portal entry

I have so many feelings on this, I don't know where to start. When I think of Edge, I think of Microsoft's attempt to unify the Windows Desktop and Windows Phone user interfaces. Edge has always been that hard thing to use for me. Edge has always been behind Chrome and Firefox in terms of standards compliance, features, ease of use. You name it, it is bad. ~~~~ Firefox OTOH, is doing OK but not great. We are now in the situation where 80% of the people on the Internet will soon be on same browser. That might make it easier for programming because their will be fewer targets, but I can see it a slowing down innovation. If Chrome does something in a certain way, then that will be the way that it is done.              

Comment by James Mohler

Agreed... and that's why I think it's bad overall.  I remember a time when I said "can't we all just use the same browser?"  I don't think that's good for innovation.

Comment by David Byers

I'm old like you, and I remember the days of the browser wars and how Microsoft won using their windows monopoly. And I took part in the Firefox revolution to "take back the Internet". I still remember rejoicing the day when overall IE usage dropped below 50%. Ah, the old days... As far as Edge moving to Chromium. I hear your fear, and I have seen other people express the same apprehension. But one point to remember...Edge is going to be using Blink, not Chromium. Blink is just a rendering engine. Microsoft will still have to build all of the other stuff that makes up a browser. That said, I can hear you thinking "But Blink is where the rubber meets the road, as afar as web development and standards". And this is true, but it is also an open source project. If Microsoft feels they don't like the direction that Google heads down the road, they can easily fork Blink and sidestep the bad stuff. </2 cents>

Comment by yacoubean

I was there but I must have been in a different part of the war. I was leading a team of 4 developers (5 total). It was a job for two people, but we had to have five. Why? Netscape 4's CSS implementation was so bad, we couldn't use it. We were littering our pages with font tags everywhere. Our code base was 50% bigger than needed, it was slower because it was bigger. We had to spend more time testing because everything had to be set one by one. I was once asked if we could theme our site because a customer wanted it themed. I said with CSS it would be trivial, without it, all 5 of use would be tied up for 1/2 year and rollouts would be painful. In those days, I could not wait for Netscape 4 to go away. It held up progress for years. ~~~~~ These days, I have the same feeling with IE 11. The sooner it goes away the better. (It is not as bad as Netscape 4)  

Comment by James Mohler