I have this strange hypocritical mental model which simultaneously dismisses improvements to Edge as irrelevant while also wishing and rooting for more browser competition elsewhere.
We aren't rooting for browser competition, but browser engine competition. Microsoft is clearly not interested in maintaining their own engine, so any users that switch to Edge are ultimately still giving market share and consequently power over the web standards to Google.
IMHO, 2.5 good engines are enough (webkit, blink, gecko - in the sense that webkit and blink are very similar). We just need more really good browsers which use gecko.
We certainly need more really good browsers which use gecko.
But for that to happen, Mozilla needs to up their effort to pull apart the components, decouple them from their own integration (firefox, thunderbird) and treat them as first-class projects, whose sole focus is to provide browser-builders and such with the components and tools to integrate the pieces.
Purely technical, it's still easier to build around "chrome" components. Which is why everything from electron, via "webviews" to the oculus browser or that webview-thing in your fridge, uses chrome tech and not mozilla. Edit: in an ideal world, it would be a no-brainer for e.g. Meta to pick Mozilla components to build a browser for their VR headset. Or for VW when they develop an in-car screen. Or for an app-builder to add some web-rendering of their in-app help.
But IMO this stems from a fundamental problem with Mozilla. Their cash-cow is firefox. So if they spend time and money making tech that then makes competing with firefox easier, they lose twice. So they will never truly commit to this.
Even if that would, IMO, be one of the most impactful things for Mozillas' manifesto of a "free internet".
It's notable that there's no real nodejs equivalent running on Mozilla tech. I'd love for someone closer to the tech to explain why there's not a rich ecosystem behind spidermonkey, etc.
I am not sure about the current state. But "back then" all the components in Firefox were tightly coupled and almost impossible to extract on their own.
"Back then" being, IIRC, 2012 or so, when I briefly worked on the web and CMS side of a project that used HTML + CSS (and a tiny bit of JS) to render the UI of a media-box. The OS was basically a thing that could boot a "browser" and handle network stuff. Firefox was not an option, as it was near impossible to even remove things like the address bar, tab handling and all that. But the hardware was so underpowered, that a full browser was not an option.
Yet "yet another khtml" wrapped in the most basic "executable" did just fine.
But this is a while ago, and only one project that chose not to use Firefox/gecko.
Their loss lies in the fact that this would enable people to build competitors to firefox, as they would basically make a box of components to do exactly that.
Yet Firefox, the product, is what brings in money. Not the underlying tech.
I remember the good old times when Mozilla had a project named Chrome (yes) to (if my memory serves me correct) make building apps with gecko easier.
edit: Probably misremembering, now that I searched for it. Yes "chrome" was (and still is?) used to describe the non-webview parts of the FF but apparently I totally made up the project part.
Because IIRC in old Mozilla Chrome was a project name that was the UI layer of Firefox. Chromeless basically just mean Firefox without UI for other applications to built on top.
Oh, thanks for the update. I assumed it'd be an incremental departure and that things couldn't have changed so much in 12 years (given the complexity of the browser engines). Now that I've read more about the fork, I learned that the codebases were already significantly different at the time they declared it officially as a fork. Interesting, because it feels like they are very compatible when I'm testing stuff as a developer (apart from their support of new stuff obviously).
And when they had EdgeHTML which wasn't even that bad, people pissed on it and said it's worse than Blink, idk man, this is an impossible case of getting the monopoly out of Google's hands.
I find it a very funny meme that Google controls web standards. Well I used to find it abstractly okay to worry about, then funny, and now annoying because it's used as a thought-terminating cliche.
This really depends on how much effort Microsoft puts into working on Blink itself vs. its skin. And, since Microsoft and Google are similarly sized companies, Microsoft is in a better position to fork Blink if the shared engine becomes a problem (the way Google forked WebKit).
They do have an enormous amount of control over them, but the bigger issue is that standards are not that relevant given that all developers will test their stuff on Chrome and basically it (slower Firefox on Google sheets? Pause when opening YT documents? Who cares!).
