Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-building-chromium-powered-web-browser-windows-10 <comment><USER3> What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engine is a big step in that direction. It is a step they have to do because.. and now comes the down votes... YOU don't test your work in Egde and because YOU tell all friends and family to use Chrome instead of edge. I bet many of you even helps friends and family in downloading it. So stop complaining about monoculture. Many of you helped create it.

<comment><USER4> How can I test Edge when Microsoft don't release it for Mac and Linux?

A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.

<comment><USER5> [http://modern.ie](http://modern.ie) Free Windows VirtualBox images you can use for testing!

<comment><USER6> Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but if testing on your browser means downloading a 4GB+ image every couple months and having it take up all my memory in a clunky VM and messing around with how it gets its IP and then trying to update itself with another multi-gigabyte windows update while I'm tethering and did I mention you have to redo it all every couple of months?... then I'm not testing against your browser.

<comment><USER7> Then how are you testing your browser? Are you assuming that testing Chrome on ThisOS is sufficient testing for Chrome on EveryOtherOS?

<comment><USER8> One thing is testing if the fancy custom react component works properly in a particular browser at all, that should be the case in a certain browser+version across OSes and you'd want that available all the time.

The other thing is testing if some CSS is acting up in a specific Browser/Browserversion/OS/Screensize/Phone combination; that is probably a job for QA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a firefox fax, I hope this isn't true. The dominance of chrome isn't good for anyone. This will lead to (even more) sites not bothering to be made compatible with Firefox. We are headed back to the "designed for IE" days.

<comment><USER10> My understanding is that they'll be using the Chromium engine underneath, but still their own Edge "browser" and UI on top.

IMHO, I personally think it's a good thing to consolidate on one engine to render HTML cross-platform for these two reasons:

1\. Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines.

2\. The Chromium engine itself is open source. There are other browsers (Vivaldi, Opera, etc) that run on top of it.

3\. While I think it's great the engine underneath is the same, I think it's equally great that there is a variety of UIs and browsers built on top of the same engine - the innovation happens in the browser space, not the engine, anymore.

<comment><USER11> _> The Chromium engine itself is open source_

Being open source is a red herring in this instance.

Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. You fork the browser and remove that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so your fork doesn't work with those websites.

Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. You fork the browser and add the feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use your feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and your fork is no better off.

The insidious part of a web monoculture is allowing Google to dictate the standards of the web platform. Being able to fork the codebase only gives one the power to change things that are strictly client-side.

<comment><USER12> Your examples have nothing to do with whether you use Chrominum engine, though.

Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that doesn't have that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so MS Edge doesn't work with those websites.

Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that has that feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use MS Edge feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and MS Edge browser is no better off.

<comment><USER11> Not sure what this is attempting to refute. Your comment is about why monocultures are bad for competition, which I happen to agree with. My comment is about why Chromium being open-source doesn't alleviate any concerns about monoculture.

<comment><USER13> How is the situation better if there are two browsers with 50% market share? You still can't add a new feature the other side doesn't want, because 50% of users won't be able to use it.

Any feature that requires a site owner to do something to support it isn't going to be added.

<comment><USER11> You've just illustrated the advantage of a polyculture: changes to the platform are not unilateral decisions, and therefore require discussion, communication, and documentation. Furthermore, if one actor tries to do something out of blatant self-interest that would be a detriment to the platform as a whole, that action can be blocked. With a Google monoculture, at the end of the day, the web will be whatever the CEO of Google allows it to be. Imagine how little control users have over the Android platform; envision a future where that's the web's model as well.

<comment><USER14> The difference being now that we're in no danger of IE6-ification. If Google annoys enough people, people can take Webkit and do whatever they want. It happened to Microsoft, arguably to Mozilla, it can happen to Google.

So long as the players are well behaved, having a single dominant browser is beneficial. How much time, energy, productivity, and money has been lost on cross-browser (in)compatibility wrangling?

<comment><USER15> > _If Google annoys enough people, people can take Webkit and do whatever they > want._

Not sure if that should have been Blink, or if you're making a subtle point about how Blink was forked from WebKit (which was in turn forked from KHTML).

Personally, while I can see why some may react to this news with concern about a monoculture, I find it hard to feel sorry about the end of the last significant closed source browser engine.

If Microsoft gives up IE and Edge then all the major browsers will have an open source foundation. With Gecko, WebKit, and Blink there remains a healthy range of options, too.

And as the history of KHTML/WebKit/Blink demonstrates, derivatives will appear if there's enough interest. Perhaps someday Microsoft will follow the examples Apple and Google have set by creating their own fork, if the circumstances warrant it.

<comment><USER16> It also demonstrates that forks are irrelevant and no one cares about them unless they come from major players with enough money and political power to push them.

<comment><USER15> WebKit was forked from KHTML. Chromium used WebKit, until Blink was forked. All of that was only possible because the browser engines are open source.

As with anything, you always need somebody (or a group of somebodies) to help something new gain traction. There's no magic pixie dust that will let you develop a major new platform without commensurate resources. What open source does do is lower the cost of entry and make it easier to build up to a level where you can make an impact.

<comment><USER16> You forgot to count all the other forks that died.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting theory and thread:

[https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10697763353362923...](https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1069776335336292352)

"This isn't about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork"

<comment><USER18> The irony. They had HTA apps (running on IE engine which still work more or less, I replaced most default Win10 apps like the image viewer and the "groove" music player with a version of them built with HTA since they were slow as hell to start up) for 20 years already, they did barely anything with it, they didn't really invest seriously in a good browser engine (Edge isn't) and now all they can do is use Google's? typical Microsoft... reminds me the whole ES4/Jscript.net debacle only to then reinvent the wheel (ineffectively) with Typescript... those who don't know the story should read about it, how many years wasted? 10, 15 years?...

What MS is really doing is replacing HTA,WinStore apps, whatever with Chromium, because their own tech can't compete with Chromium as they didn't seriously invest in it. I'm actually starting to believe the people who are claiming that MS is rebuilding Office in JS from scratch...

<comment><USER19> Their desktop strategy is really confusing. I think even to themselves. It seems since around 2000 or when .NET came out they lost direction, repeatedly tried something, didn't really finish and dropped it. Mobile strategy wasn't much better.

<comment><USER20> They are fragmented and not under a single focus and that is the problem. While the executives at the top are focused on cloud those in charge of the OS and other crucial products are making some oddball decisions for whatever reason. If Microsoft could push all their teams towards a consistent vision it would be great. Otherwise we will continue to see this giant love-hate of Microsoft vs the appreciation they deserve for the things they do get right. I am company neutral so I try to appreciate companies that do some things right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very sad. I'm not a Microsoft fan but I thought this was one of the things they were doing right.

The performance was really good, compatibility with standards was actually the best IMHO. Every thing (SVG) I tried that got past Firefox and Chrome worked on Edge without modification.

And yeah, we need the competition.

It's not like Microsoft is running out of money. Guess they need their most talented people doing something else.

<comment><USER22> > compatibility with standards was actually the best IMHO

Unfortunately it wasn't. See caniuse.com.

> And yeah, we need the competition.

This is the key point. Indeed. Google becoming the ultimate web monopolist seems scary. I just hope Mozilla is going to be able to keep competing (but I'm not sure how long will it stand, a neighbour post says "Firefox desktop market share now below 9%"). I wish MS could choose the Mozilla engine instead...

<comment><USER23> > I wish MS could choose the Mozilla engine instead...

At least they could send some money Mozilla's way to ensure there is an independent competitor around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> c-smile That's just the disaster.

