Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by DannyBee on Saturday March 25, 2017 @02:37PM
(#13956937)
"Crash Reporting, Metrics,"
These are not proprietary, actually.
" Audio & Video Codecs,"
Neither is this, last i looked (but i haven't looked in a while).
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by comex on Saturday March 25, 2017 @04:04PM
(#13957303)
The "proprietary" codec support is open source but disabled by default in a Chromium build unless you pass proprietary_codecs=1. Why? Patents. AFAIK, Google pays for a license from the patent holders to decode the codecs within Chrome, but not an open-ended license for anyone using the source code. This is not their fault and no different from how many Linux distros don't include MP3 decoding by default. (Incidentally, the last MP3 patent is set to expire at the end of this year…)
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by HappyTypist on Saturday March 25, 2017 @11:41PM
(#13958996)
The last MP3 patent already expired a week ago actually.
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by justinschuh on Saturday March 25, 2017 @06:08PM
(#13957787)
Yup. Our only closed source bits at this point are Flash and the Widevine CDM (DRM), both of which can be disabled from: Settings -> Content Settings.
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by partycoder on Saturday March 25, 2017 @08:47PM
(#13958342)
Better than Edge that is fully closed source.
You can use Chromium directly if you want to.
Many important projects exist because Chromium and v8 are open source.
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by repples on Saturday March 25, 2017 @10:15PM
(#13958685)
Actually the JavaScript engine of Edge is open source.
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by partycoder on Saturday March 25, 2017 @10:18PM
(#13958696)
Chakra is open source. The rest is not.
The IE/Edge layout engine has always been a source of infamous trickery. It would be good that they finally open source it.
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by repples on Saturday March 25, 2017 @10:20PM
(#13958700)
As Chakra is part of Edge, then Edge is not fully closed source.
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by satysin on Sunday March 26, 2017 @09:08AM
(#13960580)
Edge is closed source. You have no way of verifying the build of Chakra used is the same as the open source version. Well it might be possible to reproduce a build of Chakra to do a binary comparison but i am not aware of anyone doing it.
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by repples on Sunday March 26, 2017 @02:21PM
(#13962211)
There's nothing stopping you from compiling https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore and checking if Chakra.dll matches that which is distributed with Edge.
Re:Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox
by satysin on Sunday March 26, 2017 @03:03PM
(#13962469)
AFICT you cannot build a like-for-like chakra.dll from ChakraCore due to https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore#using-chakracore
The chakra.dll that comes as part of Windows/Edge includes the additional parts not included with ChakraCore (at least that is how it reads to me).
Chrome adds a lot of proprietary bits including (but not limited to): Audio & Video Codecs, Flash Plugin, Crash Reporting, Metrics, et al.