I'm really curious why they released to stable with so many basic features missing. For example, your bookmarks won't sync between devices (although that was recently re-enabled in the preview channels). It sounds like they're not pushing out automatic updates right now anyway, so I'm not sure what this announcement amounts to. Why not wait until the 20H1 Windows 10 feature update (which sounds like the update that will include the stable version of Edge) is released to mark the first stable version? Just seems like a weird release schedule.
I actually gave Edge Dev an honest try for a few months using it as my only browser. At some point it just stopped syncing bookmarks between my various computers (all Windows), and that was the breaking point for me. I went back to Firefox. I may give it another go if they can fix sync.
The blog posts mention that releasing it today is a shot across the bow for Enterprise. Given Enterprises like their year+ efforts to "test" software before ever deploying it, they want Enterprise to start that process today, ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it.
It's also a very subtle signal for several reasons to release it the day after Extended Support for Windows 7 ended. On the one hand, it supports Windows 7, so there is a possible mixed message there, which is why it is subtle. On the other hand, some of these Enterprises should realize that the last time the browser team at Microsoft did a release like this after/ahead of a Windows EOL they highly revised their browser security support policy. (Back with IE11 adding support for a couple older versions of Windows and Microsoft immediately dropping support for IE <11, despite earlier "bundled with Windows support timeframe" promises.) It can be seen as a very subtle "IE is dead, move on from it, already, you dinosaur customers".
> If you’d prefer not to install Microsoft Edge manually, you can wait for it to be installed in a future update to Windows 10, following our measured roll-out approach over the next several months. We will start to migrate Windows 10 customers to the new Microsoft Edge in the coming weeks, starting with a subset of Windows Insiders in the Release Preview ring.
I'm guessing 20H1 will be released sooner than several months.
That says they are starting now, so they are starting with 19H2 (in Release Preview to start, which is still 19H2 by the way, then into the wilds). "Several months" here could mean they want everything done by 20H1 (somewhere between March and May, given the usual pattern). I don't know if that also means that they are planning to move to packing New Edge in the RTW images for 20H1; so far 20H1 on Insiders still seems to have Edge Classic. But the clear thing is that these are clearly parallel rollouts right now.
Yeah, I threw a sizeable PDF (800MB textbook) at it and it's choking pretty hard compared to old Edge to the point where it's barely usable.
Not a deal breaker for me because I don't have a touch screen and use an external PDF reader (sumatraPDF), but if I was using edge for heavy PDFs I would be rather disappointed
Seems fine for PDFs that are a bit less extreme, but nowhere near as smooth as old edge.
That's a problem the Firefox PDF viewer frequently suffers from as well. Give it a big complex PDF and it can choke very hard on stuff that Acrobat reader or xpdf open in under a second.
800MB textbook??? What kind of textbook is that and how many pages does it have? Or page dimension/image resolution??? That is a very very large size for a pdf.
It's certainly not a typical PDF, but it's 1400 page physics textbook which seem to all be excessively large and unoptimized.
Originally it was completely uncroped, and OCRing it seems to have grown it even larger.
Not too familiar with details with PDFs but I suspect it's just a huge DPI render (maybe designed to go towards being printed) that could probably be reduced significantly if it was designed for normal consumption.
All things considered it's amazing it works at all, but old Edge handled it a lot smoother.
Extra sad because Microsoft briefly had their own PDF program (Reader) in Windows 8, but removed it in favor of making Edge the default program for opening PDFs.
Huh, I'm happy to see it's still available. I sold my Surface years ago and tend to not look at PDFs on Windows anymore, all I'd noticed was that I didn't have Reader installed anymore.
I think generally scrolling is less smooth than in the old edge. That was one thing they got right and hopefully we'll see improvements in this area upstream in chromium.
I am so sad about the fact that Edge can no longer read epubs and seems to have (so far) sub par pdf reading. It's been my go to pdf reader for a while now and I love the way it scrolls. It is so smooth - just like preview on a mac. I haven't found anything else that comes close to edge for the smoothness of its pdf reading on windows, so I will definitely be holding out on this update for as long as I can. I don't really need two chromium based browsers on my PC anyway.
Yeah it's amazing how incredible Calibre is at organising books but terrible it is at displaying them.
As a matter of fact though, I think I have found a very good epub reader which I don't see mentioned very much called Cover.
It is ridiculously smooth at displaying epubs, maybe even more so than edge. I was reading an epub with tons of images and I could swipe left and right between pages multiple times without waiting a second for reflow, almost felt like swiping a pdf. Whereas on all those other apps the book was blurred and did not scale how I would expect it to, to fill the screen. On cover everything is displayed how I think it should be displayed without changing anything. So yeah, cover A+
Agreed at Calibre! Ihave the same qualms with EPUBReader in FF, it does not get close to what edge was capable of. I'll take a look at cover at home as I sadly cannot install it at work.
Lots of people get angry about this kind of stuff. "I'd switch to Firefox if it supported Fluent" is something I have read multiple times in discussions about browsers.
And if you do webdev, chrome dev tools are still the best. While firefox tools keep getting better, i still find myself regularly launching chrome just for those.