And the end of W3C standard development process. AFAIR it should be 3 _independent_ implementations of the feature in order for Draft to reach Recommendation status.

So technically all that means that web standards will be written by WebKit team alone.

Sic transit Gloria mundi, sigh.

<comment><USER24> Fair concern. On the other hand nobody uses Edge on Windows 10, do they? In my limited experience users seem to still use IE or go to Chrome or Firefox.

<comment><USER25> I use it as much as possible. Its user experience on touch windows devices (Surface Go in this case) is several orders of magnitude better than Chrome and Firefox... is not a usable browser, performance-wise in my experience.

Edge is brand new, and foolishly branded to look like IE, this might stop average users who know about getting Chrome from using it. But it shouldn't. It's extremely rare that I'm forced to swap over to Chrome. Mostly I use Chrome to keep my invasive work IT staff from having access to my private browsing info.

<comment><USER22> The problem with Edge is it still (like IE had been always but at a small number of moments in history when it actually was the original source of an innovation) is the worst of the browsers from the standards (or non-standards, whatever) support perspective. See caniuse.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting, but what I really, really want them to do is EOL IE 11 so that the web can move forward without feeling guilty about the X% of users still on it. IE 11 has unfortunately become the new IE 6.

As it is right now I believe the IE 11 EOL is tied to the Windows 10 EOL...which is not happening anytime soon. Many frameworks are dropping support for it anyway so I guess it will end up being defacto desupported.

<comment><USER27> As someone who has (luckily) only had to support Firefox/Edge/Chrome, can you go into why IE11 is so bad? In the very small amount of testing I've done, everything seems to render just fine (especially compared to IE6/7/8)

<comment> le-mark I've been on multi year projects to modernize old IE applications, and one of the things that IE11 misses is "standard" xpath evaluation. A lot of old "dhtml" apps were all in on soap/xml. There's some wierd IE only hold over css in it like cursor hand vs pointer. On the whole it's not too bad really.

The reason why IE11 will live for a long, long time is it's compatability modes. You can run apps all the way back to IE7 on it. And yes these still exist.

<comment><USER27> >There's some wierd IE only hold over css in it like cursor hand vs pointer

Wow, that would really frustrate me. One of the first things I do (or check to make sure it's done by whatever css library I'm using) is add

a { cursor:pointer; }

to my css file. The first time I tested a website in IE11, I would be pulling my hair out!! Or more likely I would google it, but still, it would be frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This has been in the works for a while! A number of Microsoft employees have been making contributions to Chromium too. I hope to see Chromium's performance and battery impact on Windows to improve with this decision which is great for those using the OS.

It sounds like Microsoft really just wants a platform to route people into using Bing and service ads on the new tab page, which they're more than capable of doing on a reskin for Chromium. From a cost standpoint it makes sense to use the existing tools available.

For developers, it's one less platform to target.

<comment><USER7> This vision is pathetic, unambitious. What if Microsoft is content to reskin and rehome Chrome, submit their battery life PRs, and cede the web to Google? What is the web once Google dominates its access?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Note from Erik Meijer :)

[https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/1069796773017710592](https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/1069796773017710592)

<comment><USER30> That is really funny. Also, it shows how much Microsoft has changed in the last few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> And then there were three. Even more reason for Apple to never allow anything but WebKit on iOS. This monoculture isn't good for the web.

edit: Guess the pro-monoculture folks flagged this.

<comment><USER32> So webkit is not monoculture? Are you forgetting about konqueror?

<comment><USER33> That person meant that if all the main browsers move to Chromium, then it will dominate and cause a monoculture; the same way that Internet Explorer caused a monoculture in the 90s and 00s.

Pointing out that there are competitors doesn't change that their presence doesn't overthrow the monoculture. After all, Gecko was around for a long time and Firefox did become very popular very quickly after version 2; but realistically, it took until Apple put WebKit on iOS for any real dents to be made.

Also, I think Konqueror still uses KHTML by default. I don't know if Konqueror tracks WebKit, but I think they're rather different these days.

<comment><USER34> Unfortunately there's near 0 development behind KHTML and Konqueror. That's been the case for many years now.

KHTML was the only community driven browser engine and thank god for it. God knows what the browse landscape would've been without it.

<comment><USER33> That's a shame. Back when I was a full-time Linuxer, I used Konqueror as my default browser. The good ol' days of KHTML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't know, I am typing this post on Edge, and HTML rendering is way down on my list of complaints about it. Is switching to Chromium going to fix the lack of a "Paste As Plain Text" option, for instance? (Not the biggest issue, just the one that's freshest in my mind.) And I hope that whatever they do retains their focus on not burning battery, which is a big reason I use Edge as much as I do.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think this is interesting. What is more interesting to me is that this would have been a very good chance to align themselves with Apple (WebKit) or Mozilla instead. Effectively Google is far far more of threat than either of these two companies. In fact I think at this point Apple and Microsoft have so much more in common than different in terms of goals, they don't even really compete head on anymore.

Shocks me they aren't considering that

<comment><USER37> [https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10697763353362923...](https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1069776335336292352)

The focus is electron "This isn't about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps [...]"

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> A big reason Inuse chrome is that it is literally everywhere I need it to be: Mac, Linux, Windows, IOs, and Android. Edge is only on one of those and the only time I interact with a Windows machine is when my wife needs help fixing/recovering from something majorly broken on her computer. I haven't used a windows machine in a professional setting in ... 8 or 9 years at a minimum. Purely anecdotal, but my experience leads me to believe that, even though users on alternative platforms may be smaller in number, they tend to be the people building things for everyone else to use. Hence, Edge is stuck in a walled garden of Microsoft's own making and they aren't putting in the effort to make it work with the stuff that runs everywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER39> All this coming from this build bug for ARM64Win?

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460)

Is there anything else to dig into to validate?

<comment><USER40> Previously, MS and Google have publically announced they will collaborate on bringing Chrome to Windows on ARM.

Abandoning EdgeHTML on the basis of that bug report would be drawing a long bow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Stupid. Open source Edge and see where that gets us before you blow up the only chance we have of maintaining an open web standard.

<comment><USER42> 2008\. "Fuck you, Microsoft, for not bundling Firefox or Chrome."

2018\. "Fuck you, Microsoft, for bundling Firefox or Chrome."

Hilarious.

<comment><USER41> Very disingenuous comparison. Shows a lack of comprehension or wilful ignorance of the issue many have expressed in this thread.

<comment><USER43> "fuck you" is not same as stupid. The comment is good actually- edge has potential, why not open source it since you're not going to do much with it anyway in terms of making money. this also brings devs to windows eco system and helps them explore windows internals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This definitely makes sense from a business standpoint. MS gets two big things from Edge/IE: one, people using Bing by default, and two, tight integration with Windows/Office/MS Cloud services. All of that has nothing to do with engines, very little to do with even UI design.

</comment><comment><USER45> Microsoft should give up entirely on Internet browser development. I cannot see any good reason to throw their money away like this. They are a company too dependant on legacy software to bother competing with Google and Mozilla. Cloud services seem to be their brightest modern opportunity, but they really weren't prepared for the 2010's. Competing with Chrome is just chasing cars. Of course they've always had the advantage of being the default browser. I still don't think average users will ever see IE as anymore than a fly on a Window. Regardless of who's layout engine theyre forking.

<comment><USER46> > Microsoft should give up entirely on Internet browser development. I cannot > see any good reason to throw their money away like this.

If Microsoft release a low power device like Surface Go or future ARM devices then reviewers and people open up Chrome and it runs jerky and laggy then they'll blame the device. If Chrome becomes the default browser and gives you bad battery performance then people blame the device.

