I agree that it's good to have multiple browser _products_, but why is it better that MSFT has its own engine instead of investing in OSS ones like webkit/blink? This is the same question I have for Firefox. They can still achieve their privacy goals without having to invest in and maintain a separate engine. Is having a unique engine really all that beneficial in the long run?

- Because that would leave Google with near-total power to drive the evolution of the web, via their control of Blink's development.

- Gecko was around before either of WebKit or Blink, so targeting this toward Firefox is getting history backward.

1) They could fork it, adopt standardized changes, but continue to innovate on it if they like

2) That wasn't my point. WebKit derivatives clearly won. Does Firefox even need to also own an engine when their goals seem to be entirely around the browser product?

A fork that tracked Blink upstream would still leave Google with control over the direction of development. A fork that diverged from Blink would end up equivalent to an independently-developed engine.

Adopting Blink would, furthermore, impose a set of design and architectural constraints not necessarily in line with Firefox's priorities as a project. With Gecko they're investing in parallelism and pulling in more and more components from Rust/Servo, for example.

Firefox has been something of an underdog from its inception, releasing at a time when IE had already "won". Chrome taking that spot won't make Mozilla scrap everything and start over—this is familiar territory.

Of course, this is all ignoring the absolute upheaval and loss of momentum a total rewrite on top of Blink would wreak on Firefox as a project.

There should be some freedom to render the same page in different ways. Lynx is an extreme version, but there is lots of room to consider different platforms, environments, input devices and users.

Why? When I design a page, I know what I want it to look like. I don't want to have to waste a bunch of my time in compatibility hacks to get around crap that they do different.

You are asserting that the provider of the website should have complete control over the experience.

But not everyone agrees with you -- the readers want control, too, and it's their hardware, after all.

I always thought we had this backwards. We should abandon sending the UA altogether and design pages according to the standards. If a browser doesn't render then correctly, then tell the browser to fix their shit.

I realize that nowadays this isn't as simple as that, but if we had started along that path, things would be much better now.

IIUC, we _did_ start out that way. it was probably Microsoft that first started differentiating itself by adding non-standard features and functionality. EEE, ya know.

Unfortunately I don't have anywhere near the clout to be able to tell Microsoft to do that. And in the meantime, my users look at a broken site.

Then you should publish PDF's or JPEG's because the user agent has always had final say in how a page renders, your style hints are merely recommendations.

Its good technology-wise, but out of all the browsers I've touched, its the one that I feel like I have the least control over

One of the biggest reasons I can't use Edge is I think it's impossible to actually inspect an HTTPS certificate.

Edge extensions got off to a slow start which hurt it quite a bit for me. Now it has a decent (although still small) number of extensions that cover most of the must-haves for me. It is my number 3 browser behind firefox and chrome.

I tried Edge on Windows 10 last year for a while, but had some issues with Outlook Web Access. And the way of managing proxies (among other things) is mixed up and confusing in Windows 10 - it has the old way of handling settings and a new Settings application. It’s not bug free and doesn’t satisfy basic conditions (searching for proxy in settings doesn’t work - need to know how to get to it). Anyway, back on topic - I switched back to IE 11. I have to try Edge again and see how it’s improved and changed during this time.

It looks like that's changed in the Insiders build I'm on (the one releasing later this month). I've got Proxy Settings under Edge's Advanced Settings menu:

https://i.imgur.com/zPHcYL3.png

And searching for Proxy gives me all of these options:

https://i.imgur.com/BDEzNWW.png

I have an Atom 2in1 and Edge is unusably slow and buggy on it. Chrome and Firefox work fine. It's also impossible to click and select part of url as it jumps around.

No.

Root for other browsers, sure.

But Microsoft's? No.

They wantonly abused their market position in the 90s & stalled the advancement of the web for years.

There many other worth products to cheer for rather than the latest offering from a habitual bad actor.

So the alternative is google who do the same damn things.

The real problem is this is still webkit/blink and ultimately control still goes to google.

