Google and chrome are the biggest threat we have to the open internet at the moment.

No. Google wants an open internet because search (and hence ads) needs a lot of input. Google gets that input from the open internet (and, notably, shares that input with other search engines). Facebook gets input from 1.8Bn people, and owns access to it all.

(This is a generalization; Goog certainly owns access to plenty of input: email, docs, and hosting. But it is not, I think, on the scale of FB, because frequent, casual input requires a social context.)

Google's nightmare scenario is that everyone starts to use FB Pages for content, FB ads for that content, and something FB payments to pay for services, etc. In this way FB manages to build a private (but very large) vertically integrated internet. Like Alibaba. There are only three ways to disrupt this trend: the browser, the operating system, and the hardware. Each of these mediates between FB and the user, and each one is Google's opportunity to capture attention. (And this, I think, is why engineering talent is so valuable, just as much to deny FB from making things as to make things yourself.)

The nightmare scenario for the open internet is a Facebook Phone running Facebook OS.

These type of comments are useless to anyone who does not already agree with you. Point out how. Include examples and data

Because no private company should have that much control, we've been down that path and it was bad enough I thought it should be obvious.

Then there's things like adding DRM, a user hostile "feature" google shoved down our throats. Visit netflix on a linux box and you'll discover that "works with chrome" is the new "works with IE".

It works in Ubuntu. Maybe I'm missing your point. It didn't used to work on Linux at all, without jumping through a ton of hoops pretending to not be Linux.

It only works if your browser claims to be Chrome. (That's how you can get it working in Firefox, too)

The point is you should never have had to pretend, web browsers shouldn't contain DRM. It's not working for me on arch.

And Flash Ads were easy to turn off instead of the pile of workarounds we have to use nowadays with JavaScript ads.

Agreed. I don't understand why there are still memes against Internet Explorer floating around. Edge is not the problem.

As a web developer I'd rather develop for Chrome than IE/Edge. It's pretty much just that simple.

That is exactly the attitude web developers had toward the IE/Netscape situation around the year 2000.

I think that as web developers we have the responsibility to consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences. If not us, then who?

I understand your point and I actually make sure that my websites target IE10 and up, but it usually happens after I'm done in Chrome.

Have you worked with Edge/IE? The pain starts with, as a Mac user, having to boot up a VM and ends with the, in my opinion, horrible development tools compared to Chrome or even Firefox. In this state Edge will never be more than an afterthought.

I do the same.

Only IE, Chrome and FF and their mobile versions are relevant on my daily workflow when working on web projects.

Then I get hold of one of our pool Macs and iDevices and check Safari for a few hours.

If a large percentage of your users have IE/Edge you might want to tests these early on, or even develop with them.

"as a Mac user, having to boot up a VM"

So are you a developer, or a Mac user? Do you develop for Mac users, or users?

For users. Yet I happen to be a developer on a Mac like many others. As mentioned before I'll make sure that it works in IE/Edge, but having to jump through hoops to do so will never make me treat the process as more than a checklist item close to finishing the project. Of course I don't expect Windows developers to see it any other way with Safari.

This is a non-issue for cross-platform browsers.

>I think that as web developers we have the responsibility [...]

I'm all for being idealistic, but you can't expect developers to use a software that lacks in performance, features and security. I'm talking about Firefox by the way, because if you really

>consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences

that is the obvious choice, not Edge.

These things are somewhat self-reinforcing. Many sites feel slower with Firefox because they've been developed on Chrome and avoid the slower sides of Chrome, yet won't take advantage of the paths in Firefox that are faster than Chrome.

This has been especially evident on some Google properties like Google Docs, or the incident where Inbox couldn't support Firefox because it implemented a function correctly where Chrome didn't.

That said, I hardly notice any performance difference on most sites, and IMHO Firefox behaves much better with a large amount of tabs. Security is the main issue, but Firefox sandboxing is starting to roll out.

The rendering performance difference is noticable on almost every site and it doesn't matter at all how they've been developed. Even sites developed in FF with no regard for Chrome features render more smoothly in Chrome.

Then there's the developer tools that slow everything down even more in FF, to almost a halt/crash on some sites, while on the same sites they have no impact on performance in Chrome at all.

That is with an i7 and a mid/low range GPU.

I swap between Firefox and Chromium (yes, -ium, not -e) when developing web-related stuff - one day FF, the other day Chromium, recent versions of both browsers. Development is done on... a 2004 vintage Thinkpad T42p. With a whopping 2GB of memory. If it works on that, it should work on anything. I swap between these two to avoid developing towards one specific rendering engine and to get a feel for how things will work in 'the real world'.