MS has to ship a browser for the exact same reasons Apple insists on shipping a browser. It's the most used application on the OS and the app that's almost used 100% of the time the device is running therefore it can make a good device feel like a bad device if its optimized poorly.

Notice all Apples web battery benchmarks use Safari not chrome.

<comment><USER45> Unless there is a major breakthrough in x86 compatibility, Windows isn't coming to ARM. They tried it with RT and they supported RISC far back as NT 4. I think 10 is great, but they've come to admit they're pretty much boxed into the whole Wintel monopoly they once thrived.

You do have some good points. I was thinking how bad it would look on their part if their OS doesn't even have its own browser. Even Gnome has a browser, which is pretty much FirefoxGTK.

I can't put my finger on why Microsoft should cease browser development. But adopting Chromium is definitely a good step in that direction. It's cheaper, normal people won't notice (or care), and they can keep branding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> A number of the comments mention monoculture. But where does monculture end and a solid reliable and honest standard begin? For exampke, at some point the power grid and gasoline formulations were standardized, yes? TV screen sizes, tin cans and shipping containers. Is the browser not the shipping container of our time?

To call W3C a standard and then have different implementations is no standard at all. That is the nature of guidelines. The fact that said "standard" so often led to a suboptional UX only poured salt on the wound.

Maybe this really is bad news? But there doea seem to be some upside, monoculture or not.

<comment><USER48> Standard is an interface with multiple implementations. Shipping container standard with certain dimensions is good. Shipping container standard "from evil Google" is bad.

<comment><USER49> Standard can also be a ubiquitous implementation: OOXML, PDF, CUDA, Linux, glibc, pulseaudo, ffmpeg, imagemagick, tensorflow, systemd, Windows, MySQL, React, Java, QT, Electron.

Since standards bodies these days are really documentation effots it seems silly to say that implementation defined standards aren't. It's practically where any 'proper' standard comes from these days where the market leader is essentially the reference implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Someone needs to note that Chromium is a browser and the rendering engine is called Blink. You can't build a different browser and rename it based on Chromium but you can use Blink as your rendering engine. The article says "...building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine...".

<comment><USER51> You absolutely can build a new browser based on chromium. That's what opera is. It shares a lot more than just the blink code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Yay, now instead of two crappy Microsoft browsers, I get to support three crappy Microsoft browsers.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sad news. Chrome is an energy hog on the Mac compared to safari. It probably won't be as tied to the OS APIs as Edge was.

<comment><USER54> > _Chrome is an energy hog on the Mac compared to safari._

It seems that with more interest in that, it's likely to improve.

> _It probably won't be as tied to the OS APIs as Edge was_

What makes you say that? Seems like they could integrate it more or less exactly the same way.

<comment><USER53> Again with my limited experience on the Mac, chrome whatever safari is doing to take advantage of OS APIs, it always feels more native.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> If Microsoft really does this and makes the Chromium based browser the default in Windows, what is the value proposition of installing Chrome? Presumably all the websites will work exactly as they do in Chrome and it will be no faster or slower?

<comment><USER56> It's value proposition is integration with the Google ecosystem. If one rejects Google then there isn't much of a reason to use Chrome over another Chromium-based web browser.

I try to avoid Google as much as possible these days, thus it's funny because I never thought I'd consider using a Microsoft browser instead of a Google one. I think this is a potentially good move on Microsoft's part(the EdgeHTML thing turned out not to be).

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Great news! I really tried to like Edge, and used it exclusively for a few months. It just couldn't do the job.

<comment><USER58> There is one thing it does/did a very nice job with: EPUB viewing. I sure hope they port that over

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I am somewhat sad at this. I use Seamonkey, but when it comes to opening and annotating pdfs, djvu and epub files, edge does all this on my laptop with minimal fuss. I felt that Edge is one of the things that Microsoft is doing right.

</comment><comment><USER60> I honestly wondered, while I was at Microsoft' why this has not happened with Edge from the beginning. Microsoft knew how problematic mshtml.dll was and how frequently it led to zero-day vulnerabilities, while Chrome was not having any high-profile 0-days for many months, maybe years.

Edge was mostly a UI remake of MSIE and it used mostly the same security model, rendering engine etc. It was never a real value add over MSIE.

</comment><comment><USER61> I wonder if this also means ChakraCore would be abandoned. I haven't played with it directly, put it seems to be a very capable JS runtime, which has no home outside of Edge. Well, there is node-chakracore, but I wonder why Microsoft would interested in keeping that effort.

Unless... they replace V8 in their Chromium build with Chakra. They already have a V8 API shim, so I guess that would be within reach.

</comment><comment><USER62> From the article:

> _In addition, Microsoft engineers were recently spotted committing code to > the Chromium project to help get Google Chrome running on ARM._

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something, Chromium already runs on ARM SoCs. Raspbian even ships with it as the default browser.

Also, as to Edge and stability, I don't use Windows 10 for any serious work anymore in light of the recent update gaffes[1], but Edge has been consistently stable and fast in my experience. In fact it's one of the better things about Windows 10; it can correctly render certain websites that Firefox/Waterfox struggles with, and it's as fast as or faster than Chromium across the board.

[1] Even running Windows 10 Pro and deferring updates, I had stability issues with the OS from day one. I had relegated it to just gaming and went back to macOS and Linux for serious work at home, but lately I've decided to stop putting so much time into games and focus on learning and music again. Therefore, I no longer use Windows 10 at all apart from IT duties at my job.

<comment><USER63> > Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something, Chromium already runs on > ARM SoCs.

AIUI, Chromium _didn 't_ run on WinNT/ARM64.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I hope everyone complaining about this, and the web monoculture it will crystallize, uses Edge (or at least Firefox) when they're on Windows. Otherwise you're part of the problem. Just like on the "Firefox's market share dips below 9%" thread, everyone wants to gripe about Chrome's dominance but no one wants to do anything about it.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is the wrong strategy for adoption. Edge adoption will skyrocket if they give Win10S / a UWP-only version of Windows away for free. Edge locked and minimal ad support with no data collection business model. Or, give the user the choice between the two SaaS support models that they prefer, one of those combined with being funneled to MS services (Bing etc) should make it sustainable. This will result in being good for web standards, empowering MS, Google, Apple and Mozilla independently.

To increase Electron app performance on Windows, it's a good way to go about it. But I have to wonder if in time Electron will be around when wasm will be a better universal app platform to build around. Little to no performance issues to resolve there.

So some good and some bad. But I can't say that I think it makes as much sense as working hard on pushing wasm and releasing UWP-locked Win10 for any vendor to install or user to download.

</comment><comment><USER66> Could Microsoft at least open-source their Edge code, so others can develop it further? It's really important for the openness of the web that we don't get a Chromium/Webkit monoculture.

I'd also like to see if there is any way the Opera source code could be opensourced.

</comment><comment><USER67> Wish they had gone with Mozilla tech instead. Would have created a nice balanced ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER68> I can see how this is creating a monoculture on the web which could have some really negative implications going forward. However, chromium is open source; so I don't really think this is comparable to the IE days.

Also, as a web dev who is trying to push the limits of what is possible given current web APIs, being shackled by edge's lack of compatibility is really a hindrance and makes really cutting-edge stuff impossible. So, it will be nice to not have to worry about that as much.

It didn't seem like microsoft was ever serious about advancing the development of the web with edge; they were just always trying to catch up (and doing so poorly). Microsoft is probably gauging the state of their browser now and coming to the conclusion that they're too far behind to make a realistic comeback without totally revamping their approach; lots of firings/organizational reshuffling, etc.