I feel the opposite, I prefer the Firefox dev tools by far. The CSS Grid and CSS Animation tools are lacking hard on Chrome. I feel though that overall they're close to equal, some tools are better on one platform than the other, but it's personal preference at the end of the day.
I don't agree. I think it is just what you are used to using. I'm used to Firefox and find their dev tools to be superior to Chrome, but I'm pretty sure that is just because I'm just more used to Firefox's dev tools (having used them since the firebug days).
I feel like I regularly see similar comments, touting the superiority of Chrome devtools. I haven’t used Chrome in a few years; what do they have that others don’t?
I love firefox. The only big difference for now is that it is better integrated with windows. You can swipe back on the trackpad to go back and use your touchscreen seamlessly (even the keyboard pops up correctly without screwing the size of the window) Firefox doesn't do that well.
I love firefox too, it's my go-to browser at work on Linux and at home on macOS. It really isn't as well integrated into macOS either though, especially compared to Chrome and Safari. The trackpad support (or lack of it) would probably have been a deal breaker when I got a mac if I wasn't already a long-term Firefox user and quite Google-sceptic.
Because Microsoft is also collecting data from the OS level as well if you're using Windows. It's easy to keep sensitive data out of Gmail. It's hard to keep it of your computer entirely.
> Why is Microsoft tracking "even worse" than Google tracking?
Without specifics is hard to know what the message you replied to meant but one thing where I find MS tracking worse than anything Google can do on the Internet right now is that MS tracks and reports my local OS use (what applications I install/run, how long I run them, what files I have) while an Internet tracker can only get access to what the browser allows which generally limits sharing the type of information I listed.
EDIT: And pretty much all browsers have an Incognito mode or you can use TorBrowser which goes beyond that but I cannot similarly defend myself against my own local OS privacy invasion.
Massive for corporate, since it supports Enterprise Mode lists for IE11 backwards compatibility. We can all finally use one single browser, with single sign on to our apps, and support for new technology.
I haven't looked into it but I hope that the use of the Chromium engine means web standards and feature support on par with Chrome and Firefox. They mention less fragmentation for web developers so I hope that that is what they are alluding to.
I will "probably" never use this browser but I just hope that it doesn't open a new set of issues to deal with. I don't think it should
At home, it's already my main browser. Love the work they are doing on it and it's a nice alternative to Chrome (everytime I try Firefox, I go back to Chrome, so...)
I've heard the 2025 date before, but I think that is only based on a "time since release" metric.
For IE versions the support windows have always been "X years since release (or perhaps X years since the next version), or until all Windows variant released with it are EOL". If Win10 is indeed evergreen, then that second part will never expire. Perhaps they'll count the biannual Windows feature updates instead of Win10 as a whole, and so count it from when they stop releasing install media with IE11 on them, but as that hasn't happened yet, we'll still be some years away for IE11 stopping. Even then '11 will still be around in some environments for a while after EOL.
We only recently got rid of IE8 support for some of our clients as they stopped using it. That was mainly because of the then upcoming EOL of IE8 in sync with the EOL of Win7/Win2008 (the last versions released with IE8). I hear some are not so lucky... I expect IE11 to be a problem (though an increasingly small one, thankfully) for some time to come.
In any case, can you link (or screenshot if it doesn't cooperate with deep linking) to an official page listing 2025? I'm not seeing that.
>Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and the most current version will continue to follow the specific lifecycle policy for the operating system for which it is installed. To find the lifecycle dates for all operating systems, search the Microsoft Lifecycle Database here.
Unfortunately, "unofficially" doesn't fly in a lot of workplaces. Until MS pluck up the courage and do everyone a favour, IE11 will continue to haunt developers. Now we got Legacy Edge too, whoopee.
> If you’re an IT administrator, you will need to download an offline deployment package to pilot within your corporate environment—the new Microsoft Edge will not automatically deploy for commercial customers. Additionally, none of the Microsoft Edge preview channels will update to the new Microsoft Edge, as they can be used side-by-side for testing and validation.
So many of us still need to support current Edge until IT decides it is time to move on.
You should see IE11 usage drop significantly now as big corporates adopt Edge as the default. Edge can seamlessly switch over to the IE11 rendering engine for predetermined lists of legacy sites, so there's no reason for corporates to force IE11 as the default browser any more.
> Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point.
If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch.
If you mean Edgmium (New Edge) over Edge Classic, it already replaces Edge Classic (entirely) when you install it, and there's a slow rollout through Windows Update already happening, with an attempt to converge on everyone having Edgmium sometime this year and Edge Classic dying a final, sad death (RIP, good friend, you served some of us well). They say fresh installs of "Windows 10X" the hyped dual screen build of Windows will only have Edgmium, and that'll likely make its way into other Windows 10 images over time.
At $dayjob we do SaaS for the US banking industry. We see 65% IE11 and 70% Win 7 in our stats as of 2020-01-16.
We even see a small percentage of XP and IE8 (which we haven’t supported since MS dropped support.) might just be UA spoofing to support some crazy old internal app at a bank.
