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Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by pjc50 on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @02:42AM (#18597197)
Edge is a terrible product: it's a poor clone of its competitors and it has no distinguishing feature. Microsoft needed to actually innovate here and they didn't. Nor did they find an unmet need. Edge exists because everyone hates IE, not because it has something new for the user.
Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by Meai on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @03:07AM (#18597332)
Edge had some unique fullscreen integration with the Win10 app model and some really fast speed initially. But it became surprisingly buggy, I mean that really: it has a lot of glitches, sometimes crashes and weird bugs with bookmark folders on my computer. No idea if this is common but I never had these problems with other browsers. What I also find incredible is that at some point they changed the superior way of dragging tabs out into windows into the way that Firefox does it. With Chrome you drag a tab out and you get a full live(!) view of the window as you drag it. Now as with Firefox, you just drag the tab box thing around and once you drop it then it expands into a window.
Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by glenneroo on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @07:34AM (#18598822)
Maybe one "feature" is that Edge is the only browser where Netflix runs with 1080p (1920 x 1080 i.e. full HD) streaming due to requirements of the encryption layer (within Windows?) not working with other browsers. I verify this regularly with Chrome/FF/Edge. It's unfortunate that Edge is such a horrible experience, 1080p is rarely worth it, as Edge crashes or jitters a lot, even when running on Ryzen 8-core, 64GB RAM and OS on a M.2 SSD.
Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by opencl on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:57AM (#18599418)
There are FF/Chrome extensions that make Netflix run at 1080p. It is a DRM problem but apparently the DRM is not very effective.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/force-1080p-n...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/netflix-1080p/cank...

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by jodrellblank on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @03:52AM (#18597611)
it has no distinguishing feature.

Tab Set-aside, the thing where you can suspend tabs and then bring them back later, instead of having a browser with dozens of open tabs all using up memory.

It integrates with OneNote and pen input, you click the "add notes" button and the open web page turns into a screenshot with a OneNote toolbar for highlighting and drawing on it, which can save or share the note.

It has that dropdown tab bar preview thing which FireFox has only recently sort-of-cloned in its alt-tab-with-previews feature.

It sends your browsing history to Microsoft by default.

for a tablet-style browser it is more tablet-y, large-buttons, touch-input focused than IE11 was, so even if that's not innovative or distinguishing it fits Microsoft's dreams for Win 10 a lot more than IE did.

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by pjc50 on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @04:26AM (#18597810)
> Tab Set-aside, the thing where you can suspend tabs and then bring them back later, instead of having a browser with dozens of open tabs all using up memory.

I'd never heard of this, so I thought I'd give it a go: it's not on the right-click menu but on a separate icon on the top left, where the System menu should be so I'd never looked there. It turns out to be handicapped by not being able to save/restore individual tabs, you can only push all of them off and then restore ones you want.

Edge is rather hostile to tab-heavy users in other respects - it doesn't restore them after close, and it just makes them smaller and smaller without any kind of scrolling. So beyond about 20 tabs it becomes hard to use, and you'd never reach 200.

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by glenneroo on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @07:47AM (#18598894)
Firefox doesn't restore after closing either until you enable "Restore previous session" in Options. I just re-installed Windows and FF last week and this bit me the first time after a reboot.

As for tab-heavy users, I find FF Quantum to be horrible in this respect, and I keep missing Chrome, which allows a ton of tabs and resizes them, albeit slightly unreadable after ~40-70 tabs, but at least I can see the icon, which is usually enough to find what I'm looking for. FF resizes until ~5 characters of the title are still visible, thereafter requiring "< >" arrows to scroll through tabs... unfortunately if you click one of those arrows too fast (twice in < 1 second), it will skip 10-20 tabs or jump to the completely opposite end(!), which can be frustrating to get back to the tab that is just barely hidden off-screen. I have seen this complaint in forums but still haven't found a reliable workaround other than editing some javascript relating to the default theme (I forget the details)? I have reverted back to tab/ctrl-tab to cycle through tabs.

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by sfink on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:09AM (#18599077)
Why do people still use tabs on the top? Tabs on the side is so much better.

I use Tree Style Tabs.

It's a pity firefox still doesn't support it properly by allowing the top tabs bar to be hidden without userChrome.css hacking. I just ignore the top ones for now.

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by glenneroo on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:40AM (#18599293)
I can't find the parent to my comment.. but I'm fairly certain this thread was talking about default-installs of browsers, of course a lot of complaints can be fixed with plugins, but how many users actually go through the trouble? If a high enough percentage of Chrome users were installing uBlockOrigin on Chrome, I'm sure Google would do something about it.