At least google is serious about the web APIs, even if its' only because it aligns with their financial interests—at least it _does_ end up being a good user experience; i think that's what matters.

\--

edit: Also, not trying to belabor the point, but this subject on the whole is especially important to me. Chrome has allowed me to do crazy-amazing things with SVGs for my dev agency (1) since, well, they actually follow most of the SVG spec. I think most browser vendors see the SVG spec as superfluous and don't follow the spec verbatim, and that stops people like me from doing more awesome things with it; I'll literally have clients pitch me awesome ideas and my response is; sorry, we can do that but it just won't work in safari! So it becomes a no-go for all.

If other vendors really were able to dedicate serious resources towards their browser implementations then yeah, I would also be unhappy about microsoft's decision here. Optimally they would shell out more resources to their Edge division; but since they don't care about web experience the way google does—I agree that deferring to the experts is the best case scenario for everyone (i.e. developers like me and then users). At least, until microsoft redefines their priorities.

[1] www.beaver.digital

<comment><USER11> _> chromium is open source_

On Chromium being open source, and why that doesn't matter: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595978)

<comment><USER68> wouldn't you expect though; if the experience got so bad, that you'd have a sort of 'hard-fork' like we see happening all the time in the crypto space; with devs moving to whatever platform is best? That would have just been nigh impossible with close sourced software; at least there's a potential path should we ever have to confront that situation with chromium.

Practically, I wouldn't guess that we'd see that, since chromium ends up being the closest implementation to true web standards; well, since they define the standards practically, anyways.

<comment><USER11> "Hard fork" à la blockchains is a very good analogy. It's also a chilling one, considering that no hard fork of Bitcoin has ever seriously challenged it for dominance of the cryptocurrency space, and that the web has orders of magnitude more inertia than the Bitcoin blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> FINALLY. They're laying the Redmond Middle School Science Projects (the Microsoft browsers) to rest.

In the 2+ year timeframe, this will save independent SaaS and software vendors MASSIVE amounts of time and money. Thank you, Satya Nadella.

Hopefully this will resolve the Web Extension store headaches induced by having to distribute through the Microsoft Store.

I suppose those of us who sell to large organizations will still have to support IE11 and Edge for the foreseeable future. Or maybe MS could help us all out by pushing an update to put Rick Astley on the default home page for those browsers, as an encouragement to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER70> I complained here when the Windows Subsystem for Linux was released that Microsoft was capitulating to Linux, giving customers a migration path away from Windows. That Microsoft had lost confidence in the homespun Win32/Win64/UWP/... API's to court developers. I caught some flak for that, but I was right.

Here, again, we see Microsoft signalling surrender in a HUGE market. Why should I be troubled to run Windows 10, again? Where is the technical distinctiveness in rebranding Chromium? There is no advantage to Microsoft in doing that. It's less disgraceful to keep building out Edge than to rebrand Chromium.

I'm not claiming Microsoft has done a great job. Edge was another mixed bag in a long line of mixed bags on the Web front from Microsoft. But they did compete for a really long time with no shortage of technical distinctiveness. Active Desktop, in the right product manager's hands, could have been a really amazing system. IE6, when it came out, was technically very awesome, doing HTML5-like functionality 7 years before the other browser vendors.

I'd wager open sourcing Windows is next because they're not doing the brand any favors; they'll dump it and move on. Microsoft will focus on Azure and SaaS apps or whatever new market crops up and we'll all be poorer for it.

Windows 7 will be my last Windows unless some amazing direction change happens in the product. I'm just waiting for support to end. Debian Linux, here I come!

</comment><comment><USER71> Chromium, great. With this move, Google gets to take one more step toward total domination of the Web. I'll be honest, I use WebKit-Edge on my iPad and it's fine; but I believe that the desktop space needs a new engine. We need something that isn't Chromium or the Chromium-Gecko that's backing Firefox since the intro of WebExtensions. There's only one problem - that's a hard challenge, and just blindly following Google is the easy way out.

</comment><comment><USER72> Very much hope Edge is open sourced.

<comment><USER57> It would be nice so then someone could fix the bugs with gitter.im

<comment><USER73> Out of curiosity, what bugs does it have?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Sad news for me. I liked Edge. It missed few essential features for me (no search in history, really?), so after a while I switched to Chrome, but I was checking it from time to time and I never wanted it to have another engine. Microsoft seems to lost an ability to fight and make successful projects. There's absolutely no reason for me to use their browser now.

</comment><comment><USER33> Tangentially related to all the stuff about the impending browser monoculture (everything old is new; Chromium shall be the next IE, etc.), I wonder if Apple would ever revive Safari on Windows.

There's probably more value in it now than there was before, because all those iPhone users who don't want to or don't the choice to use a Mac would still want iCloud bookmark and keychain sync on their machines. Plus, eventually, it might become another glass of that proverbial ice water in Hell that iTunes and Safari for Windows were once touted to be.

Yes, I know Windows would still have Firefox and all that, but I don't think one competitor does competition make. You need many competitors to segment the market, because this is not a market where segmentation should be considered a problem; rather, it should be embraced as the way to drive standards forward. It's worked that way for us since 2007 up until the last couple of years, it'll work again.

</comment><comment><USER74> The writing was on the wall when Microsoft release Windows Server 2019 - <USER2> announced it won't support Edge. Thinking of every corporate that's going to be using this new OS for RDS and Citrix farms, not shipping with Edge said they weren't going for the corporate market. Which happens to have been their biggest market.

</comment><comment><USER75> They should just ship Firefox instead. They would get most of the benefits, wouldn't have to depend on Google tech, and could probably garner a lot of good will from the FOSS community. At least for me, it would mean much more than things like open-sourcing VS Code and other such moves do.

</comment><comment><USER76> Edge was already in a difficult place from the beginning --- a new browser engine in a new UI that tried to be yet-another-Chrome-clone. They alienated both their IE users, which hate the UI changes, and weren't very successful in pleasing web developers with their new browser engine either. I would much rather have the classic familiar IE UI with a new browser engine, because the UI is the only reason I use IE over other browsers (which are increasingly turning into approximations of Chrome's UI.)

There used to be many browsers. Not so long ago, it was mainly a choice between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and IE. Now it'll be more like a choice between Chrome, Chrome, and Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER77> This is very sad, and a huge, terminal fail on the part of WHATWG to steer HTML, by making it so fscking complicated that it's infeasible to develop new browsers ever again. But maybe a monoculture was what they were heading for all the time.

</comment><comment><USER78> FINALLY!!! The bottom line is that Chromium has won in all areas of the engine wars and Chrome has won the browser wars. Heck Chrome has even won in the testing area once it release a headless version. Everyone uses Chrome as a baseline when checking how their site renders. Like 99% of Windows users, I used Edge to download Chrome. This is a smart move by Microsoft, having the browser that is package with Windows, using the most popular rendering engine, will make people think twice about having to download another browser.

[https://imgur.com/gallery/9TxWoa9](https://imgur.com/gallery/9TxWoa9)

<comment><USER79> I don't think most people know that rendering engines exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> For Microsoft this makes perfect sense, they can keep Edge UI and use that to build there own non Google experience. Maintaining the underlying details and stuff is just overhead, rather they can entirely focus on new things and experiences.

</comment><comment><USER81> If they had made it open source, cross-platform (like vs code), with sane telemetry options (unlike vs code) I would have gave it a go. I don't get why they though anything else had a chance in the current market.