>If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch.
LTSC/LTSB versions of Windows 10 (i.e. the ones that enterprises are supposed to use) don't have Edge and there's no way to install it. The same goes for Windows Server 2016 and 2019.
Enterprises are not supposed to use LTSC/LTSB builds as daily machines; those are intended for critical services and embedded systems. Microsoft keeps saying that in their documentation. Businesses should use the Current Branch for Business and stop shooting themselves so much in the feet with Windows updates.
It's nice to see MS pushing for tracking protection as well. Firefox now takes the lead on privacy issues. Google will try to hold it off as not to hurt their own business. People will eventually migrate away from Chrome because of this and the tracking/ad business will go down. Now is a good time to do some thinking if you're in the online tracking and/or ad business.
Meaningless. There are people claiming with a straight face that targeted ads make user experience better. Wholesale collection and aggregation of personal user data will continue unabated.
Advertising is a distraction and an attempt at psychological manipulation. That is obviously a worse experience, unless you're actually into being distracted/manipulated. The weasel words "targeted ads are better" imply comparison to untargeted ads and is a disingenuous statement.
It doesn't have to make it worse, just not make it better. Almost no one ever says "I love using such-and-such a website, the adverts on the side are just so relevant".
When I'm looking for something, I'll usually have already done a thorough search around on google, ebay, amazon etc... and it's unlikely that targeted ads will show me something I've not yet seen.
As a kid, anytime I stayed home sick from school, I watched TV. I would see only advertisements for catheters and guaranteed-issue life insurance. They didn't occupy much of my conscious thought. They were annoying at worst.
When I watched TV during prime time and on the weekends, though, the advertisements were for toys and products that interested me. In the blink of an eye, my entire outlook worsened because I needed those things and didn't have them. The advertisements were also a great distraction from homework and chores.
This is an interesting debate, and one where I fear the young generation's attitudes seem to differ. My 16yo says she'd rather get targeted ads than non, because it's just more relevant and she might want to buy those things. She has zero concern about the psychological manipulation factor and assumes she will just say no if she doesn't want a product.
I guess I can see where she's coming from, as I don't avoid physical stores when I'm not planning to buy things. Window shopping is fun. But still, I think all that tracking has a dark side that's difficult to convey to the generation that grew up taking it for granted. Are we just old and fear the new and unknown?
The one thing I definitely hate is how bloated the web has gotten. Everything works great on my old computers that I switched over to linux, until I need to just google (duckduckgo) some simple piece of information on a forum. And then I find myself fantasizing about upgrading to an i7 so I can read the same basic text that could be read online when 1ghz processors were a pipe dream.
Edit: and this is with ad blockers and anti-trackers turned on. The whole browser experience is just slower, and I think the act of having to scan and block all that cruft must have an impact. Browsers used to function on Windows XP machines back in the day, right?
Targeted ads degrade user experiences for me because it's a reminder that someone or something that I don't know, knows about me.
It's as if a stranger came up to you on the street, knew what brand of toilet paper you used at home, and asked if you wanted to buy more because you're almost out. Naturally you would wonder how this stranger knows these facts about you - do they snoop in your trash? Do they observe you in the bathroom through the window? Do they come in your home while you're away? We would consider such a world where this was normal to be Kafka-esque and dystopic. Anyone who gives an iota of care about personal privacy and dignity could (and arguably should) find implementation of the digital equivalent equally repulsive.
You say "someone or something," and to me, that's a pretty big difference.
I don't care if things know about me. If there is an actual human being who is directly looking at me, associating it with my face, etc, that is a lot more bothersome than some machine that is doing that.
I understand that many people here don't make that distinction. I do care about privacy in some ways, but when you I "arguably should" find machines invading my privacy to repulsive, I guess I have to thank you for putting the word "arguably" in there, because I would argue that. It just doesn't bother me, and I am happier for not having one more thing to be bothered by.
I agree that there's a difference, but it's not necessarily one that the primal part of my brain cares about, regardless of what I know at a conscious/intellectual level. Furthermore, data that a machine knows is just one step away from becoming data that a human knows given sufficient curiosity or happenstance; a step into which you usually have no insight into whether or if it will occur.
Yeah, I hear ya, I guess my primal brain is different than yours.
For instance, sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed by what I purchase at a store. (even if it's just that I'm buying a lot of junky, easy-to-prepare food at the grocery store) I've never once felt that way checking out at Amazon. Not even a teensy tiny bit. And that would remain true even if I suspected (or knew) that some human at Amazon was looking closely at the orders.
Buying something at a store isn't a good analogy. Uninterested members of the public being able to casually observe you buy something at the store is a perfectly normal part of society. A better analogy for today's internet is if you walked to the store holding a big sign with your credit card bill, texts to your friends, and a list of places you went today printed on it, and the street on the way was packed with people who were there for the sole purpose of taking pictures of that sign and selling them to whoever will buy. Targeted advertising would be the people who bought those pictures knocking on your door.
Seems like a pretty extreme analogy, but ok. Having someone knock on my door is kind of a pain, since I have to get up and answer it. I'm not sure it is comparable to seeing ads on web sites that I am on by choice.