It's not a cliche, it's sad reality. It doesn't have to be thought-terminating, though - some people try to do something about it.
Don't know what YT documents are, but FWIW my experience with Firefox on Linux is much better when using Google's products than Edge on Windows. Maps, in particular, is an unbelievable dumpster fire. It lags like crazy and has extremely weird behavior. Think the map's labels showing up in the search box for a second. When panning, it seems to reload pretty much everything byte by byte.
The only thing which works on Edge but doesn't on Firefox is casting from YouTube to my TV, but since this ignores my adblocker I never use it anyway.
The comparison is done on the same physical machine, with the default Edge config (I don't use windows that often, so don't bother to change settings).
Edge was never going to be that once Microsoft gave up on their own renderer. It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now.
On the other hand, it's exciting that Kagi is working on Orion. Ladybird will be interesting too. Maybe manifestv2 deprecation will start another browser war...
Microsoft could've made it look like IE and attracted a lot of that crowd with "same familiar UI, better rendering", but instead they decided to take the dumbed-down UI that Chrome had and add more MS-specific yet largely-useless or hostile features.
Very few people are going to want to go up against Google and do it for nothing. At the end of this monumental quest, you only have just another browser.
If it doesn't even make sense for Microsoft when they have an entire, ubiquitous operating system to take advantage of, I don't see how we do anything except declare Google's engine the winner that takes all.
It was nice when KHTML was forked for WebKit. It seriously seemed that open-source was taking root (pun intended). However, the situation has unfortunately evolved into a “not like that!” scenario.
I checked what "Windows Blog / Microsoft Edge" is about. It says "Microsoft Edge news and product updates for developers focused on Microsoft Edge". If it was for end users, I'd have no problem with such superficial articles. But targeting developers - this is a shame and shows again and again Microsoft's culture around not supporting technically minded people (I don't even think of mentioning the term "hacker" in connection with Microsoft) with understanding what's going on under the hood. This is exactly the core promise of FOSS software and should be an eye-opener for not using proprietary software whenever possible (in this case, MS Edge).
They made a chart where the the 28 bar is 40% of the size of the 32 bar. How to lie with charts. Their intended audience is made of IT news sites publishing filler.
IANAL, but when I asked a person somewhat involved in EU anti-trust processes, osx and macos aren't even close to be classified as monopolies in most of the EU, so the idea that Apple is abusing their monopoly to enforce their own tech on users, doesn't apply that clearly.
EU antitrust doesn't require a monopoly (or even majority marketshare), just abuse of a dominant position. I still wouldn't bet on them going after macOS Safari any time soon, it's a much weaker argument they've been able to force much because of it (unlike iOS Safari).
> These results come from our field telemetry, which represent real-world web usage on all types of hardware and websites.
I wonder what the speedup would be without field telemetry. Also what is the electrical consumption for all the telemetry-related packets hopping around the internet? What would the speedup be like for the internet itself if we stopped using telemetry on everything.
Most websites send massive amounts of telemetry data which is never mentioned but somehow MS doing this for Windows/Edge etc, which they fully disclose, always is.
They could probably just load one fewer ad and postpone all the Copilot and Bing Rewards crap for a few seconds...
Sigh. Edge on Chromium was actually light and fast when it first came out, before Microsoft polled a Microsoft and enshittified it with all the unnecessary crapware.
We are using the same medium/platform (browser with HTML/JS/CSS) for decades (plural!) now and mostly using the same, boring websites.
How come there is still so much performance to gain and how come there is still so much NEED for it?
In the time CPU's and browsers got twice as fast together, it seems like web apps got twice as slow.
The only web app that people use a lot that has any justification to demand this is probably google maps 3D mode -but then again, we already had that webgl magic a DECADE ago as well.
Look at the most used websites. All of them are mostly text, images and sometimes (4k) video. All of this should be blazingly fast by now.