While Chromium does beat Firefox in speed in several individual tasks the overall experience does not differ all that much between the two. Chromium is noticeably more memory-intensive than Firefox, this can go so far as to have the system slow down to a crawl with only two or three tabs open. With Firefox this is much less of an issue, it handles dozens of tabs without a hiccup.

Development tools are more or less on-par between Chromium and Firefox+Firebug (or Aurora). I do not notice the slowdowns you mention when using the developer tools - at least not when comparing between FF and Chromium - even though my system is much slower than yours (1.8GHz Pentium M, 2GB, ATI FireGL Mobility T2 + 128MB). Of course things just are slower on a system like mine so maybe I'm just used to waiting those extra few milliseconds here and there?

In my opinion Firefox has a much better user interface than Chromium, partly due to the fact that Firefox uses GTK (and as such looks (or can be made to look) like most other applications where Chromium comes with its own toolkit.

Once I'm done I test whatever I made on Safari on iOS (the 'new IE6'...) and prepare to jump through some hoops to work around the problems which invariably crop up.

It hardly matters; the Edge teams said that any differences in behaviour compared to Webkit are bugs[1], so they've given up their position as an alternative.

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mo...

Once Safari and Edge stop giving me headaches I might be more sympathetic to their cause.

We still have new browsers popping up, like Brave and Vivaldi. We still have Firefox, which is decent.

I don't understand what your concern is in this context.

The Edge and Firefox teams already spend large amounts of time being bug-compatible with Chrome so websites, especially mobile ones, continue to work.

That time would be better spent elsewhere.

(Note that Brave doesn't have its own engine, it's Chromium. Unsure about Vivaldi - is it Blink based or Presto based?)

Vivaldi is an Electron-based wrapper for Chromium - thus it's Blink, not Presto. Since Opera moved to Blink a while back as well, I'm fairly certain no extant browser uses that rendering engine, and I believe its development has ceased entirely.

Sure. But until someone comes up with the magic wand to fix this I'd prefer one set of bugs to deal with rather than 4. I don't believe the open web is hurt by this, which was the whole point of the original comment.

Thing is as long as web engines evolve you can't have this. There was a moment say 3 or 4 years ago when some people, including key jQuery devs, were saying that Firefox should just switch to WebKit and that would solve web development because there'd be only one engine to target.

What actually happened is that Android phones got stuck on several outdated WebKit versions, Safari on another, and then Chrome forked WebKit into Blink.

So instead of one engine, you now have...like 5 or 6, realistically.

Trying to target standards compliance instead of relying on browser quirks is still the best strategy, both for devs and the ecosystem. It was in 2002 and it still is in 2017. Without it, we wouldn't have iPhones, Android phones or Chrome, for crying out loud.

For good reason. Microsoft left their browser dev abandoned for 5 years after they "won" their bitter war against Netscape. And only the Firefox (nee Phoenix) browser rising from the ashes of Netscape fought on.

Edge is a decent browser, but Microsoft was not kind nor to be trusted back then. They have to earn their new trust.

On the open-source front we now have several great browsers - Safari/Webkit (which is very strong on mobile), Chrome/Blink (was Webkit) which dominates, and Firefox/Gecko which is a solid reliable browser thats crossplatform.

Why should anyone choose Edge?

If you include Safari/Webkit on that list then don't forget to also include Edge/Chakra[0] ;)

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore

Is Edge cross-platform on significant platforms?

It works on my xbox one

won't be really hard to improve the market share: - make edge cross platform. - make the extensions system on par with chromes and as easy to launch an extension - fix its UI lag on Windows 10 - maybe open source it

Honestly I think the numbers on this would be poor. OS X users use Safari, and rightfully so because the performance tends to be very good compared to other browsers on Apple hardware. At best they could hope for bundled installs with Office 365 to bloat their numbers, but I'm just not sure it's worth the effort.

The rest I'm not really sure that there is much benefit to it save the UI lag fix. The oft-tossed about technical debt is incredibly real with Microsoft's browsers, and I believe a lot of the debt that IE had was inherited by Edge to ensure a transition for Microsoft's clientele relying on the IE support for their sites.