I guess I have enough concerns in my life that actually have measurable impacts on me that such things seem pretty trivial.
In addition to other answers in this thread: It's a form of cultural bubble.
A lot of 20th Century pop culture was driven by or at least responded to advertising. When advertising has to hit the broadest demographics and speak to the largest audiences it has more pressure to be creative and interesting, so that people talk or think about it.
It also lead to interesting moments of discovery when ads found audiences outside of what they expected.
Targeted ads are more often preaching to an already sold choir, so they can just be lazier in almost every way. They break expectations of novelty in ads. They lose the ability to drive the discovery models that were the original driving force behind why ads even exist in the first place. They add yet another unnecessary border wall/bubble effect where we struggle to find shared cultural events/jokes/touchstones between groups of people, because just about no two people (even inside the same demographic group) are seeing the same ads these days.
It's only meaningless because "only what is needed to make your experiences better" means anything that is useful for advertisers. I've never seen a company that purported to be more benign than that.
I don't see why they would've done that, given how much it was baked into other stuff behind the scenes throughout the years. Auditing it would be a massive undertaking that I'm not sure even the most well-off organization would like to try.
I wish they had thrown in with helping Firefox instead of handing even more web influence over to Google. A percentage of what Microsoft spent on EdgeHTML contributed to the Firefox project—ideally as employee time—would go a long way, along with the counterbalance of putting the Firefox engine and code base front and center of more Windows users.
Cynical thought: in no way am I claiming this was the only reason for Microsoft choosing Blink, but it’s probably easier to find and replace Google analytics APIs with Microsoft endpoints than it is to add them into a code base after the fact.
That's pretty misleading. When you want to sync state across Chromium installs, you use a Google account, and that's really just scratching the surface.
Chromium comes with quite a bit of Google baked-in.
Sadly Chromium is WAYYYY easier to development on than Firefox. Had Mozilla spent effort making the base of it as a framework in the same way Chromium is, they may have considered it.
There is a reason why Electron, QT etc use Chromium.
Curious, what makes Chromium better in your opinion? I have probably just touched the surface of the dev tools on both and haven‘t used any features that I would be missing on either.
It's a blank browser, has barely any "Google" specific stuff in it ready to go. It is easy to develop for, doesn't require cross language compiling (rust/c++), builds fast, easy to understand how the different parts work (at least for a browser developer it should be), has documentation, is meant to be used to develop your own browser.
Are you sure Chromium builds fast? lol, it takes my laptop with 12 cores and 64gb of ram over an hour to compile from scratch, not counting the ~20gb of git history to download (I maintain an internal build at work).
Limiting the threads as somebody elses said. For chromium no one really builds it on a laptop, everyone in my team used a build server or a 32 core monster desktop.
They worked on it a bit [0] but it has been abandoned along with all the other embedding efforts over time. As someone who embeds Chromium (via CEF) only because it's easy, I would really appreciate (and have been shouting into the wind about) focus on the embeddability of Gecko.
Kind of a shame.. There are a few areas where FireFox absolutely smokes Chrome. The way it reflows some heavy DOMs interactively is almost magical in comparison.
I suspect that their work in using Electron for things like VSCode made switching Edge over to Blink more enticing. I wonder if they ever considered looking at the Mozilla frameworks
Unfortunately historically there was a history of Mozilla not being a very stable platform to develop on top of (though I have no idea if Chromium was worse). There had been at least two separate embedding APIs that have been abandoned (the original one in the ActiveX control era and the external one after they moved to Hg), at least three Electron-like things (prism, XULRunner, and positron), and the field of corpses of Mozilla-based apps (I've worked for two, there were lots more).
Maybe they're better at API backwards compatibility now? Not sure; I'm unlikely to try again given previous experience. Which is a shame; I still use Firefox since it was called Phoenix…
If anybody has more recent experience working on their stack, I'd be happy to be correctly though. Preferably with examples of projects that _haven't_ been burned.
They probably can't, especially if the engine interfaces with proprietary code or is deeply linked to the kernel for example. It's likely part of the reason why they never got it updating as frequently as the Chromeium counterpart can, as this is entirely userspace.
Yes there are problems to everyone using the same software but there are advantages too. One drawback is that potential security issues would affect "everyone" but on the other hand the same fix works for "everyone".
If the common software is open source it serves as de facto standard/reference implementation so you don't have compatibility issues. Standardization processes try to address this without reference software but IMO that is a lot more effort (in terms of engineering hours) to get it right so you can have a fully featured standard that is clear, has no bugs and has multiple perfectly standard compliant independent implementations.
After all software is just a tool to serve a purpose and our decisions in this area should be driven by pragmatic reasons alone. If we can serve the same purpose with much less effort by having everyone build on top of/use the same common base why not.
Similarly I'd rather see everyone just use Linux instead of all the different popular OSes we have.
To be honest, I paid more attention to the Russian version than I would English. I kinda know how to pronounce it, and it's fun to see if I can figure out any of the words.
We have effectively lost a competitor. Microsoft is now contributing to Chrome development.
