The obvious question is: why not just use Chromium or Google Chrome? Or some other browser based on Chromium? I barely trust Microsoft to make a piece of toast as it is anyway.

Obviously I am not the target user for this browser 🤣

I think the more important message is that Chromium will have a near-monopoly on the browser market in the near future.
After all these years of poorly specified and poorly implemented HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other related standards, this will properly standardize the web.

open beta
https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/?f … 2FY&OCID=MO12FY

Scali wrote:

I think the more important message is that Chromium will have a near-monopoly on the browser market in the near future.
After all these years of poorly specified and poorly implemented HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other related standards, this will properly standardize the web.

Poorly specified... I doubt it. Poorly implemented: moreso. There are still Safari on the Apple ecosystem and Firefox on other platforms. I don't think that removing the Edge engine from the competition is a good thing. Although I didn't use Edge personally, apart maybe sometimes at work if nothing else was possible, I think some competition in the browser market is a good thing.

If on the other hand the Blink engine (Chromium/Chrome's engine) were to be openly developed by multiple organizations who contribute different requirements, it might be a good thing. But having only one engine is dangerous in many ways: Security, feature bloat, ...

root42 wrote:

Poorly specified... I doubt it.

Well, I read the specifications, and to me, they are not specific enough. If I were to write a browser, I'd have to make a lot of assumptions and guesses of how certain corner-cases are supposed to work. Which happen to be the exact kind of corner-cases where different browsers generate different results, so I see a correlation.
I feel it is similar to OpenGL in that sense. That is also a prime example of a poorly specified standard, which has the exact same problems as browsers: huge bugs and incompatibilities between implementations.

root42 wrote:

I think some competition in the browser market is a good thing.

I think there are two sides to that story.
In theory, yes, having multiple competing browsers could lead to a sort of 'lowest common denominator' standard, and multiple parties experimenting and innovating, and contributing new features to the standard.
Sometimes this works, such as with the x86 standard, the Sound Blaster standard, VGA, etc.

But sometimes it doesn't. And I think browsers have been around long enough, and they never managed to solve their problems.
And in such cases, having a single 'monopoly' can simply work better. Sometimes that works too, like Windows. I think the success of Windows on the desktop is due in large part to the fact that applications simply work out-of-the-box on any machine with any recent version of Windows installed.
That situation would probably never have existed if Windows were some kind of open specification and there were tons of different implementations of it.

Scali wrote:

And in such cases, having a single 'monopoly' can simply work better. Sometimes that works too, like Windows. I think the success of Windows on the desktop is due in large part to the fact that applications simply work out-of-the-box on any machine with any recent version of Windows installed.
That situation would probably never have existed if Windows were some kind of open specification and there were tons of different implementations of it.

To play devil's advocate for a moment here, think about the Linux ecosystem in comparison to Windows: many, many different Linux distros, but they can all run the same software because they are competing on the "implementation" of a "standard" in that they all use the same Linux kernel but different packages on top of that to round out the entire OS. In that way compatibility is crazy good across the board no matter which distro you have. Plus most distros have consolidated around the "Debian standard" anyway.

On the other hand, Windows, though it is a universal platform and everything runs on it, is susceptible to feature and code bloat because MS only has an incentive to keep it good enough to work, not perfect or as efficient as possible. When there is competition, you have choices, and even if that results in some messiness, I'll take that over a straight-up monopoly any day.

keenmaster486 wrote:

To play devil's advocate for a moment here, think about the Linux ecosystem in comparison to Windows: many, many different Linux distros, but they can all run the same software because they are competing on the "implementation" of a "standard" in that they all use the same Linux kernel but different packages on top of that to round out the entire OS. In that way compatibility is crazy good across the board no matter which distro you have. Plus most distros have consolidated around the "Debian standard" anyway.

I deliberately did not mention linux, to avoid this debate. However, I will say that in practice it doesn't work this way.
Take Steam for example, it officially only supports a very small subset of distros (in fact, I believe they recently stopped supporting anything other than their own). In practice you may be able to hack it to work on certain unsupported distros, but the compatibility is severely limited.

And let's not even get into init vs systemd...

Other than that, yes the fact that many distros consolidated around the "Debian standard" supports my point of monopolies perfectly. Some things just work better when everyone uses exactly the same. Same as what happens with Chromium now.

I couldn't care less about Edge or Chrome but one of the reasons MS is moving to Chromium/Blink is that Google was caught intentionally crippling their websites and services to perform poorly in browsers other than Chrome. E.g. placing an invisible overlay on top of videos on YouTube to disable hardware acceleration when YouTube detects Safari or Edge. I don't like MS monopoly in the desktop computing market but I like Google's monopoly in the web services market even less.

YouTube also deliberately disables 4k playback for browsers other than Chrome, for no good reason.

I just checked and I definitely can select up to 4K 60fps in Safari.

ShovelKnight wrote:

I just checked and I definitely can select up to 4K 60fps in Safari.