I switched to Chrome after noticing severe problems with Edge: The laptop's fan would turn on and task manager shows no processes consuming high CPU. Eventually I found that Edge is the culprit. Killing every Edge process quiets the fan.
Another problem with Edge is intrusion into the web page. Curved corners for example. Every pixel in the page belongs to the application, and Edge is intruding. When you select text Edge shows its own menu, and you're confused as to whether the application is showing the menu or Edge.
Aside: it’s impressive how the whole blog post does not mention a single detail of what they actually did to achieve these performance improvements. Code changes, really?
I wonder how this compares to barebones Chrome, given that they're both Chromium-based.
I don't love Edge but at work I use it almost exclusively, because of the tighter integration with the Windows identity/authentication broker -- SSO flows are much less painful (read: effectively transparent) if your org uses AAD/EntraID as an IdP.
EDIT: I tested myself and it actually is ~4.8% faster than stock Chrome, using this benchmark anyway.
If you record a network packet capture, you will see it communicating with history.google.com. You might also notice that each time you load your browser history, that domain will be contacted to sync your history with Google's servers.
It was true in 2023, but I haven't found any updates on the story since then.
It was sending a request to the domain "bingapis.com" with HTTP referer of the current page. Thus, sending your URL to Microsoft. It was a feature that could be turned off, but was on by default.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/96nwgd/microsoft... - With search suggestions enabled, search suggestions and URLs entered into address bar go to Microsoft regardless of which search engine is selected (Really, typing http: or https: ought to mean no suggestions generated at all)
They should, yes. Don't know why DOJ doesn't. But in case of the EU, Microsoft is handled with very soft gloves in all aspects because corrupt idiotic bureaucrats on all levels can't imagine a life without their Windows, Outlook and Excel. So the throw their hands up in the air, cry "but there are no alternatives, we cannot do anything here" and continue their extended post-lunch-sleep.
I use Edge as I used to use Internet Explorer: to download Chrome.
MS seems unable or unwilling to make a decent browser. Edge can't be started until you click next through three screens where it tries to make you to create an account with them. The default homepage is full of ads on that website of theirs. I could go on and on, but seriously, I don't think anyone cares about Edge performance.
I have this strange hypocritical mental model which simultaneously dismisses improvements to Edge as irrelevant while also wishing and rooting for more browser competition elsewhere.
We aren't rooting for browser competition, but browser engine competition. Microsoft is clearly not interested in maintaining their own engine, so any users that switch to Edge are ultimately still giving market share and consequently power over the web standards to Google.
IMHO, 2.5 good engines are enough (webkit, blink, gecko - in the sense that webkit and blink are very similar). We just need more really good browsers which use gecko.
We certainly need more really good browsers which use gecko.
But for that to happen, Mozilla needs to up their effort to pull apart the components, decouple them from their own integration (firefox, thunderbird) and treat them as first-class projects, whose sole focus is to provide browser-builders and such with the components and tools to integrate the pieces.
Purely technical, it's still easier to build around "chrome" components. Which is why everything from electron, via "webviews" to the oculus browser or that webview-thing in your fridge, uses chrome tech and not mozilla. Edit: in an ideal world, it would be a no-brainer for e.g. Meta to pick Mozilla components to build a browser for their VR headset. Or for VW when they develop an in-car screen. Or for an app-builder to add some web-rendering of their in-app help.
But IMO this stems from a fundamental problem with Mozilla. Their cash-cow is firefox. So if they spend time and money making tech that then makes competing with firefox easier, they lose twice. So they will never truly commit to this.
Even if that would, IMO, be one of the most impactful things for Mozillas' manifesto of a "free internet".
It's notable that there's no real nodejs equivalent running on Mozilla tech. I'd love for someone closer to the tech to explain why there's not a rich ecosystem behind spidermonkey, etc.
I too would love to learn more about that.
I am not sure about the current state. But "back then" all the components in Firefox were tightly coupled and almost impossible to extract on their own.
