Microsoft Edge preview builds for macOS

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/05/20/microsoft-edge-macos-canary-preview/#DkPlZhgCR3PLqbTC.97

63 72 7 years ago

blogs.windows.com

gshdg4• 7 years ago

I’m really interested to find out how they’re approaching privacy. If they take a strong stance, this might be a good alternative to chrome for those sites that support nothing else.

sureaboutthis• 7 years ago

Windows itself is not a bastion of privacy.

nailer3• 7 years ago

I see your point, but I'll add that telemetry is focused on making sure stuff works, whereas selling ads based on your data is focused on making money from you.

Telemetry can be disabled on Enterprise: https://www.kapilarya.com/allow-or-prevent-telemetry-in-wind... but I agree it would be good for Microsoft to allow this to be disabled in Pro.

kgraves2• 7 years ago

a good alternative to chrome for those sites that support nothing else.

Edge is literally Chrome with Microsoft slapped on top of it.

nailer3• 7 years ago

No. They're working on a big privacy dashboard which blocks tracking cookies as well as other stuff: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/whats-next

Video: https://edgetipscdn.microsoft.com/insider-site/images/whatsn...

toastal• 7 years ago

Why not just use Brave then?

pedrocx486• 7 years ago

I personally ditched them due to them pushing BAT to heavily on those that don't want to participate and Sync being broken randomly.

nsomaru• 7 years ago

Broken on Debian stable due to a sandbox issue not solved for many months.

Not willing to compromise security to run Brave which it seemed the workaround at the time did.

uptown• 7 years ago

From a practical standpoint exactly what does Google collect from one’s browsing activity when they use Chrome? Not sure I’ve ever seen the technical analysis of what kinds of exposure users have.

minikites• 7 years ago

I'm sure it's not limited to this but there are a lot of dark UI patterns in Chrome, e.g. any Google web login also logs you in to Chrome so Google "has permission" to record your browsing history and other browsing data.

judge2020• 7 years ago

Nowadays your Chrome Sync/Backup is encrypted with your G password (and you can change it to a separate password if you wish), but a lot is still sent to Google (and IIRC by default): https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/9116376?hl=en ("Learn about other Google Services")

princekolt2• 7 years ago

Why not Safari? It's fast, power-efficient, and native.

gshdg4• 7 years ago

And a lot of stupidly optimized-for-chrome sites break in it. Plus extensibility is limited.

tapoxi2• 7 years ago

In my case our SSO requires a FIDO U2F hardware token and Safari doesn't support FIDO U2F at all. Someone wrote a third party extension but I can't get that working.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

Discussed a bit yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963291

adgasf2• 7 years ago

Question about MS strategy: why would someone use this over Chromium or Firefox?

SentientNo4• 7 years ago

I assume they bet on people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff and corporate people who use macs but work with MS infrastructure (like Exchange and Sharepoint).

ernesth• 7 years ago

people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff

Why would those people not use the chromium browser?

DHPersonal• 7 years ago

If Microsoft integrates all the functionality of the original Edge into Chromium Edge, then it will be a great browser to use on their Surface line of tablet computers. Without those features, it’s a non-Google Chrome with a large company backing its feature updates and contributing to the codebase’s continued improvement, along with syncing features and potential better integration with Windows. Firefox has a lot of good features still, but its small usage amount has made some development budgets ignore it or drop support of it on some sites I have visited.

butteroverflow2• 7 years ago

Yeah. Our postal service's website has a small badge on every page. It translates to something like 'developed for and in Chrome'.

They must be bragging about it, or something.

It reminds me of all those 'best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600' from the beginning of the century.

nailer3• 7 years ago

It's much faster. Microsoft ripped out about 30 different Google-specific components, I think @ericlaw tweeted the list a little while ago.

Additionally Microsoft pay attention to developers. Chrome Devtools has has a Headers tab, with response headers and then request headers. There's a seperate tab called 'Response' which only contains the response body. I fed this back to Google (suggesting a request and response tab with headers and body) and (per Google) the response was from an engineer saying they personally liked it so therefore there was no reason to change it. Microsoft's feedback was they're actually looking at more logical layouts.

nicoburns• 7 years ago

Well if it comes pre-installed with windows then that's one big reason. As a power user, I'd probably install another browser. But given that this is basically Chrome, there's not a lot of reason for an average user to switch.

sorrowfulgeek• 7 years ago

This is Chromium. Maybe you mean Chrome. Someone would use this over Chrome if someone doesn’t want to be surveilled by Google. Of course now you’ll be surveilled by MS. It is better when your surveillance dossier is split among multiple entities.

adgasf2• 7 years ago

Chromium _is_ Chrome minus the Google stuff IIRC

jpalomaki• 7 years ago

On Windows (and corporate environment) one reason is that it is easier to manage. Comes with Windows, updates via Windows update and Microsoft provides support (for those with agreements).