<comment><USER42> What are VS Code's insane telemetry options?

<comment><USER82> The VS code you download is not Open Source, it has a special Microsoft license and includes close source Microsoft Telemetry ( which could be considered as spyware) which you cannot opt-out completely.

See [https://code.visualstudio.com/license](https://code.visualstudio.com/license)

If you want a clean VS Code with MIT license and no spyware you have to build it yourself or use VS Codium : [https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/README.md)

This pretty much the same idea as Chrome vs Chromium

<comment><USER81> Build it yourself with build tools from MS... which have telemetry :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> There is something really weird/off about this rumor. It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to drop EdgeHTML. EdgeHTML is doing really well.

The big thing that jumps out here is the repeated use of the term Chromium rather than Blink. That might just be a non-technical writer here, but what if it is not?

EdgeHTML has been working for years to be open source, and maybe even cross- platform. Could this project actually be the completion of that effort? Maybe they are using Chromium to host EdgeHTML (and ChakraCore) instead of Blink/V8? Edge for macOS and Linux, maybe?

<comment><USER83> I'm increasingly convinced that this rumor is about a replacement for ElectronJS that somehow got filtered through a non-technical reporter telephone game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why did Microsoft create a web browser in the first place? Did Microsoft make any more money by having control of the dominant web browser?

They could have just let Netscape win. Later when Google demonstrated the value of search, Microsoft could have just shipped Firefox with Bing set at the default search engine. Microsoft wouldn't have had to pay for decades of browser development, and it wouldn't have been slapped with a huge anti-trust action by the US Department of Justice.

<comment><USER78> You're a definitely a programmer and not a marketer. When you control the product, you control the experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> That's quite unfortunate. I like Edge - the rendering engine, not so much the browser. If Edge would let me sync my bookmarks with Firefox, I would switch immediately. I found it quite fast, and no other engine works so well with touch. I also don't recall rendering problems.

What MS should do IMHO is to package Edge as a component (like IE was in the old days), and let people build shells around it (like the Maxthon browser was).

I don't think I would use an Edge based on Chromium much, as I liked the UI itself not so much.

</comment><comment><USER86> It's good that a Windows-only rendering engine where people working on other operating systems can't test their work is gone but this is problematic for tech diversity on the web

</comment><comment><USER22> … and it will always use a severely outdated version of the Blink engine with nothing but some of vulnerability fixes back-ported occasionally (after unreasonable pauses of course).

</comment><comment><USER87> WTF, what instability? I use it as my main browser and have (almost) no issues at all, even with ad blocker installed. Maybe 2x a month I need to launch Chrome for some weird site.

</comment><comment><USER88> I hope they continue to struggle for many more years in the browser market. I and millions of devs lost many years on IE 6/8 crap they shouldn't be forgiven so easily

</comment><comment><USER89> Hm, my first thought is "will this work with carlo?" [0].

I'm excited about that project, but one big downside is that Chrome has to be installed. It would be great to write desktop applications that render through a browser, without having to either download Chrome (like carlo) or bundle it (like electron).

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355345)

</comment><comment><USER90> This reminds me that I think there's a real market opportunity for a clean- sheet _proprietary browser_. Everyone just assumes open source (except for Safari and Edge until now).

I think it's possible to build a significantly better browser than Chrome or anything else out there. And I think at least a few million people would pay more than $100 for it (there are 326 million people in the US alone). This would be a good time to do it.

<comment><USER91> I wouldn't touch a proprietary browser if you paid me $100

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> (Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft.) This is a good move. Microsoft is further embracing open source technology. I really _want_ to use Edge, I gave it so many tries, but every time I keep coming back to Chrome because Edge is just so damn unreliable. And Chrome is creepy as hell. And Firefox just... is slow and not smooth. A not-creepy web browser from Microsoft, with the same reliability and speed of Chrome? Sign me up.

<comment><USER23> My work laptop still runs Windows 7, so I have no experience with Edge; but Firefox feels a lot faster than Internet Explorer 11, even though it hogs memory like crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Hell has frozen over!

I occasionally use Edge in my Windows VMs. It's just kind of... Well... I'm not sure, but I like Chrome better.

The irony is that I religiously used Explorer for years because I believed that the browser isn't an accessory; the browser provided with the computer should be good enough. I only switched to Chrome because the multiprocess model made it easy to kill that one misbehaving tab that was hogging CPU.

</comment><comment><USER94> It's unfortunate to lose another implementation...and very telling about Microsoft. They'll spend infinite money (which they effectively have) to try to take a dominance position, but will give up if they can't be the top of the heap. How much would it really cost them to keep maintaining Edge, even if it's not the most popular browser? How was that generating revenue for them, anyway?

</comment><comment><USER95> I for one, welcome our one and only new browser overlord.

</comment><comment><USER96> I wonder what this means for Chakra Core, their JS engine.

They previously tried to establish Chakra as an alternative to V8 and even maintained their own fork of Node.js running on it. It doesn't look like those efforts went anywhere.

If they're already throwing out their rendering engine, it seems odd if they want to keep Chakra, especially considering how Electron (which runs VSCode and GitHub's Atom) is already built on V8.

</comment><comment><USER97> With so many browsers using Blink/V8, couldn't it be argued that an independent foundation should be created to take over the project so that no company (Google) controls the code? Each browser can then implement their fork / skin of the rendering engine / V8. It could even allow the foundation to experiment with larger changes how Mozilla has done with it's rust-based renderer.

<comment><USER82> You mean everyone uses Blink/V8 and everyone does research as forks and merge it to master if they have something interesting to commit ? I would see a few issues :

\- The 1st problem I see is that open source is often meritocracy and so Google will always be deciding because there will be much more engineer from Google on the project than from other companies joining the project. And anyway Google has no interest to try to align with MS/Mozilla interests.

\- The other problem I see is that you need some independence to make fundamemtal changes. WebRender would never exist if Mozilla tried to fork an existing engine. They wrote everything from scratch and now they are doing fundamental changes to Gecko to be able to merge Webrender in it. If they add to agree with Google, MS, and other companies they would still be arguing and trying to convince them, and Google would refuse because they think their solution is better (or more suited to their own personal needs) and Rust would not even exist

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> How ironic. But, kudos to the responsible decision makers. It's a shame though that they haven't decided to make a modern and decent engine that works at least as reliable as FF or Chrome(ium), Edge always felt like a recycled version of IE. I think the move was done because the Chromium engine also has a strong extensions base. That's something I found Edge was lacking, ultimately.

</comment><comment><USER99> I would tend to frown upon shrinking competition but in this case Edge wasn't really a player. The markets were already shared by the Chromium engine and Firefox. Chromium has the ancestry back to WebKit and KHTML so, to my knowledge, Safari also isn't a direct competitor. So, we're looking at a duopoly which naturally happens when things get complex enough and smaller players are left behind by the sheer lack of resourcing.

Browsers always were hubs of a number of technologies because loading markup language documents over network and rendering them onto screen with some dynamic programming abilities covers a lot of ground. While we sort of agree on the rendering, scripting, and styling of HTML5 by now this has just intensified with features like WebGL of WebAssembly which reach out to completely new domains. So, it's near impossible to compete in the scene unless you're a big, established player.

A modern browser is a lot more complex than operating systems these days and probably 10x more complex than old operating systems from the era where it was still possible for a small group of people to write a competely usable kernel and desktop in a relatively short time. In effect, the browser has become the operating system and to think, that's probably the very reason it's much easier to be a Linux or Apple user these days. As long as you can run Firefox or Chrome, 90% of your problems are solved. Even Windows is, for most people, just a platform to run your browser on. Then you use things like Google Docs or the web-implementation of Office to launch Word or Excel to do your work. But you don't need Windows to do that, and with a Chromium based browser that Microsoft must fully support for their web services you can just use any Chrome/Chromium based implementation.