Regarding Tree-Style Tabs... I wish I could agree with you, I have been trying various Tree-Style Tab plugins on multiple occasions over the years, often for months at a time... before always giving up out of frustration and resorting back to tabs on top. I honestly can't tell you the exact reasons, but it's generally a frustrating experience... initial transition takes a couple days, plus issues like lack of proper hotkey support e.g. tab/ctrl-tab for tab switching, ctrl-f4 to close a tab, ctrl-t to open a new tab, some or all of those hotkeys tend to not work properly. Multi-screen support was also... lacking, for lack of a better description. There were various other minor annoyances and quirks with every plugin... and I tried various plugins for FF and Chrome before ditching all of them. I will probably try again soon, now that FF Quantum has been out for awhile, hopefully more plugins have been created.

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by tlynchpin on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @07:07PM (#18604678)
If you would like to customize your Firefox tab experience, install Waterfox [0] and then install Tab Mix Plus.

[0] https://www.waterfoxproject.org

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by smolsky on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @12:38PM (#18601625)
There is one distinguishing feature: swipe. It lets me move back/forward by swiping across the face of the Windows tablet.
Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by int_19h on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @04:14AM (#18597750)
Its distinguishing feature is that it can read EPUB books. I'm not entirely sure why you'd want that in the browser - I think someone looked at how all browsers these days have native PDF support, and thought, "I wonder if we could squeeze something else in there".
Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by Endy on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @04:42AM (#18597898)
I find your disdain for that feature to be amusing, because one of the first plugins I've downloaded for Firefox, SeaMonkey, and Pale Moon whenever I've installed them on a computer is an EPUB reader. As much as my genuine preference would be to have a web-browser with a "Do One Thing Well" mindset, the fact is that EPUB is great because it's just a compressed and ordered set of XML files, which a web browser is very much built to read. I don't see a need for Calibre when either my web browser or Sumatra PDF can pick up and display my EPUB books properly.

So for me, the fact that I don't need an addon to do that would definitely have sent me to using Edge over Chrome or current Firefox, if I were on an OS that included it.

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by int_19h on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @04:45PM (#18603856)
My disdain for that feature comes from a position of someone who reads e-books a lot. A browser is about the most useless place I can think of putting it, because it is very rare that I want to just take a peek at an ePub file while I'm surfing (unlike with PDFs, which serve as a de-facto pixel-perfect text format for the web). A proper book reader app needs e.g. library management.
Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by Endy on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @07:43PM (#18604845)
Ah, see, there's the big difference. You and I have vastly different use-cases - something I've noticed seems to get disregarded lately in dev circles. I don't need a software library manager, I already have a file manager (Windows Explorer) for that, and I really can't help but read to the end of a chapter. So all I need is the XML parser and renderer. There is no such thing as 'one true way' to use a computer. I don't ask you to use my solutions to the problems you face; I just ask that if you develop one of the programs I rely on for that solution, that you don't go and break it.

Over time, I've found that (in general) Microsoft is less prone to breaking what has already worked than Mozilla or Google. I don't know about Apple beyond iOS, and I don't know about that for the backend, because on the iPad, the only non-OS Apple software I use is iBooks (hasn't changed much in terms of 'tap a book, read a book'), Notes (hasn't changed much in terms of 'open a note, type a note, it autosaves'), and Podcasts, which also hasn't undergone much change. Heck, it's the App Store itself that's most broken for me now, to the point that I've come to rely on sites like appapp.io when I want to find a program or game; and then I pop over directly to the app store page for the software. With Google, I'm glad I never used GMail in the first place because I've heard the redesign is terrible. Maps are still pretty good though there's been some new "features" that made my life more complex; but every new version of Android that I get when I change mobile devices seems to bring with it a new host of settings issues and things it doesn't allow me to do without rooting it. Mozilla, well, let's just say the downturn started when Australis was mentioned and there have been no significant bright spots (Pocket, the introduction of telemetry, & Mr. Robot being significant lows).

Sorry for going a bit sideways to the topic, but honestly, TL;DR: different strokes for different folks. I hope you genuinely like your desktop ebook reader of choice so much that you wouldn't feel a web browser can do the job as well, but I don't need the heavy-duty support of a separate reader program when the addon or built-in feature works for my needs.

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by int_19h on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:10PM (#18604967)
I don't have any objections to the OS having ebook reader out of the box - I just think that it would be better as a separate app, rather than a browser. Browser is for, well, browsing the web. Reader is for working with ePub files, for starters - even in the scenario which you describe. And it can still be a basic viewer app that just opens on double click, with advanced functionality (like a library) available for those who need it.

To me, it's the decision to shove that functionality into Edge that feels like a typical developer shortcut: they wanted ePub, and ePub is basically HTML, and Edge already does HTML, so let's do a reader as an extension! But it doesn't really make any sense to me UX-wise. Again, the only reason for something to be in the browser like that is if you routinely open documents of that type via links. And I just don't see people doing that with ePub - note how your scenario doesn't involve anything of a kind.

Re:Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge ... by davidgerard on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @07:30AM (#18598796)
I really hope they keep that feature - even most Linux distros can't just read e-books out of the box.