The best long-term outcome for the web would arguably to have been for Microsoft to put more resources into their in-house EdgeHTML browser instead of throwing it out and reskinning Chrome.
Microsoft is now contributing to Chrome development.
And now everybody can benefit from their hard work.
But somehow it's better for them to duplicate work for their 1% marketshare?
It's beyond reskinning. They can change anything they want to.
Let's say Google says they don't like some privacy feature because it hurts their bottom line in terms of ad revenue. So they decide not to have that in Chrome.
Sure, people could switch to in-house Edge or Firefox. But they don't want to switch, because for whatever reason, Google is better able to make a browser that people like. Attested to by the tiny market share Edge has (and fairly small share Firefox has, notwithstanding its popularity within the HN community).
Switching to Chromium based Edge is a much easier move for users, assuming Microsoft decides to second-guess Google's decision, which they can do easily and have strong incentives to do -- keeping in mind that the number one complaint people have about Chrome is that they don't trust Google.
I don't think it evoques a flat letter 'e' at all, it is highly reminiscent of a blue Firefox logo though (so IceWeasel probably, if I remembered that logo), IMO.
Everything I've heard is that touch support is completely destroyed in this one.
This completely destroys my main use case for my Surface. I need a tablet with a web browser that's designed to be used in portrait mode without the Type Cover attached.
Can anyone here recommend a UWP web browser I can switch to when the real Edge goes away for good? Or if none exists, can someone recommend a cheap 12"+ tablet that runs a mobile OS?
Does anyone know what the UI of Edge is written in? Since it runs on Mac as well, have they ported some of the .Net UI frameworks to Mac or is it native all the way?
Edge (and Chromium) both use a custom C++ UI framework. Chrome wrote the framework to be cross-platform, so Edge was able to take advantage of that to deliver the macOS version. AFAIK there's no WinUI XAML components being used.
We’re getting far OT. But the two US parties being identical, policy-wise, may have been an insightful oberservation during, say, the Clinton adminstration. To repeat it today is just completely ridiculous.
I’d be afraid that they would cause politburo style politics wherein it’d be a pretty big umbrella but ultimately it’d result in the main faction always winning. At least with with Repub/Dem bipolarity there is room for movement and adjustment (to the right or to the left).
I'm going to take a guess that this is mostly due to the use of Skia. I think the problem is not so much with the rendering of fonts (which is still likely DWrite) but with the compositing of them onto the canvas. There, it's extremely difficult to get gamma right.
I am sympathetic to this, as I've spent a lot of time at the low levels of this stuff. Unfortunately, one problem is that there is no one "right answer," and not really a lot of authoritative guidance on what's preferred. Some people prefer higher contrast, others prefer minimal distortion of the shapes and spacing. It's always a tradeoff.
Is there anyone who cares about "minimal distortion" except devs or other people working on UI-related stuff? I know I don't even know what the ground truth is supposed to look like, so I'm not even sure I can notice distortion. I certainly don't care.
Well, there are many forms of distortion. When it comes to spacing in particular, yes, there are many people who are quite sensitive to it, others less so. You can Google "keming" for more information on that.
I can notice bad kerning, that's not what I thought we're talking about. We're just talking about the distortion difference between these renderers we have, not arbitrarily terrible distortion. And awful kerning is not the kind of distortion a renderer like Chrome's has.
Left side is actually sharp, with subpixel smoothing. Right side is awful (just like many parts of post-Vista Windows) with apparent grayscale AA.
This is something they actually got right; it's one thing that was terrible about IE and the old Edge, and that I'd bet was subconsciously turning many people off (in my case, consciously making me want to tear my eyes out). If you can't see the difference, open dev console on the screenshot and run:
If this doesn't work in the new Edge, try in Chrome (not sure if Edge supports this zoom mechanism). You should definitely be able to see the difference in sharpness.
Edit: Maybe also worth mentioning, Firefox's bold font rendering is one thing keeping me away from it. Lack of the above zoom mechanism is another. Not sure if I'm alone in these.
All in all, I'd say the one on the left is more pleasant to read and easier on the eyes, despite being "thinner". The jagged edges on the right feel on my eyes like the sound of relentless blackboard scratching.
Well, to me it is a big deal. I'm not trying to make it one, it just is. Best analogy I can give you is probably the one in the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057875
>Right side is awful (just like many parts of post-Vista Windows) with apparent grayscale AA
By "post-Vista" you mean Windows 8 and later? Vista and 7 (its refinement) were the peak of subpixel-antialiased ClearType with the Segoe font. It was with Metro and its animated, rotation-enabled, mobile-first design language that antialiasing was downgraded to greyscale.
No, I mean since Vista and later. Ever since DWM was introduced, anything rendered on a DWM surface (or something along those lines, I don't know the details) has been blurry. The taskbar text is an easy example. The Metro UI did extend that to even more places, though.
> Firefox's bold font rendering is one thing keeping me away from it.
You are not alone. Firefox font rendering actually upsets me. Comparing to Chrome rendering, it's just a non-starter.