"Back then" being, IIRC, 2012 or so, when I briefly worked on the web and CMS side of a project that used HTML + CSS (and a tiny bit of JS) to render the UI of a media-box. The OS was basically a thing that could boot a "browser" and handle network stuff. Firefox was not an option, as it was near impossible to even remove things like the address bar, tab handling and all that. But the hardware was so underpowered, that a full browser was not an option. Yet "yet another khtml" wrapped in the most basic "executable" did just fine.
But this is a while ago, and only one project that chose not to use Firefox/gecko.
How would they loose? Right now people looking for a "component" are just using chrome(ium), so Mozilla does not have those "users" to begin with.
If Gecko would be as usable for integration as Blink is more people would use it overall which is a net benefit for Gecko.
Their loss lies in the fact that this would enable people to build competitors to firefox, as they would basically make a box of components to do exactly that.
Yet Firefox, the product, is what brings in money. Not the underlying tech.
I remember the good old times when Mozilla had a project named Chrome (yes) to (if my memory serves me correct) make building apps with gecko easier.
edit: Probably misremembering, now that I searched for it. Yes "chrome" was (and still is?) used to describe the non-webview parts of the FF but apparently I totally made up the project part.
Are you thinking about XUL / XULRunner?
Was it Prism?
That was a project to make it easy to make site specific browser IIRC.
Yes, I think it was. I think some people used it to create custom "chromes" for Gecko, hence the confusion.
edit: Funny enough, the continuation project for Prism was named "Chromeless": https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless
Because IIRC in old Mozilla Chrome was a project name that was the UI layer of Firefox. Chromeless basically just mean Firefox without UI for other applications to built on top.
WebKit and Blink aren’t very similar. There’s only a small amount of WebKit code left in Blink, and their architectures are completely different now.
Oh, thanks for the update. I assumed it'd be an incremental departure and that things couldn't have changed so much in 12 years (given the complexity of the browser engines). Now that I've read more about the fork, I learned that the codebases were already significantly different at the time they declared it officially as a fork. Interesting, because it feels like they are very compatible when I'm testing stuff as a developer (apart from their support of new stuff obviously).
3. Goanna exists, which is an engine forked from Gecko in 2016.
How many users does it have?
It's used by 3 browsers - Pale Moon, Basilisk and K-Meleon. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goanna_(software)....
And when they had EdgeHTML which wasn't even that bad, people pissed on it and said it's worse than Blink, idk man, this is an impossible case of getting the monopoly out of Google's hands.
People are going to piss on Microsoft either way because of how they handled IE for so long. And they deserve every ounce of piss they get.
I find it a very funny meme that Google controls web standards. Well I used to find it abstractly okay to worry about, then funny, and now annoying because it's used as a thought-terminating cliche.
It effectively decides how most people experience the web, and that doesn't change when people use Edge.
This really depends on how much effort Microsoft puts into working on Blink itself vs. its skin. And, since Microsoft and Google are similarly sized companies, Microsoft is in a better position to fork Blink if the shared engine becomes a problem (the way Google forked WebKit).
They do have an enormous amount of control over them, but the bigger issue is that standards are not that relevant given that all developers will test their stuff on Chrome and basically it (slower Firefox on Google sheets? Pause when opening YT documents? Who cares!).
It's not a cliche, it's sad reality. It doesn't have to be thought-terminating, though - some people try to do something about it.
Don't know what YT documents are, but FWIW my experience with Firefox on Linux is much better when using Google's products than Edge on Windows. Maps, in particular, is an unbelievable dumpster fire. It lags like crazy and has extremely weird behavior. Think the map's labels showing up in the search box for a second. When panning, it seems to reload pretty much everything byte by byte.
The only thing which works on Edge but doesn't on Firefox is casting from YouTube to my TV, but since this ignores my adblocker I never use it anyway.
The comparison is done on the same physical machine, with the default Edge config (I don't use windows that often, so don't bother to change settings).
Edge was never going to be that once Microsoft gave up on their own renderer. It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now.
On the other hand, it's exciting that Kagi is working on Orion. Ladybird will be interesting too. Maybe manifestv2 deprecation will start another browser war...