Edge isn't great if you use tabs; it tends to lose them on crash/restart and doesn't make it easy to have lots of them.

It also seems to suffer from the same weird font rendering as a lot of Metro apps.

Edge isn't great period. There are too many janky UI and design choices - probably because it is part of that whole benighted Metro ecosystem.

The thing that really drove me nuts was how the address bar jumps around when you're trying to select part of a URL, which makes it so much harder than it ought to be when you are trying to click and drag with a mouse, let alone a touch interface.

Agree completely. I'm a heavy Windows/Office/.NET/F#/Powershell user, overall a fan of MS ecosystem, but Edge is still just plain painful to actually use day to day. Chrome remains far ahead. I'd say "1000 papercuts" but maybe 5-10k is closer.

Jumping address bar? Ohhhh yeah hate that one: https://twitter.com/LincolnAtkinson/status/88703561300998963...

One thing that catches me surprisingly often when I use Edge (which is very, very rarely, contributing to this), is that all the browser controls, like Back, stay in focus when you click them until you click something else. I don't think any other common browser has this behaviour, which is why I'm not used to un-focusing them, and the next press of space definitely does something I did not intend it to do.

Exactly this. I lose my open tabs every 2 weeks or so. I've reported this to the black hole of Edge feedback on numerous occasions. How hard can this be to get right?

I want to root for it but there are API differences (especially for video/text tracks) which make it hard or impossible to work with. And Microsoft hasn't yet come to the table (which Apple/Chrome/FF have been at and are very good with taking feedback from devs) to standardize on these APIs.

The developer tools of Chrome and Firefox are better. There are more addons. There is more customization.

Or we should shun it, so that if anyone else decides to use their monopoly power to try to destroy the web, they know the consequences will be long lasting.

We shun a browser, some other company sees that, and decides not to become a monopoly? Sounds implausible.

MSFT has new leadership and is cooperating much with open platforms more than ever before. Let's encourage that.

Lets encourage that if it is due. It looks like Edge is still proprietary. If they opened it up, I'd give it a shot. As it is still closed off, I'm personally not interested.

Edge is not a good browser. It is holding the web back with its slow adoption of HTML5 standards. (source: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/chrome-58/edge-12.html)

Edge still has a spoof referrer header vulnerability that's been known for more than 6 months now: https://www.brokenbrowser.com/referer-spoofing-patch-bypass/

The version of Edge you're linking to on HTML5Test there is two years and four major versions out of date. Edge 16 is more than 100 points higher on HTML5Test.

More generally, there's a lot more to making the web great than a blind sprint to adopt every API. Just because it isn't shipping doesn't mean Microsoft isn't a (very) active participant in the standards conversations, testing behind flags, etc. That is a huge part of moving the web forward.

Take Grid as an example - we were the last browser to ship the updated spec, so you could say we "held it back." But we also originated the first version of the spec and worked closely with the community, standards bodies, and other browser vendors on making sure what ultimately shipped cross-browser this year was great, useful, and interoperable. Is that holding the web back?

(Disclaimer: Edge employee)

To add another example, WebVR API cleanup was inspired by Microsoft that joined the group working on this API. Edge isn't yet shipping WebVR, but they are helping with the work.

Good example! Though, for the record, WebVR 1.1 is shipping in EdgeHTML 15. Fair to call it a preview, since consumer headsets won't be available until later this month with the Fall Creators Update, at which point end-to-end support will work out of the box.

Firstly you're comparing today's Chrome with an Edge copy from more than 2 years ago. Secondly, html5test scores are bullshit. It gives a points utterly arbitrarily; you still get 5 points for continuing to implement rejected specifications like Web SQL, while actually useful features like the FileSystem API or WebAssembly gets you nothing.

I've never used Edge and have no particular interest in it, but html5test is basically a way for Chrome users to feel good about themselves.

(Not to say that Chrome users shouldn’t feel good about themselves for other reasons, just not their browser’s html5test score)

Why are you comparing the latest version of Chrome to Edge 12, which according to Wikipedia was last released August 27, 2015?