I have brought this up many times, but I get blasted for it. Apparently it's all based on opinion alone and you and I have a very minority opinion in these tech communities. I suspect that the silent majority is with us though.
Yeah, exactly. I get blasted all the time for it too. Same suspicion here about other users being on our side, though they might not be able to put their finger on what the problem is.
It was my hope as part of Edge migrating to Chromium that they’d contribute proper native-appearance font rendering, just as they’ve been contributing a few other things now (“To date we’ve made more than 1900 contributions across areas like accessibility, modern input including touch, speech, digital inking, and many more.”).
Chromium’s Windows font rendering is better than it was a few years ago (when it was really pretty awful), but as you say, it’s still not right. Firefox’s font rendering is much truer to the platform conventions.
I hope that this is still on their radar as something to improve.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadIt's also a very subtle signal for several reasons to release it the day after Extended Support for Windows 7 ended. On the one hand, it supports Windows 7, so there is a possible mixed message there, which is why it is subtle. On the other hand, some of these Enterprises should realize that the last time the browser team at Microsoft did a release like this after/ahead of a Windows EOL they highly revised their browser security support policy. (Back with IE11 adding support for a couple older versions of Windows and Microsoft immediately dropping support for IE <11, despite earlier "bundled with Windows support timeframe" promises.) It can be seen as a very subtle "IE is dead, move on from it, already, you dinosaur customers".
I'm not sure it will be part of 20H1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/01/15/upgrading-new... says:
> If you’d prefer not to install Microsoft Edge manually, you can wait for it to be installed in a future update to Windows 10, following our measured roll-out approach over the next several months. We will start to migrate Windows 10 customers to the new Microsoft Edge in the coming weeks, starting with a subset of Windows Insiders in the Release Preview ring.
I'm guessing 20H1 will be released sooner than several months.
Not a deal breaker for me because I don't have a touch screen and use an external PDF reader (sumatraPDF), but if I was using edge for heavy PDFs I would be rather disappointed
Seems fine for PDFs that are a bit less extreme, but nowhere near as smooth as old edge.
Originally it was completely uncroped, and OCRing it seems to have grown it even larger.
Not too familiar with details with PDFs but I suspect it's just a huge DPI render (maybe designed to go towards being printed) that could probably be reduced significantly if it was designed for normal consumption.
All things considered it's amazing it works at all, but old Edge handled it a lot smoother.
https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9WZDNCRFHWG5
I just checked the Microsoft App Store and Reader is available.
https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9WZDNCRFHWG5
Funny because with Windows Ink, I loved Edge's PDF abilities.
Made my life so much easier.
Zathura and Calibre are insanely bloated. FBreader is just no. Emacs works, but has similar functionality to FBreader.
As a matter of fact though, I think I have found a very good epub reader which I don't see mentioned very much called Cover.
It is ridiculously smooth at displaying epubs, maybe even more so than edge. I was reading an epub with tons of images and I could swipe left and right between pages multiple times without waiting a second for reflow, almost felt like swiping a pdf. Whereas on all those other apps the book was blurred and did not scale how I would expect it to, to fill the screen. On cover everything is displayed how I think it should be displayed without changing anything. So yeah, cover A+
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/cover-comic-reader/9wzdncr...
Not implying this is all good.
Whether that makes its way to Google somewhere along the lines or not is a different story.
I'm pretty sure Google has infected more of the Internet than Microsoft.
Without specifics is hard to know what the message you replied to meant but one thing where I find MS tracking worse than anything Google can do on the Internet right now is that MS tracks and reports my local OS use (what applications I install/run, how long I run them, what files I have) while an Internet tracker can only get access to what the browser allows which generally limits sharing the type of information I listed.
EDIT: And pretty much all browsers have an Incognito mode or you can use TorBrowser which goes beyond that but I cannot similarly defend myself against my own local OS privacy invasion.
I’m already using it on my Mac.
Already installed in Windows.
Microsoft supported = huge for corps that live in MS ecosystem.
Best quality for Netflix streaming.
No need to have Google Chrome installed.
I will "probably" never use this browser but I just hope that it doesn't open a new set of issues to deal with. I don't think it should
Sadly, it doesn’t appear that ie11 will have an end of life date as it’ll be supported as long as Windows 10 is and Windows 10 appears evergreen.
Hopefully Microsoft will make edge the default browser at some point.
For IE versions the support windows have always been "X years since release (or perhaps X years since the next version), or until all Windows variant released with it are EOL". If Win10 is indeed evergreen, then that second part will never expire. Perhaps they'll count the biannual Windows feature updates instead of Win10 as a whole, and so count it from when they stop releasing install media with IE11 on them, but as that hasn't happened yet, we'll still be some years away for IE11 stopping. Even then '11 will still be around in some environments for a while after EOL.
We only recently got rid of IE8 support for some of our clients as they stopped using it. That was mainly because of the then upcoming EOL of IE8 in sync with the EOL of Win7/Win2008 (the last versions released with IE8). I hear some are not so lucky... I expect IE11 to be a problem (though an increasingly small one, thankfully) for some time to come.