Okay... might be because Safari is based on Webkit, as is Chromium.
At any rate, it didn't work for me in Firefox, Internet Explorer or Edge, while it does work in Chrome on the same machine.
I tested with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0m1XmvBey8

ShovelKnight wrote:

I don't like MS monopoly in the desktop computing market but I like Google's monopoly in the web services market even less.

Yep. Google is the new Microsoft, in several ways, Chrome being the new IE (in terms of the de-facto standard of the web) being one of them. At least is performs better than IE ever did in the early days of the web, heh.

Scali wrote:

Okay... might be because Safari is based on Webkit, as is Chromium. At any rate, it didn't work for me in Firefox, Internet Expl […]
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ShovelKnight wrote:

I just checked and I definitely can select up to 4K 60fps in Safari.

Okay... might be because Safari is based on Webkit, as is Chromium.
At any rate, it didn't work for me in Firefox, Internet Explorer or Edge, while it does work in Chrome on the same machine.
I tested with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0m1XmvBey8

Chrome and Safari diverged long ago. The Chrome Blink engine has little in common anymore with Webkit.

YouTube only streams content above Full HD resolution using VP9 codec (MediaSource support is mandatory as well).

4K videos work in the latest Firefox out-of-the-box. In older (but not too old) versions of Firefox and their forks, some preferences may have to be enabled explicitly in about:config, eg. in Waterfox (classic branch at least) and Basilisk, you have to enable media.mediasource.webm.enabled.

Similarly in Edge (EdgeHTML version), you must go to about:flags page and set Enable VP9 video format setting to Always on.

UCyborg wrote:

4K videos work in the latest Firefox out-of-the-box. In older (but not too old) versions of Firefox and their forks, some preferences may have to be enabled explicitly in about:config, eg. in Waterfox (classic branch at least) and Basilisk, you have to enable media.mediasource.webm.enabled.

You're right, I was using a somewhat older version of FireFox, and after updating, 4k worked.

UCyborg wrote:

Similarly in Edge (EdgeHTML version), you must go to about:flags page and set Enable VP9 video format setting to Always on.

This doesn't work for me. That setting was already on, but still, no 4k in YouTube.
Edit: That is interesting... I tested on my laptop, where it was already set to "Always on", although I don't recall ever changing that setting... and it didn't work (but Chrome and FireFox did on that same machine).
But I just checked my desktop, and there it was set to "Automatic"... On that setting it doesn't work for some reason, but once I switched to "Always on", 4k was indeed enabled in YouTube.

I only have Edge that comes with Windows 10 version 1809 for reference, version 44.17763.1.0. I'd ask if you have N version of Windows by any chance, although in that case, it would have a negative effect on Firefox as well I think. Could be remedied by installing Media Feature Pack.

I don't have any other suggestions. Either way, forgot to mention that Internet Explorer 11 doesn't support VP9 and that https://www.youtube.com/html5 page was removed at some point, which showed what's supported or not (there might be an alternative).

I can give my two cents, I am a web developer (Well, a front-end developer) since 2004. I work mostly on responsive web designs.

I can say that I have tested the chromium Edge version and I have to say, I like it. I like the fact that IE is going defunct now and MS moved forward with Edge and web standards. It just made my job much more easier. But on the other hand, I also don’t like how Google has so much power now in deciding the standards, leading browser usage, and many web services. I do most of my web development on Safari. But I started to like how Edge works well on both macOS and Windows...

But for my daily web surfing, instead of Chrome I use Safari on my macOS and iOS. When I am on Win 10, I have all major browsers installed for testing my projects only, but I almost never do some web surfing there. I probably use Edge (chromium) now more than Chrome. My boss and other Mac users at work use Chrome, some other dude on Windows or even a Mac uses Firefox. No one is using something else.

I have to agree with @root42. Competition between the engines is good. Having only one engine to run them all is quite dangerous, security-wise. I wish MS could still try to develop the EdgeHTML while they run Edge on Chromium, to be more standards-compliant with much less vendor-specific parameters. Why not offer the browser with the two engines and let the user choose one (chromium as default engine, until EdgeHTML reaches maturity)?

Google has so much power on W3C table to determine the standards now and I think it is not a very good thing too. I tend to think that their implementation of some features (—WebKit-... vendor specific CSS properties) not widely supported (take for example —webkit-line-clamp, used to truncate multi line texts) is a problem that existed before when IE started to use its proprietary specific properties. It’s the same movie we saw before, just different characters and a scenario a bit different now - the Internet has now evolved in a more robust way than 25 years ago. I can’t accept the fact that I need a framework, I need jQuery, to make a modern website. Christ, bootstrap framework with its jQuery library is so heavy, man.

But... I think that they all (Opera, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google...) are capable of working together in one engine or one web standard to rule the internet, as demonstrated by the case where they agreed on dropping support for older TLS versions. They can, but at the same time they cannot, just because when it comes to the engines they are very protective and want... money. My question is how they would deal with a scenario where a major security threat is found in that engine.

Mosaic -> Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox and I will stick to it for life.

I would stick to Firefox in Windows if Mozilla had done some things better before.