It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now.
Microsoft could've made it look like IE and attracted a lot of that crowd with "same familiar UI, better rendering", but instead they decided to take the dumbed-down UI that Chrome had and add more MS-specific yet largely-useless or hostile features.
Very few people are going to want to go up against Google and do it for nothing. At the end of this monumental quest, you only have just another browser.
If it doesn't even make sense for Microsoft when they have an entire, ubiquitous operating system to take advantage of, I don't see how we do anything except declare Google's engine the winner that takes all.
It was nice when KHTML was forked for WebKit. It seriously seemed that open-source was taking root (pun intended). However, the situation has unfortunately evolved into a “not like that!” scenario.
Exciting - the article implies it came from a collection of improvements. Best of all they’re claiming the improvement is observed across platforms!
2 questions the article didn’t address:
1. What were the changes, and what was each one’s contribution to the total?
2. How much - if any - of this improvement be observed in other Chromium browsers?
I checked what "Windows Blog / Microsoft Edge" is about. It says "Microsoft Edge news and product updates for developers focused on Microsoft Edge". If it was for end users, I'd have no problem with such superficial articles. But targeting developers - this is a shame and shows again and again Microsoft's culture around not supporting technically minded people (I don't even think of mentioning the term "hacker" in connection with Microsoft) with understanding what's going on under the hood. This is exactly the core promise of FOSS software and should be an eye-opener for not using proprietary software whenever possible (in this case, MS Edge).
They made a chart where the the 28 bar is 40% of the size of the 32 bar. How to lie with charts. Their intended audience is made of IT news sites publishing filler.
One good thing the EU mandated recently is that you can uninstall Edge. On my gaming PC, I installed LibreWolf from the Microsoft store instead.
Thank you so much for this tidbit, did it promptly.
That's great. They could do the same with Safari.
They should. But if they can is not that certain.
IANAL, but when I asked a person somewhat involved in EU anti-trust processes, osx and macos aren't even close to be classified as monopolies in most of the EU, so the idea that Apple is abusing their monopoly to enforce their own tech on users, doesn't apply that clearly.
EU antitrust doesn't require a monopoly (or even majority marketshare), just abuse of a dominant position. I still wouldn't bet on them going after macOS Safari any time soon, it's a much weaker argument they've been able to force much because of it (unlike iOS Safari).
They did, on iPhone and iPad.
The way I understand it, the EU doesn't care about Mac at all since it has so low market share.
Any perf improvement is great but the way they promote it seems a bit much?
1.7% faster navigation times 2% faster startup times 5% to 7% improvement in web page responsiveness
I'd say in practice a 2% faster startup time is probably barely noticeable?
It's is not noticeable at all.
Also, you would barely see the difference in the chart if they actually used a zero axis.
Here is a better (more honest) chart:
Almost enough to counteract the additional adware bloat from an average monthly Windows update
> These results come from our field telemetry, which represent real-world web usage on all types of hardware and websites.
I wonder what the speedup would be without field telemetry. Also what is the electrical consumption for all the telemetry-related packets hopping around the internet? What would the speedup be like for the internet itself if we stopped using telemetry on everything.
Most websites send massive amounts of telemetry data which is never mentioned but somehow MS doing this for Windows/Edge etc, which they fully disclose, always is.
e.g. Netflix/YouTube
Graph with misleading y-axis does not give any credibility to Microsoft.
Wish they said what they actually did to get these improvements!
cd chromium && git pull
They could probably just load one fewer ad and postpone all the Copilot and Bing Rewards crap for a few seconds...
Sigh. Edge on Chromium was actually light and fast when it first came out, before Microsoft polled a Microsoft and enshittified it with all the unnecessary crapware.
Edge could easy win over Chrome if they support ManifestV2
We are using the same medium/platform (browser with HTML/JS/CSS) for decades (plural!) now and mostly using the same, boring websites.
How come there is still so much performance to gain and how come there is still so much NEED for it?