In any case, can you link (or screenshot if it doesn't cooperate with deep linking) to an official page listing 2025? I'm not seeing that.
not according to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17454/lifecycle-faq....
>Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and the most current version will continue to follow the specific lifecycle policy for the operating system for which it is installed. To find the lifecycle dates for all operating systems, search the Microsoft Lifecycle Database here.
It's unknown how long MSFT will continue to include IE in Windows, but at the very least it will be supported until January 2029, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history.
Isn't is already for fresh Win10 installs? Or are you meaning "new Edge"?
> If you’re an IT administrator, you will need to download an offline deployment package to pilot within your corporate environment—the new Microsoft Edge will not automatically deploy for commercial customers. Additionally, none of the Microsoft Edge preview channels will update to the new Microsoft Edge, as they can be used side-by-side for testing and validation.
So many of us still need to support current Edge until IT decides it is time to move on.
If you mean over IE11, that's probably a (dumb, unhealthy) Group Policy decision of your Enterprise as Edge has been the default browser in Windows 10 since launch.
If you mean Edgmium (New Edge) over Edge Classic, it already replaces Edge Classic (entirely) when you install it, and there's a slow rollout through Windows Update already happening, with an attempt to converge on everyone having Edgmium sometime this year and Edge Classic dying a final, sad death (RIP, good friend, you served some of us well). They say fresh installs of "Windows 10X" the hyped dual screen build of Windows will only have Edgmium, and that'll likely make its way into other Windows 10 images over time.
We even see a small percentage of XP and IE8 (which we haven’t supported since MS dropped support.) might just be UA spoofing to support some crazy old internal app at a bank.
Makes your money feel safe, eh?
LTSC/LTSB versions of Windows 10 (i.e. the ones that enterprises are supposed to use) don't have Edge and there's no way to install it. The same goes for Windows Server 2016 and 2019.
"We will honor your choices about browsing data and collect only what is needed to make your experiences better."
When I watched TV during prime time and on the weekends, though, the advertisements were for toys and products that interested me. In the blink of an eye, my entire outlook worsened because I needed those things and didn't have them. The advertisements were also a great distraction from homework and chores.
I guess I can see where she's coming from, as I don't avoid physical stores when I'm not planning to buy things. Window shopping is fun. But still, I think all that tracking has a dark side that's difficult to convey to the generation that grew up taking it for granted. Are we just old and fear the new and unknown?
The one thing I definitely hate is how bloated the web has gotten. Everything works great on my old computers that I switched over to linux, until I need to just google (duckduckgo) some simple piece of information on a forum. And then I find myself fantasizing about upgrading to an i7 so I can read the same basic text that could be read online when 1ghz processors were a pipe dream.
Edit: and this is with ad blockers and anti-trackers turned on. The whole browser experience is just slower, and I think the act of having to scan and block all that cruft must have an impact. Browsers used to function on Windows XP machines back in the day, right?
Edit2: and then I see this thread on the HN front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22054715
It's as if a stranger came up to you on the street, knew what brand of toilet paper you used at home, and asked if you wanted to buy more because you're almost out. Naturally you would wonder how this stranger knows these facts about you - do they snoop in your trash? Do they observe you in the bathroom through the window? Do they come in your home while you're away? We would consider such a world where this was normal to be Kafka-esque and dystopic. Anyone who gives an iota of care about personal privacy and dignity could (and arguably should) find implementation of the digital equivalent equally repulsive.
I don't care if things know about me. If there is an actual human being who is directly looking at me, associating it with my face, etc, that is a lot more bothersome than some machine that is doing that.
I understand that many people here don't make that distinction. I do care about privacy in some ways, but when you I "arguably should" find machines invading my privacy to repulsive, I guess I have to thank you for putting the word "arguably" in there, because I would argue that. It just doesn't bother me, and I am happier for not having one more thing to be bothered by.
For instance, sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed by what I purchase at a store. (even if it's just that I'm buying a lot of junky, easy-to-prepare food at the grocery store) I've never once felt that way checking out at Amazon. Not even a teensy tiny bit. And that would remain true even if I suspected (or knew) that some human at Amazon was looking closely at the orders.
I guess I have enough concerns in my life that actually have measurable impacts on me that such things seem pretty trivial.
A lot of 20th Century pop culture was driven by or at least responded to advertising. When advertising has to hit the broadest demographics and speak to the largest audiences it has more pressure to be creative and interesting, so that people talk or think about it.
It also lead to interesting moments of discovery when ads found audiences outside of what they expected.
Targeted ads are more often preaching to an already sold choir, so they can just be lazier in almost every way. They break expectations of novelty in ads. They lose the ability to drive the discovery models that were the original driving force behind why ads even exist in the first place. They add yet another unnecessary border wall/bubble effect where we struggle to find shared cultural events/jokes/touchstones between groups of people, because just about no two people (even inside the same demographic group) are seeing the same ads these days.
I just still wish they would have at least OSS'd EdgeHTML instead of just shoving it in a closet somewhere.
Edit: Chromium connects to Google servers to update extensions and for captive portal detection. Firefox does pretty much the same.