Unless Microsoft wants to branch into having a "business browser" and a "consumer browser", they can't give users a clean and non-burdened version of a Microsoft Internet Browser. I really doubt they're going to want to deal with the headache of splitting the focus to two versions. They can make all the changes they want public facing, but as long as they have a sacrosanct part of the browser that can't be altered or removed, they're destined to be an afterthought if a thought at all.

Remove ads & featured junk? Make Google a more prominent default search engine?

I don't think adding OSX or Linux users will fix the problem. Nor will open or closed source.

I will never use IE if it doesn't support all platforms.

having a consistent browser experience over multiple platforms is an added feature for many users. e.g. I install chrome in all platforms I use.

My point is OSX + Linux is like 5% of the desktop OS. No matter how awesome Edge team made it, 1-2% more users will do VERY VERY little compared to the 50% of users they have lost on desktop machines in the past 5 years. They would be absolutely insane to even spend 1 money on adding new OSX users when Windows users (who get their app for FREE and with NO WORK) are leaving left and right. Gotta fix the bleeding before you worry about the lipstick.

You're forgetting Mobile. Using Chrome on android and Windows gives you the benefit of shared accounts, shared passwords, bookmarks and history.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by UI lag? I've not used a massive amount of Edge but I don't remember it being particularly laggy?

Opening a new tab on Edge for me takes 2-3 seconds - and it feels like it freezes while the page loads. On the same machine Chrome and Firefox peform much better in this respect.

p.s. when the page loads in Edge its actually quite fast and scrolling feels smoother than other browsers - but the initial delay breaks the whole experience for me.

That's odd, using edge on my (low horsepower) work machine now, there doesn't appear to be any kind of delays in opening a tab or loading a page.

I'll admit that I don't actually like edge's scrolling very much, I think it's the [de/ac]celeration curves - but that's a purely preference thing.

I tried using Edge, but just get a "This app can't open" message. I'm sure I could fix it if I wanted to but it's easier to just run Chrome.

I just dont like the browser, the things I dont like are:

- the search / address box are not obviously that until you click on it

- the window bar area to click on and drag the window around is small and not obvious

Not major things but it makes it less intuitive to use than chrome in my opinion.

Does this mean we'll get even more notifications on Windows 10?

Its right about time for a disrupt effort, Chrome is outrageously slow.

Slow how to me it still loads any website the fastest. The biggest complain about chrome is that it is bloated specially if you use more than few tabs. But I don't see google working on fixing or improving that much simply because using more than a few tabs is an edge case which probably less than 1% of the users use.

> using more than a few tabs is an edge case which probably less than 1% of the users use

Using basic functionality of a browser (opening multiple tabs at a time) is an edge case? Every person I know that uses Chrome has at least 5-10 tabs open at a time. I wouldn't call it an edge case, but I would guess that the minority uses less than 3-4 tabs at a time.

If youre not seeing it, see it now: they are doing something about it: http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr...

Really? Because firefox being slow was the entire reason I switched in the first place.

That's the Endless Treadmill. Netscape Navigator is slow, use this new and fast browser called IE. [time passes] IE is slow, use this new and fast browser called Firefox. [time passes] Firefox is slow, use this new and fast browser called Chrome. Chrome is slow...[to be continued]

But the thing is, Chrome isn't slow.

Neither is Firefox. (Unless you clobber them with a bazillion extensions, leave Flash always-on and open 3000 tabs) However, that is the perception.

I agree that in the recent years there's been a major push to make browsers great again, but the speed comes at expense of memory bloat. This might be an acceptable tradeoff - until you need to do something non-browser as well.

Firefox has come a long way since the day I switched that's for sure, but it was slow back then, and that was before I even had the necessity for any extensions.

Even now, for me Chrome cold boots far faster than Firefox does - after doing a taskkill /f /im chrome.exe, chrome opens anywhere from 0.4 to 1.2 seconds after hitting "ok" on a run dialog with "chrome" entered in it, but the same thing with "firefox" in it takes from 3 to 8 seconds to open.

And that's not even a fair test either, as chrome has about 20 or so extensions installed and firefox has none.

Don't even get me started on the android variants of the two either, firefox just feels sluggish and unresponsive next to chrome.

Not sure about Android, but is cold boot time representative of anything? Personally, I do that two-three times a day, max. Open/close tabs, now that happens all the time. (To be precise: I don't care which browser does it fastest. All I care is that I don't perceive latency - milliseconds do not matter, hundreds of milliseconds do)

Well in that case, warm booting chrome is even faster again.

Good. As long as there's competition, this will put pressure on all browser makers to keep theirs fast as well.