In the time CPU's and browsers got twice as fast together, it seems like web apps got twice as slow.
The only web app that people use a lot that has any justification to demand this is probably google maps 3D mode -but then again, we already had that webgl magic a DECADE ago as well.
Look at the most used websites. All of them are mostly text, images and sometimes (4k) video. All of this should be blazingly fast by now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
I switched to Chrome after noticing severe problems with Edge: The laptop's fan would turn on and task manager shows no processes consuming high CPU. Eventually I found that Edge is the culprit. Killing every Edge process quiets the fan.
Another problem with Edge is intrusion into the web page. Curved corners for example. Every pixel in the page belongs to the application, and Edge is intruding. When you select text Edge shows its own menu, and you're confused as to whether the application is showing the menu or Edge.
Aside: it’s impressive how the whole blog post does not mention a single detail of what they actually did to achieve these performance improvements. Code changes, really?
The y-axis of the graph isn't even labelled
It's 3.1 faster!! That's a lot more than the 0.8 of the last update.
It has a title and only one data series.
I’m assuming that’s the Speedometer score
I wonder how this compares to barebones Chrome, given that they're both Chromium-based.
I don't love Edge but at work I use it almost exclusively, because of the tighter integration with the Windows identity/authentication broker -- SSO flows are much less painful (read: effectively transparent) if your org uses AAD/EntraID as an IdP.
EDIT: I tested myself and it actually is ~4.8% faster than stock Chrome, using this benchmark anyway.
Microsoft Edge sends every URL you visit to Microsoft. Hard pass.
FYI, Google Chrome will do the same thing.
If you record a network packet capture, you will see it communicating with history.google.com. You might also notice that each time you load your browser history, that domain will be contacted to sync your history with Google's servers.
Much of your uploaded data can be seen from here, but you'll need to be logged in to see it: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?pli=1
Firefox doesn't.
even incognito?
is it true or just some analytical data?
It was true in 2023, but I haven't found any updates on the story since then.
It was sending a request to the domain "bingapis.com" with HTTP referer of the current page. Thus, sending your URL to Microsoft. It was a feature that could be turned off, but was on by default.
What is the feature that can be shut off ?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-b...
It's the "Show suggestions to follow creators in Microsoft Edge" feature.
But that's not the only time Edge has been caught with a feature that sends all your URLs to Microsoft:
https://x.com/scriptjunkie1/status/1152280517972299777 - "Anonymous" statistics sends your Windows SID along with the URL visited for the smartscreen feature
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/147rdv4/microsoft... - an Image Enhancement feature sends image URLs to Microsoft
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/96nwgd/microsoft... - With search suggestions enabled, search suggestions and URLs entered into address bar go to Microsoft regardless of which search engine is selected (Really, typing http: or https: ought to mean no suggestions generated at all)
how can this possible??? EU or DOJ should sue the fuck out of microsoft since its ON by default
They should, yes. Don't know why DOJ doesn't. But in case of the EU, Microsoft is handled with very soft gloves in all aspects because corrupt idiotic bureaucrats on all levels can't imagine a life without their Windows, Outlook and Excel. So the throw their hands up in the air, cry "but there are no alternatives, we cannot do anything here" and continue their extended post-lunch-sleep.
Curious how the blog post published April 10 goes out of its way to highlight Speedometer 3.0...almost 2 weeks after 3.1 was released[1].
[1] https://browserbench.org/announcements/speedometer3.1/
Interesting. Talking about it as if it was their achievement. Was it ?
> 1.7% faster navigation times
No one cares honestly, not even the hardest edge fan.
It would be more interesting to know how they improved edge performance.
Not feeling any difference. The only significant change is my custom fonts are reset.
I use Edge as I used to use Internet Explorer: to download Chrome.
MS seems unable or unwilling to make a decent browser. Edge can't be started until you click next through three screens where it tries to make you to create an account with them. The default homepage is full of ads on that website of theirs. I could go on and on, but seriously, I don't think anyone cares about Edge performance.