MikusR• 7 years ago

Chrome based Edge has nothing to do with Windows update

hibbelig• 7 years ago

I don't quite see that I should be using Edge on Mac because Edge on Windows is easier to manage.

aardshark2• 7 years ago

Well speaking for me personally, Firefox runs terribly on my Macbook and it would be nice to have an alternative to Chrome.

tshanmu2• 7 years ago

this is not my experience, firefox quantum has been always faster and reliable than Chrome on MBP.

chapium2• 7 years ago

I have similar problems, Firefox is noticeably slow.

Angostura2• 7 years ago

Nothing wrong with Safari, in my experience.

chapium2• 7 years ago

Firefox runs rather poorly on Mac.

jfk13• 7 years ago

That's a terribly sweeping generalization, and is clearly not everyone's experience (see for example tshanmu's comment a few minutes before yours).

Have you filed a bug report with specifics of the poor behavior you experience, so that Mozilla engineers can potentially investigate the issue?

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

That's not been my experience.

jaabe• 7 years ago

I think you can ask yourself that question with a lot of Microsoft products these days, and we use (and like) a lot of them at my place if business.

I mean Microsoft has the upper hand compared to Google or AWS because they are better at GDPR and privacy shield stuff. Microsoft is also miles better in terms of enterprise support, but it’s those reasons and not their solutions that sell.

night815• 7 years ago

I think MS is making money elsewhere so they don't need browser market share but they do need to provide a browser.

tcper• 7 years ago

Finally, IE come back to Mac, since IE5 in Mac OS 9.

pavlov3• 7 years ago

IE was the default browser in original Mac OS X as well. Safari didn't ship until 10.2 I think.

gshdg4• 7 years ago

10.3 or 10.4, IIRC.

Angostura2• 7 years ago

IE 5.2 was damn good.

fnordsensei• 7 years ago

How come that every single Microsoft application for MacOS requires an installation? It makes me suspicious that they're gunking things up unnecessarily.

eddyg• 7 years ago

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19967190

jorisw• 7 years ago

Microsoft's added value right there.

userbinator• 7 years ago

It's just their Chromium shell, and not using their own rendering engine. (In case anyone was wondering if this was about EdgeHTML being ported.)

pavlov3• 7 years ago

EdgeHTML is being killed on Windows as well. Chromium with Microsoft chrome is their new default browser.

onion2k• 7 years ago

EdgeHTML isn't getting ported. It's dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML

simonh• 7 years ago

This was just a matter of time coming. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Linux port soon, if fact I'd be surprised not to.

The motivation seems to be to establish a solid consistent foundation layer for Microsoft to deliver cross platform Electron apps, like Teams and VS Code. EdgeHTML is no good for that, so it got ditched for Chromium.

notjustanymike• 7 years ago

As someone who develops a web app with medical content, this can't come out soon enough. We'll finally be able to get our windows 7 loving clients off of IE11.

jamesgeck0• 7 years ago

You can drop support for Windows 7 in January, same as Microsoft. Unfortunately, IE11 is a component of Windows 8.1, which will be supported until 2023.

justacomment__• 7 years ago

A delightful browser on a delightful UI. Truly we are blessed.

5trokerac3• 7 years ago

Why do I get the feeling this will be used by developers to say they tested Edge when they really didn't?

bovermyer• 7 years ago

A mix of cynicism and experience, I would say.

usermac• 7 years ago

I installed it an noticed they have their own App Store.

rsweeney21• 7 years ago

Let's say Microsoft finds a way to gain a large market share with Edge. Couldn't they cause significant damage to Google if they enabled ad blocking by default? 90% of Google revenue is still ad revenue. Say they got 50% market share. If all of the sudden 50% of internet users started blocking ads, wouldn't that be a pretty bad thing for Google? Like put them out of business overnight kind of bad? While not hurting Microsoft at all?

I wonder if Google saw this vulnerability years ago and so they decided to build Chrome to protect themselves.

Microsoft Edge preview builds for macOS

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