In this light I'm amazed Microsoft would be giving power to Chrome and Google. Microsoft was and still is an operator in the operating system and platform space. How are they going to stay at all relevant if they just officially reposition Windows as a host for Chromium build? Surely things aren't as black and white but that's effectively how it is, giving up control. Microsoft can't reinvent themselves as the new Google because that's an uphill battle. They'd need to create a new space where they can thrive because operating systems don't matter that much anymore and the lock-in cash-cow that is Windows+Outlook+Office is gradually munched away by the web technologies.

</comment><comment><USER100> I think this is a great idea.

I use 3 Windows computers and use Chrome Firefox and Edge on all three computers. My experience is that Edge is less stable than Chrome which surprised me at first since Edge is owned by the host OS having all the advantages of access to all the private code.

You can throw all the money and resources in the world, and something like a browser is too complex to quickly catch up.

</comment><comment> mark-r Had to double-check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1. I think I'll wait for a confirmation before I believe it.

</comment><comment><USER101> To be fair, chakra is/was a really really solid JavaScript engine. And it's probably easier to embed than anything inside Chrome. ([https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore](https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore)) Hope they are still comitted to chakra.

</comment><comment><USER102> This is interesting .

It's coherent with their recent investments in Electron.

Hence the need for MS to support PWA with excellent feature parity with chrome.

</comment><comment><USER103> Microsoft please, can we have the tabs on the side by default? There is a lot of vertical space that is unused and it is a thousand times more practical to have tabs there on the left or on the right. Try Tree Style Tabs for a week on Firefox and you will understand why it is the future of browsing the web.

<comment><USER97> Look at Vivaldi. It's a reimplementation of classic Opera 12 style browser as a Chromium-based browser. It supports tabs on all four sides by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> I recently made the switch to Firefox from chrome. Webrender is a revolution in web technology since it primarily uses the GPU for rendering resulting in much faster and smoother websites. I'd urge everyone to give webrender a shot, it feels noticeably smoother than chrome.

</comment><comment><USER105> I think I anticipated this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379360)

>I wish Microsoft would just accept that no one will use Internet Explorer and devote resources to breaking MS-DOS compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER106> We need to remember MS bought Github recently, and with that Electron. Electron is based on Chrome so..

It makes total sense for them to concentrate the effort in Chromium and Blink, and just reuse it as their default Windows browser.

I think this is much more about Electron than it is about Edge.

</comment><comment><USER107> Edge's rendering engine is good. The only real problem Edge has is that they've built it using the ugly, unresponsive Metro UI. If they build a browser with the Chromium engine and a Metro UI, they can expect nobody to use it as well.

</comment><comment><USER108> I hope that while Microsoft does this, once they make the switch, they open source Edge.

</comment><comment><USER109> As a front-end developer this is amazing news. Less work and can deliver faster

</comment><comment><USER110> Wait, Microsoft, do you think people will use your Chromium-based browser more than they use Edge? Of course not, people will still be dumb and download Chrome. Don't throw the towell!

</comment><comment><USER110> I'm a Linux user and I use Firefox, but recommend Edge to all my Windows friends that don't care about browsers, it's a great browser, probably better than Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER111> The only reason Edge isn't successful is because it's not cross platform. Which, I realize, is kind of the point - but sort of also why as a browser it is now dying.

</comment><comment><USER112> Microsoft should buy Vivaldi and make that their default browser.

</comment><comment><USER113> None of my issues with Edge have anything to do with the browser engine.

All of them have to do with stupid Microsoft like decisions, like 'you can't avoid the internal pdf reader'.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron Would be nice if they would pull their fingers out and update the rendering engine in Outlook from the 1995-esque bollocks they insist on using to this day.

</comment><comment><USER114> Hopefully they will use it to compete against google , rather than helping them with their world domination plans. This might be a good thing

</comment><comment><USER115> It shows how difficult it is to rewrite a browser. I am glad firefox didn't go for full rewrite but going for progressive changes.

</comment><comment><USER116> Edge didn't have any issues besides it's UI. It doesn't make sense to me that for UI MS halted it's development.

</comment><comment><USER117> More monoculture :(

I'm just waiting for the day Microsoft announces that they are dropping their own compiler in favor of Clang/LLVM.

<comment><USER16> Well, they have taken the effort of making C++/WinRT work with clang, and are contributing to the co-routines implementation in clang.

But they have adopted GCC for Azure Sphere though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> how the meeting went: "its really expensive to build a decent browser and a spyware engine for it... hmmmm"

<comment><USER42> How does Edge's telemetry compare to Chrome's?

Have there been any problems with Edge similar to Chrome's suddenly logging people into the browser?

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> I would much rather Microsoft works with Apple to bring Safari/Webkit to Windows, then bending over to Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER120> how does this solve the market share problem of edge? The implementation isn't the problem, its the awful UI.

</comment><comment><USER121> That reminds me of the Azure presentation where the Microsoft employee switch to Chrome after Edge crashed.

</comment><comment><USER122> I look forward to yet another Microsoft browser that does not work correctly with SharePoint.

</comment><comment><USER123> A pity really, even though I never used it. One more brick in the future googlenet wall.

</comment><comment><USER124> One less browser for the front-end folks to support in the long run!

</comment><comment><USER125> Hallelujah! It's much better than maintaining a dead edge browser users use only once to download chrome. The biggest question whether people will use a new branded Microsoft browser or not because many of us remember a decade of ie6.

<comment><USER126> This is what I have been saying to my colleagues. Microsoft should not put their branding anywhere near the new browser even if it is industry acknowledged as their browser. That _definitely_ includes any and all IE branding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> Our customer only uses IE11, so this won't affect my work

</comment><comment><USER128> Will the homepage be Google... or Bing? There's the question!

<comment><USER23> Do people still use that? On any browser I use, I change the settings so when I restart it, it will open whatever tabs I had last opened. I almost never get to see the browser's homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> Anyone has more details, regarding the roadmap and timeline?

</comment><comment><USER130> one browser to rule them all, one browser to find them; one browser to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them...

</comment><comment><USER131> Next up: Windows 10 kernel replaced by BSD

</comment><comment><USER132> But I thought edge was faster. Every time I open a new installation, it's got that page with the speedometers showing that "edge is faster".

</comment><comment><USER133> Is Chromium different than WebKit now?

<comment><USER21> Since 2013 or so. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_\(browser_engine\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> Anyone here use edge for epub reader?

</comment><comment><USER135> If only they'd swap put the Windows kernel for Linux while they're at it...

</comment><comment><USER136> what does this mean for ChakraCore?

</comment><comment><USER43> On the one hand developers have one less engine to worry about. On the other if it becomes a chromium monoculture then Firefox loses.

<comment><USER137> No, there's now more reason for gecko to survive. Can't have single engine dominate the web.

<comment><USER97> But if that engine is open source, isn't that a good thing? There's a single standard but anyone can contribute patches for increased performance, new features, etc?

<comment><USER11> All commits to the Chrome codebase are gated through Google, an ad company whose driving motivation is in delivering value to shareholders, not to improving the web. Once the web becomes a Google monoculture, I won't be holding my breath to see any features land on the web that could threaten Google's bottom line.

<comment><USER97> I know what Google is.

Aren't changes to many open source projects gated, like the Linux kernel?

