Tags: microsoft

How Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With Web Components - The New Stack

“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”

Why were they slow? The answer: React.

“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”

Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide? - Charlie’s Diary

Trust:

Recall undermines trust, and once an institution loses trust it’s really hard to regain it.

Facing reality, whether it’s about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management – Baldur Bjarnason

The EU is not the FCC. I wish every American tech pundit would read and digest this explainer before writing their thinkpieces.

It’s very common for US punditry to completely misunderstand the EU and analyse it as if it were a US political entity – imagining that its actions are driven by the same political and social dynamics as a protectionist industry within the US.

Browsers Are Weird Right Now – Tyler Sticka

‘Sfunny, I’d been meaning to write a blog post on exactly this topic, but Tyler says it all …and that’s before Apple’s scandalous shenanigans.

Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice - Mozilla Research

It’s a dream team of former Clearlefties: Harry and Cennydd joined forces to investigate and write an in-depth report looking into deceptive design practices used by Microsoft to stop people changing their default browser from Edge. They don’t pull their punches:

We judge that Microsoft cannot justify the use of these techniques, and should stop using them immediately. If they do not, we would welcome – where the law provides for it – regulatory intervention to protect against these harms.

Baseline’s evolution on MDN | MDN Blog

These updated definitions makes sense to me:

1. Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
2. Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.

Tech Companies Are Ruining Their Apps, Websites, Internet

This is enshittification.

Webrise

Prompted by my talk, The State Of The Web, Brian zooms out to get some perspective on how browser power is consolidated.

The web is made of clients and servers. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the server space but there’s very little diversity when it comes to clients because making a browser has become so complex and expensive.

But Brian hopes that this complexity and expense could be distributed amongst a large amount of smaller players.

10 companies agreeing to invest $10k apiece to advance and maintain some area of shared interest is every bit as useful as 1 agreeing to invest $100k generally. In fact, maybe it’s more representative.

We believe that there is a very long tail of increasingly smaller companies who could do something, if only they coordinated to fund it together. The further we stretch this out, the more sources we enable, the more its potential adds up.

I mentioned recently that there might be quite a difference in tone between my links and my journal here on my website:

’Sfunny, when I look back at older journal entries they’re often written out of frustration, usually when something in the dev world is bugging me. But when I look back at all the links I’ve bookmarked the vibe is much more enthusiastic, like I’m excitedly pointing at something and saying “Check this out!” I feel like sentiment analyses of those two sections of my site would yield two different results.

My journal entries have been even more specifically negative of late. I’ve been bitchin’ and moanin’ about web browsers. But at least I’m an equal-opportunities bitcher and moaner.

• Mozilla, I complained about your Facebook Container extension for Firefox.
• Apple, I complained about the ridiculous way Safari’s update cycle is tied to operating system.
• Google, I complained about the way a breaking change was rolled out in Chrome (and the implications for future breaking changes).
• Microsoft, you got off lightly. But please consider any of my criticisms of Chrome to apply to Edge too, seeing as they’re basically the same now.

I wish my journal weren’t so negative, but my mithering behaviour has been been encouraged. On more than one occasion, someone I know at a browser company has taken me aside to let me know that I should blog about any complaints I might have with their browser. It sounds counterintuitive, I know. But these blog posts can give engineers some ammunition to get those issues prioritised and fixed.

So my message to you is this: if there’s something about a web browser that you’re not happy with (or, indeed, if there’s something you’re really happy with), take the time to write it down and publish it.

Publish it on your website. You could post your gripes on Twitter but whinging on Jack’s website is just pissing in the wind. And I suspect you also might put a bit more thought into a blog post on your own site.

I know it’s a cliché to say that browser makers want to hear from developers—and I’m often cynical about it myself—but they really do want to know what we think. Share your thoughts. I’ll probably end up linking to what you write.

Back to the Bad Old Days of the Web – Jorge Arango

We’ve enjoyed a relatively long period when we didn’t have to think about which browser to use. Alas, that period is ending: I must now keep Chrome running all the time, much like I needed that PC in the early 2000s.

History of the Web - YouTube

I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane with Chris:

From the Web’s inception, an ancient to contemporary history of the Web.

The latest newsletter from The History Of The Web is a good one: The Browser Engine That Could. It’s all about the history of browsers and more specifically, rendering engines.

Jay quotes from a 1992 email by Tim Berners-Lee when there was real concern about having too many different browsers. But as history played out, the concern shifted to having too few different browsers.

I wrote about this—back when Edge switched to using Chromium—in a post called Unity where I compared it to political parties:

If you have hundreds of different political parties, that’s not ideal. But if you only have one political party, that’s very bad indeed!

I talked about this some more with Brian and Stuart on the Igalia Chats podcast: Web Ecosystem Health (here’s the mp3 file).

In the discussion we dive deeper into the naunces of browser engine diversity; how it’s not the numbers that matter, but representation. The danger with one dominant rendering engine is that it would reflect one dominant set of priorities.

I think we’re starting to see this kind of battle between different sets of priorities playing out in the browser rendering engine landscape.

Webkit published a list of APIs they won’t be implementing in their current form because of security concerns around fingerprinting. Mozilla is taking the same stand. Google is much more gung-ho about implementing those APIs.

I think it’s safe to say that every implementor wants to ship powerful APIs and ensure security and privacy. The issue is with which gets priority. Using the language of principles and priorities, you could crudely encapsulate Apple and Mozilla’s position as:

Privacy, even over capability.

That design principle would pass the reversibility test. In fact, Google’s position might be represented as:

Capability, even over privacy.