(note that I think there's nothing wrong with this at all, just pointing out that this isn't chromium-specific)
Both chromium and Firefox can be customized and vendor branded (see the countless privacy oriented browsers built on top of Firefox).
That's pretty misleading. When you want to sync state across Chromium installs, you use a Google account, and that's really just scratching the surface.
Chromium comes with quite a bit of Google baked-in.
Iridium was developed specifically to degoogle all attempts at phoning home.
There is a reason why Electron, QT etc use Chromium.
Firefox is comparable in that department.
What magic are you using to be able to build Chromium?
0 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron
I get the Electron reason...it just sucks.
Even their docs for XUL shows it all as archived:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
https://www.palemoon.org/
https://www.basilisk-browser.org/
Maybe they're better at API backwards compatibility now? Not sure; I'm unlikely to try again given previous experience. Which is a shame; I still use Firefox since it was called Phoenix…
If anybody has more recent experience working on their stack, I'd be happy to be correctly though. Preferably with examples of projects that _haven't_ been burned.
Yes there are problems to everyone using the same software but there are advantages too. One drawback is that potential security issues would affect "everyone" but on the other hand the same fix works for "everyone".
If the common software is open source it serves as de facto standard/reference implementation so you don't have compatibility issues. Standardization processes try to address this without reference software but IMO that is a lot more effort (in terms of engineering hours) to get it right so you can have a fully featured standard that is clear, has no bugs and has multiple perfectly standard compliant independent implementations.
After all software is just a tool to serve a purpose and our decisions in this area should be driven by pragmatic reasons alone. If we can serve the same purpose with much less effort by having everyone build on top of/use the same common base why not.
Similarly I'd rather see everyone just use Linux instead of all the different popular OSes we have.
That said, browser debates often come off like the Nintendo versus Sega arguments I remember as a kid. It's funny how people become married to one.
The best long-term outcome for the web would arguably to have been for Microsoft to put more resources into their in-house EdgeHTML browser instead of throwing it out and reskinning Chrome.
Let's say Google says they don't like some privacy feature because it hurts their bottom line in terms of ad revenue. So they decide not to have that in Chrome.
Sure, people could switch to in-house Edge or Firefox. But they don't want to switch, because for whatever reason, Google is better able to make a browser that people like. Attested to by the tiny market share Edge has (and fairly small share Firefox has, notwithstanding its popularity within the HN community).
Switching to Chromium based Edge is a much easier move for users, assuming Microsoft decides to second-guess Google's decision, which they can do easily and have strong incentives to do -- keeping in mind that the number one complaint people have about Chrome is that they don't trust Google.
Just because it's the same codebase doesn't mean they're not competing.
Seems like I am not alone in using Yin and Yang metaphor here.
This completely destroys my main use case for my Surface. I need a tablet with a web browser that's designed to be used in portrait mode without the Type Cover attached.
Can anyone here recommend a UWP web browser I can switch to when the real Edge goes away for good? Or if none exists, can someone recommend a cheap 12"+ tablet that runs a mobile OS?
Fonts are rendered with thinner lines in new Edge (on the left): http://terrainformatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IE-fo...
Such rendering does not match rest of Windows...
New Edge is definitely less readable, and Google Chrome exhibits the same problem.
Proposal to Democrats: to unite with Republicans in one party as Republicans have "better development tools".
I am sympathetic to this, as I've spent a lot of time at the low levels of this stuff. Unfortunately, one problem is that there is no one "right answer," and not really a lot of authoritative guidance on what's preferred. Some people prefer higher contrast, others prefer minimal distortion of the shapes and spacing. It's always a tradeoff.
The left render has less contrast but, to my eyes, is clearer. Look, for example, at the upvote and downvote buttons.
The right image's buttons are faint and blurred (jaggy), while the left image's buttons are sharp.
This is something they actually got right; it's one thing that was terrible about IE and the old Edge, and that I'd bet was subconsciously turning many people off (in my case, consciously making me want to tear my eyes out). If you can't see the difference, open dev console on the screenshot and run:
If this doesn't work in the new Edge, try in Chrome (not sure if Edge supports this zoom mechanism). You should definitely be able to see the difference in sharpness.Edit: Maybe also worth mentioning, Firefox's bold font rendering is one thing keeping me away from it. Lack of the above zoom mechanism is another. Not sure if I'm alone in these.
By "post-Vista" you mean Windows 8 and later? Vista and 7 (its refinement) were the peak of subpixel-antialiased ClearType with the Segoe font. It was with Metro and its animated, rotation-enabled, mobile-first design language that antialiasing was downgraded to greyscale.
You are not alone. Firefox font rendering actually upsets me. Comparing to Chrome rendering, it's just a non-starter.
I have brought this up many times, but I get blasted for it. Apparently it's all based on opinion alone and you and I have a very minority opinion in these tech communities. I suspect that the silent majority is with us though.
Chromium’s Windows font rendering is better than it was a few years ago (when it was really pretty awful), but as you say, it’s still not right. Firefox’s font rendering is much truer to the platform conventions.
I hope that this is still on their radar as something to improve.