On a serious note, doesn't the license allow forks? Couldn't a large company just fork it and make changes without Google's approval?

Once it becomes "de facto", couldn't one argue to setup a foundation outside of Google's control as is done in many other open source projects?

I get that people hate Google but why bash on the project being open source; is it not open "enough"?

<comment><USER11> _> Aren't changes to many open source projects gated, like the Linux kernel?_

All projects gate commits somehow. It's not about the gating, it's about who is allowed to make the big decisions and how much buy-in they need to seek from other stakeholders before they're allowed to proceed. It's also about incentives; if Linus were, say, a Verizon employee and if the Linux Foundation were a Verizon subsidiary, people would feel much differently about the governance of the kernel. Likewise if the kernel were permissively licensed rather than GPL'd.

 _> On a serious note, doesn't the license allow forks? Couldn't a large company just fork it and make changes without Google's approval?_

The thrust of the point here is that forking the codebase is no good if you can't convince people to install the browser and for websites to support the browser. It's a social problem.

 _> is it not open "enough"? _

It's not. Open source gives users the freedom to fork. When forking isn't enough to preserve user freedom, the next step is open governance, which involves delegating decision-making power to users (with many interesting structural varieties to choose from). Amusingly, I gave a speech on this topic at All Things Open just a month ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What happens to chakra?

</comment><comment><USER138> Tell me this is a late April fools joke

</comment><comment><USER139> 1\. Embrace 2. ... 3. ... :)

</comment><comment><USER140> Edge is only useful to download Google Chrome and Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER141> Just buy Ubuntu and turn "windows" to a full on Linux Distro already.

</comment><comment><USER142> Broken shit should die. And Edge was definitely broke. Safari is next, with 5% market. Chrome is the clear winner in the end.

<comment><USER143> Certainly WebKit on iOS, macOS, and watchOS is much more than 5% of active web users.

There are over 2 billion iOS devices and every browser on iOS—Firefox, Chrome, Brave—uses WebKit.

<comment><USER144> not by choice

<comment><USER145> Even if iOS users had a real choice I suspect a lot of them wouldn't bother changing the default browser.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Obamacare, Failing Ahead of Schedule - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/opinion/sunday/douthat-obamacare-failing-ahead-of-schedule.html

<comment><USER2> " _The disaster can presumably be fixed. As Cohn pointed out on Friday, many of the state-level exchanges are working better than the federal one, and somewhere there must be a tech-world David Petraeus capable of stabilizing HealthCare.gov._ "

But a general can relieve a subordinate of command a lot easier than I expect the people responsible for this mess. Some evidence already in [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6581567](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6581567) where they're talking about a "tech 'surge'", i.e. more cluelessness from people who've never read or experienced a bunch of the lessons in _The Mythical Man Month_.

And I've read that the state exchanges depend on the federal for subsidy calculations, and that tests of that function are showing a lot of errors.

And his claim that there is a single, let along exchange based "right-of- center vision for health care reform" is ludicrous.</comment>


What's Coming in PostgreSQL 9.5 - <AUTHOR> https://www.compose.io/articles/coming-in-postgresql-9-5/

<comment><USER2> Let me just take a moment to point out how important row-level security is as a concept. That features allows one to create essentially a secure analytics data model by tying security business logic into the values of a table. For every query, just join to that security table, and now the database is flexible and secured.

Example:

Tie a salesperson to an order placed, and use the order table as the primary fact table. For all reporting and visualizations that can be tied to orders, all one has to do is incorporate an association to that table. Worrying about which customers, products, time periods, etc. a salesperson can see are automatically handled by that association.

I am not saying that PostresSQL implements what I am describing, but this example can be expanded by creating an intermediate table with many-to-many associations. E.g., this table might have one row for each salesperson's access and one row for each salesperson under a supervisor. Once again, a centralized location for controlling access throughout the entire analytical data model. It is a very useful tool that I have relied upon extensively.

<comment><USER3> Meh, you can already do this with a query AST. For every request, grab the user's data permissions represented in the same query AST and then AND them together. Compile your query AST into whatever search technology (I've seen it done with ES, Postgres, MySQL, Mongo, Solr, and Rethinkdb in the last couple years). If you're being super fancy you can even use your query ast to match on a document stream in real-time by compiling to some actual programming language and checking things on whatever document stream.

<comment><USER4> The difference is that postgres can enforce this for arbitrary queries.

This doesn't matter in the typical webapp where all accesses to the DB happen through the same database user id, but when actually using the user system of the DB, it allows for fine grained access control to a common data set.

The closest you have without explicit RLS support is to create a view for each user. RLS generates per-user views on demand under a common name.

<comment><USER5> I use schemas[0] for this. Could someone explain what advantage is gained from RLS in comparison, either to views or schemas?

[0] [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/ddl- schemas.ht...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/ddl-schemas.html)

<comment><USER2> I am very familiar with RLS, but not schemas. Could you provide an example of how you would use schemas? If not too much trouble, could you also use my salesperson example from my other comments?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> BRIN (Block Range) Indices look really interesting.

Instead of storing the whole B-Tree (and spending time updating it) just store summary of ranges (pages).

This for example, would be great for a time series database that is write heavy but not read as often.

I found these benchmarks here explaining the differences:

[http://www.depesz.com/2014/11/22/waiting-for-9-5-brin- block-...](http://www.depesz.com/2014/11/22/waiting-for-9-5-brin-block-range- indexes/)

\---

Creating 650MB tables:

       * btree: 626.859 ms.
       * brin: 208.754 ms

(3x speedup)

Updating 30% of values:

       * btree: 8398.461 ms.
       * brin: 1398.711 ms.

(4x speedup)

Extra bonus:

       * size of btree index: 28MB
       * size of brin: 64kb

Search (for a range):

      $ select count(*) from table where id between 600000::int8 and 650000::int8;
        * btree between: 9.574 ms
        * brin between: 21.090 ms

\---

<comment><USER7> Yep, this is a big deal, for me at least. It basically makes it almost cost- free to add indexes to tables that are write heavy.

I've always felt like Bitmap Indexes were a killer feature, and never understood why they weren't used more in databases. If you have a low cardinality column (anything suitable for an enum), your indexes become incredibly fast and cheap.

<comment><USER8> There was an effort to build bitmap indexes for Postgres a few years ago. There are details in the mailing list archives. It looks like it was almost completed! It's high on my list of things to tackle if I ever get time to start contributing, but maybe someone else will get to it first.

<comment><USER9> Is that different than the bitmap index access method, which IIRC landed in 8.1 or so, and is used to combine results of multiple index scans?

<comment><USER8> Yes, totally different thing. :-) A great book on query plan stuff is here:

[http://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-High-Performance-Gregory- Sm...](http://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-High-Performance-Gregory- Smith/dp/184951030X)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Love me some postgres. If I could be so bold as to ask for a feature or two, it would be great if the initial setup were easier to script.

Perhaps this is outdated already but we have to resort to here-documents and other shenanigans to get the initial db and users created. Is there a better way to do this?

Next would be to further improve the clustering, to remove the last reason people continue to use mysql.