I’m not saying Apple and Mozilla don’t value powerful APIs. I’m not saying Google doesn’t value privacy. I’m saying that Google’s priorities are different to Apple’s and Mozilla’s.

Alas, Alex is saying that Apple and Mozilla don’t value capability:

There is a contingent of browser vendors today who do not wish to expand the web platform to cover adjacent use-cases or meaningfully close the relevance gap that the shift to mobile has opened.

That’s very disappointing. It’s a cheap shot. As cheap as saying that, given Google’s business model, Chrome wouldn’t want to expand the web platform to provide better privacy and security.

Igalia Chats: Web Ecosystem Health with Jeremy Keith and Stuart Landridge

Myself and Stuart had a chat with Brian about browser engine diversity.

Here’s the audio file if you’d like to huffduff it.

Old CSS, new CSS / fuzzy notepad

I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.

In the beginning, there was no CSS.

This was very bad.

Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.

Same-Site Cookies By Default | text/plain

This is good news. I have third-party cookies disabled in my browser, and I’m very happy that it will become the default.

It’s hard to believe that we ever allowed third-party cookies and scripts in the first place. Between them, they’re responsible for the worst ills of the World Wide Web.

How to Kill IE11 - What the Deaths of IE6 and IE8 Tell Us About Killing IE | Mike Sherov

An interesting look at the mortality causes for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 8, and what they can tell us for the hoped-for death of Internet Explorer 11.

I disagree with the conclusion (that we should actively block IE11—barring any good security reasons, I don’t think that’s defensible), but I absolutely agree that we shouldn’t be shipping polyfills in production just for IE11. Give it your HTML. Give it your CSS. Withhold modern JavaScript. If you’re building with progressive enhancement (and you are, right?), then giving IE11 users a sub-par experience is absolutely fine …it’s certainly better than blocking them completely.

Microsoft’s Edge browser is going to switch its rendering engine over to Chromium.

I am deflated and disappointed.

There’s just no sugar-coating this. I’m sure the decision makes sound business sense for Microsoft, but it’s not good for the health of the web.

Very soon, the vast majority of browsers will have an engine that’s either Blink or its cousin, WebKit. That may seem like good news for developers when it comes to testing, but trust me, it’s a sucky situation of innovation and agreement. Instead of a diverse browser ecosystem, we’re going to end up with incest and inbreeding.

There’s one shining exception though. Firefox. That browser was originally created to combat the seemingly unstoppable monopolistic power of Internet Explorer. Now that Microsoft are no longer in the rendering engine game, Firefox is once again the only thing standing in the way of a complete monopoly.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a while now, and I can heartily recommend it. You should try it (and maybe talk to your relatives about it at Christmas). At this point, which browser you use no longer feels like it’s just about personal choice—it feels part of something bigger; it’s about the shape of the web we want.

Jeffrey wrote that browser diversity starts with us:

The health of Firefox is critical now that Chromium will be the web’s de facto rendering engine.

Even if you love Chrome, adore Gmail, and live in Google Docs or Analytics, no single company, let alone a user-tracking advertising giant, should control the internet.

Andy Bell also writes about browser diversity:

I’ll say it bluntly: we must support Firefox. We can’t, as a community allow this browser engine monopoly. We must use Firefox as our main dev browsers; we must encourage our friends and families to use it, too.

Yes, it’s not perfect, nor are Mozilla, but we can help them to develop and grow by using Firefox and reporting issues that we find. If we just use and build for Chromium, which is looking likely (cough Internet Explorer monopoly cough), then Firefox will fall away and we will then have just one major engine left. I don’t ever want to see that.

Uncle Dave says:

If the idea of a Google-driven Web is of concern to you, then I’d encourage you to use Firefox. And don’t be a passive consumer; blog, tweet, and speak about its killer features. I’ll start: Firefox’s CSS Grid, Flexbox, and Variable Font tools are the best in the business.

Mozilla themselves came out all guns blazing when they said Goodbye, EdgeHTML:

Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.

Tim describes the situation as risking a homogeneous web:

I don’t think Microsoft using Chromium is the end of the world, but it is another step down a slippery slope. It’s one more way of bolstering the influence Google currently has on the web.

We need Google to keep pushing the web forward. But it’s critical that we have other voices, with different viewpoints, to maintain some sense of balance. Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.

Andre Alves Garzia writes that while we Blink, we lose the web:

Losing engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity.

I like that analogy with language death. If you prefer biological analogies, it’s worth revisiting this fantastic post by Rachel back in August—before any of us knew about Microsoft’s decision—all about the ecological impact of browser diversity:

Let me be clear: an Internet that runs only on Chrome’s engine, Blink, and its offspring, is not the paradise we like to imagine it to be.

That post is a great history lesson, documenting how things can change, and how decisions can have far-reaching unintended consequences.

So these are the three browser engines we have: WebKit/Blink, Gecko, and EdgeHTML. We are unlikely to get any brand new bloodlines in the foreseeable future. This is it.

If we lose one of those browser engines, we lose its lineage, every permutation of that engine that would follow, and the unique takes on the Web it could allow for.

And it’s not likely to be replaced.

Goodbye, EdgeHTML - The Mozilla Blog

Mozilla comes out with all guns blazing:

Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.

Microsoft Edge: Making the web better through more open source collaboration - Windows Experience BlogWindows Experience Blog

The marketing people at Microsoft are doing their best to sell us on the taste and nutritional value of their latest shit sandwich piece of news.

We will move to a Chromium-compatible web platform for Microsoft Edge on the desktop.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

While we Blink, we lose the Web

Losing [browser] engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity.