Posted on 04/30/2019 8:18:50 PM PDT by dayglored
Chromium base should ease porting pains substantially
Microsoft may be closer to its first Mac browser in 14 years.
"We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS," Joe Belfiore said last December, when he announced the move to a Chromium-based engine for the Edge browser. "Improving the web-platform experience for both end users and developers requires that the web platform and the browser be consistently available to as many devices as possible."
Dialogue boxes touting support for macOS ("10.12 and above") have been spotted. The company has also invited interest in ports of Edge-on-Chrome for Windows 8.1, Windows 8, and Windows 7.
Edge is tightly integrated with Windows 10, allowing Microsoft to claim bragging rights over speed and power consumption. But building on top of the open-source Chromium project makes the browser much more portable.
Microsoft stopped developing a Mac browser 14 years ago with Internet Explorer for OS X at the end of 2005. IE for Mac OS X was a painful port of an app that had first appeared on the previous, original Mac OS in 1996. In 2002 we called the OS X port "a serious disaster" which degraded the experience of using Apple's shiny new OS. Few knew at the time that Apple was brewing its own native browser, Safari, which debuted six months later, in January 2003, and all was well again.
Apple has made moving iOS apps to the Mac easier thanks to its Marzipan project, which it's using to port the iOS TV app and possibly more. It would be a surprise if this wasn't the path Microsoft is taking.
Previews of ChromiEdge have been generally well received, comparing favourably to Google's implementation, but it stops far short of the feature set of the Windows 10 equivalent. If you want a cross-platform browser that's based on Chrome and syncs your history and bookmarks across devices, why not just use Vivaldi? ®
I don’t want a browser that is derived from Google’s Chrome. Brave went over to it as well, and I think Opera has, too. Pale Moon is Mozilla based, but has issues. What to do, what to do.
Meanwhile... Lets make the OS run on 32gb min.
“Kind of a good idea, eh wot?”
Nope.
Edge has been a POS from the beginning and now it’s based on ‘free source Chrome’ - way to innovate, MS.
Microsoft's innovation days are over. They've come up with some really good stuff over the years, but they were always better at acquiring and absorbing, than inventing (remember EEE: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"?).
Windows 10 was supposed to take over and rule the world. Not so much, it turned out. Edge, being the great new browser in Win10, was supposed to take over and rule the world. Not so much.
So now, if they want Edge to survive, it has to be portable. It's a reasonable business decision to use Chrome as a base, and eat a little crow.
Windows is a declining, and eventually will be a minor, player for Microsoft's business. Nadella has been saying that for a few years now, and the reorg of the business units a year or so ago underscored it.
Just you wait until the Fall (1909) release comes out.
Windows US desktop marketshare up to 78% as chip deliveries have increased.
Even when considering all devices, mobile included, Windows controls highest percentage, 35%. (Worldwide, Win is on par w/ Android at 35%, as well, but dominates on desktop 79%)
So where’s the “decline”?
See here: http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america
Think I’ll be sticking with my Safari/Brave browsers. If you want/need a Chrome-based browser there is much better privacy with Brave or the new Gab fork.
It's a question of how big a circle you draw around "what is The Market".
For example, if you consider only traditional "desktop" computers, Windows is unquestionably still in the catbird seat with nearly 80% of -that- market.
But non-business users are abandoning Windows desktops like crazy. As non-business Windows users' desktops die, they are not being replaced by Windows desktops nearly as much as they are replaced by handhelds, and in some cases by other operating systems. Windows 10 saw its biggest uptake in that market because 1) Microsoft gave it away for free for a while, then 2) Microsoft forced it down people's throats for a while, then 3) Microsoft stopped producing Office for anything but Win10, even though Win7 and Win8.1 are still "supported".
Business users of Windows are the remaining desktop market, and it is still large. But it's also still heavily Windows 7, not Windows 10. Business users are not migrating rapidly -- Windows 10 is not popular in business. And when those businesses are eventually forced to abandon Windows 7, a good number will migrate to other platforms.
Meanwhile, in the rapidly growing segment of the computer market -- the cloud -- Linux rules as completely as Windows once ruled the desktop.
That's the "decline". It's not a decline in percentage -- the Sales Dept. pie chart for desktops still appears "good". But the pie is smaller each year.
This is why Microsoft's "Windows Division" was broken up a while ago, and the Windows teams were distributed among other groups. Nadella sees and acted upon that which Ballmer refused to admit -- that Windows as the world's top operating system has been trimmed back to being just another player in a market that has left it behind.
Windows will survive, but it will be for businesses, gamers, and developers. Nearly everyone else is finding other things that suit their needs better.
YMMV. Let's check back in another year or three. :-)
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