<comment><USER11> Here is my script to create a test instance in about 5 seconds (albeit without any tables define yet, just space for them, with a running server on that space, and an account to create and use the tables in the DB):

(puts tablespace in folder under current directory)

<code>

#!/bin/sh -x

# create and run an empty database

# note: fails miserably if there are spaces in directory names

PGDATA=`pwd`/pgdata

export PGDATA

# make it if not there

mkdir -p $PGDATA

# clean it out if anything there

/bin/rm -rf $PGDATA/*

# set up the database directory layout

initdb

# start the server process

nohup postgres 2>&1 > postgres.log &

sleep 2

# create an empty DB/schema

createdb edrs_test_db

# create a user and password ("demo") to use for connections

psql -d edrs_test_db -c "create user guest password 'guest'"

ps auxww | grep '[p]ostgres'

echo run tail -f postgres.log to monitor database

# vi: nu ai ts=4 sw=4

# __* EOF __*

</code>

"edrs" is the name of an app - sub in something more applicable. I'm running this on OXS, but should work on Linux as well.

<comment><USER12> Why `nohup postgres 2>&1 > postgres.log &` instead of `pg_ctl start`? You could also use `pg_ctl -w start` to wait for proper server startup instead of `sleep 2`

<comment><USER11> Why? Ignorance. I'm used to running postmaster from years past (when not starting from an /etc script). Postmaster is now just called postgres, and it works for a disposable test instance setup.

I'll look into that, though, as it sounds like the right thing vs the sleep hack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nobody has mentioned jsonb partial updates yet. This is huge and goes further in superseding MongoDB use cases. Previously you would have add your own locking mechanisms (or use SELECT ... FOR UPDATE) so read/modify/update could be performed atomically. Now it will be built in.

<comment><USER14> You already could do that with postgres hstore, I think, but postgres hstore is limited to a flat list of key/values, not nested data structures like json.

I've been wishing for a while though that Rails ActiveRecord would support the atomic partial update operations inside hstore that postgres already does.

([http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/hstore.html](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/hstore.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do you guys think row-level security will eventually replace the crazy logic we have to add to our systems normally to allow for this? I can think of many places this might help a bunch if combined with SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION command.

<comment><USER16> I thought you could do that now by making a view and setting security on the view. Oracle allows for that sort of thing.

<comment><USER15> True, I have seen Microsoft SQL systems like that as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No, partial updates of materialized views it seems like.

<comment><USER18> nope. but since 9.4 you can at least update them without an exclusive lock on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool stuff for multi-tenant DBs! Aside from the obvious row level security, tenant ID makes a nice BRIN key for some tables, I suspect.

</comment><comment><USER19> It sounds like BRIN could replace partitioning on some cases. Am I right? Assuming you have a huge log table, partitioned by week, would this be a better fit?

<comment><USER7> For a log table or anything immutable and write heavy, definitely.

That being said it might be difficult to know when you won't get any benefit out of it unless you have control or knowledge of how rows are laid out in the table space. For example, deleting some rows based off of a fairly random criteria may make Postgres insert into those spaces on subsequent writes (after a vacuum), which could "pollute" the block ranges with non-ordinal data and make the block ranges less targeted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Upsert, oh well. CRUD becomes CRUDUM: Create, Read, Update, Delete, Uperst, Merge.

Instead of 4 orthogonal concepts we now have 6 overlapping. Because the majority voted for it. That's progress!

<comment> andrewl-hn Well, philosophically, CRUD is a lie. You only ever need two operations: READ and UPSERT.

Create with upsert and Delete by upserting "deleted = true" flag.

<comment><USER2> That "deleted" flag is extremely useful in data warehousing and OLAP applications. I wish every table had a "deleted" column and an "updated" column.

<comment><USER21> They do in my schemas :)

One extra tip, which I have found useful, is to make the deleted column a time data type (just like created and updated), but nullable. That way, your Boolean check just needs to change to an IS NULL check, but you get the additional 'when' information without using an extra column.

<comment><USER8> That is the normal pattern in Rails apps using the `acts_as_paranoid` or `permanent_records` gems (`deleted_at` to match `created_at` and `updated_at`). But I often also have `deleted_by_id` to capture Who, and I wonder if I shouldn't just have a separate `deletions` table with the who/when and other context, and then `deletion_id` on the record.

And then I wonder if I should track updates too. There are auditing solutions to record all that, but the ones I know are (rightly) not really designed for building application logic on top of.

The idea of a relational schema having some kind of temporal dimension letting you get at changes is something that's been on my mind a lot lately.

<comment><USER22> > _There are auditing solutions to record all that, but the ones I know are > (rightly) not really designed for building application logic on top of._

Yes, a big problem with table-level audits is that you lose all kinds of information about the other entities in the system. Sure, now you have an audit log of when a row was changed, but you don't really know anything about the state of all the other pieces of the database at that time, so you can't really usefully reconstruct what the entity looked like at the time it was modified.

In theory you could parse through the whole audit log to reconstruct the state of the DB but in practice it gets very complicated.

<comment><USER2> A better solution is to perform row-level snapshots with a compressed storage format, such as a column store. I maintain a database which takes monthly snapshots of data and supports an application that allows period vs. period comparisons of aggregates or even individual rows. In my case, I use snapshots, but more space efficient (at the cost of computation) would be to only store changed records, then dynamically determine which data to show based on the desired periods and sorted the row changes.

<comment><USER8> I think what mason had in mind, which I agree is a major pain point, is when a central table "owns" records in other tables, e.g. a `book` might have several rows in `pages`. I want to say "give me edition 3" and get not just the book at that point but all its pages too. Tracking changes to the book is not so hard, but reconstructing it with all its child records is a pain.

<comment><USER22> Yes exactly. Piecing together the state of all the foreign tables across the system at a specific point in time is difficult/painful.

This is one place where document stores really shine as you generally keep everything in a single place. When you update a document you don't have to worry about the values of all the foreign keys, you just save the current version which contains all your values.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


One-molecule-thick material has big advantages - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/graphene-molybdenum-disulfide-flat-materials-0823.html <comment><USER2> I'm starting to grow a little bit numb toward all the revolutionary materials science papers that I've seen since starting grad school. I don't mean to malign the work done here, but if I had a dollar for every paper I've read that claimed to be the foundation for a new class of devices I'd be rich enough to start my own seed fund.

When will we see some actual commercialization of this nano tech? The nano future has been five years away for the last 20 years. Let's make some devices already.

<comment><USER3> "Let's make some devices already."

That's genius. We need to relay this idea to the science people. Is there a mailing list?

Oh! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nanotechnology_applicat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nanotechnology_applications) , Nevermind! :P

<comment><USER4> Chips with small feature sizes and paints with nanoparticles in them are not really what was originally meant by "nanotechnology". We _still_ do not have the capability to design and build arbitrary machinery using individual molecules as building materials. In the meantime, the word "nanotechnology" got appropriated to refer to anything that involved small feature sizes and needed funding grants, so Drexler started calling it "molecular manufacturing"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This may be a stupid question but can you even see something that is just one molecule thick? Is it mostly transparent?

<comment><USER6> Indeed, from the fourth to last paragraph: "The material is so thin that it's completely transparent"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, it's widely produced as a lubricant already, but how would supply hold up if the market for the material hugely expands? One of the really nice things about the potential for graphene electronics is that you can be darn sure we'll never run out of carbon. Molybdenum, on the other hand, isn't exactly the most common metal in the world. Our electronics already depend on traces rare elements, but not as primary structural components.

So, even if we can make chips out of this stuff, will they actually be economically viable, and for how long?

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what the likelihood is of this being a solution for Augmented Reality contact lenses. The article mentions the possibility of it being used to build displays for eyeglasses, but that depends on a number of factors like pixel density that I can never tell whether reporters take into account.

<comment><USER9> That it might be useful for displays at _all_ is mere speculation at this point. Meaningful conjecture on the characteristics of those displays is beyond the scientists doing the research themselves; don't get your hopes up for the reporters doing any better.</comment></comment>