension. Ouch.

They created a discussion thread, but the Chromium developers have been absent for a while: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...

I'm not sure there's much to discuss. The API didn't provide any way to add an item to the blocked list. That's clearly deliberate, and has nothing to do with the stated goal of improving performance.

I can only gather that the actual goal is very different from the stated goal.

Firefox it is then. I have defaulted to Chrome because of DevTools and I'm just used to the keyboard shortcuts.

I have Firefox on OSX already, and it runs smoothly. Unfortunately mobile Firefox (while supporting all those extensions), has a jittery scroll issue on Android, so I use the Chromium-based Kiwi Browser (for night mode) or Brave (for built in adblocking).

Iirc Firefox Mobile's jittery scroll was fixed in the last couple months (along with fling velocity) so it might be worth checking again.

If we only count people who care about their browser, then the IE user share will be much lower. In other words Microsoft can do anything with IE and it won't reduce the usage much. And Microsoft knows this, even though it tried to gain technical edge for some time.

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