Chromium-based Microsoft Edge previews are now available
32 replies, posted
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft039s-chromium-powered-edge-previews-are-now-available-for-everyone
I'm giving it a shot, it pulled everything straight from Firefox (which normal Edge can't do )
I like it, the overall design is so much better looking than Chrome itself
Gonna give it a try for the following weeks
Just remember that you guys wanted this. Any advantage to Edge as it was will be lost.
Sets has been on ice for a while now, I really do hope it will come someday but then there's the issue of Windows/Edge/Office being too integrated again, the EU might not like that.
If this means Edge is somehow going to come to macOS or Linux now, I may give it a shot.
Otherwise, I'll just stick with my Chromium/Blink based browser of choice, Vivaldi.
Actually, what exactly would be the point of switching from, say, Chrome to Edge? I guess for better MS account integration, but I'd think more people would be integrated with Google's services than Microsoft's.
As far as I know you won't be in the Chrome botnet. You'll be in the MS botnet, but you're already there because of Win10
I've been using the inking functions in edge for marking up PDF documents, is that going to be gone in the new release (whenever this becomes final)?
Been using the leaked builds for a few weeks now and I definitely will not go back to firefox or old edge.
My favorite features are the auto-hiding scrollbar that is activated in edge://flags and the ability to turn a webpage in to an app, removing the menu bar, the bookmark toolbar and the searchbar, perfect for a more focused youtube experience when i've pinned the window to the corner of the screen. Ofcourse there's also the ability to use Chrome apps on this browser too with no problems.
I am missing firefox's minimal display padding option to reduce the amount of space taken up by ui elements and old edge's "set these tabs aside" function but i suppose that's what the insider feedback system is for.
Interested in how this compares speed and battery-wise to the old Edge. Edge was actually pretty good for laptops and low end hardware compared to Chrome.
So check this out:
I've loaded up the exact same two pages (desmos.com/calculator and YouTube) with the exact same broswer extension (uBlock Origin) in Chrome, Edge Dev and Edge Release.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/441/34e171e2-d9b5-40af-adc3-77263fcb0aae/Capture.JPG
It turns out Edge Release is using the most processes and RAM out of all of them.
the edge JS engine Chakra was faster and more efficient, as was the DOM renderer
but Google pushed and forced its chrome-only standards enough that MS figured it wasn't worth trying to continue to make Edge compatible.
a shame people are OK with this but whatever
And yet EdgeDev is using more than Chrome. This is all honestly a bit surprising.
I imagine the UI won't get polished until everything else is finished or close to it.
In some cases though, because I can also read comments saying it also uses less ram
It will depend on a number of things, usually the number of tabs/processes really count.
but we can't also forget that due it still being in development phases, you could have more debug options enabled, which will inflate it
12 versus 8 threads is going to result in more memory usage. Every thread has to load its own copy of the Javascript engine at the very least. And like Scratch said, if it's a development release then it's going to have some extra stuff enabled that will increase resource usage. It'd be around 388.8mb of memory just if you took it down to 8 threads which is only 70mb more than Chrome despite being the dev release.
I mean, all modern web browsers these days use "GIGANTIC" amounts of RAM. Even Firefox.
Really, I think the high RAM usage is less due to the browsers themselves, and more down to just how web pages are designed these days. Could be completely wrong, of course.
Still, Vivaldi using maybe 2 GB of RAM vs. Firefox maybe using 1.8 GB isn't that much of a huge deal to me. I've usually still got plenty of RAM to spare.
I'm feeling a bit cautious about this, having less rendering engines in the market might turn out to be a bad thing and cause a over-reliance on Google's Blink engine.
As long as it is not trashing, it can use all the RAM it wants.
It's already concerning just how much say Google have in the web standards as it is. If other renderers and JS engines start to die off they will likely end up with de facto control over the web standards.
Chromium is a good browser platform, sure. But we need some diversity in browsers to actually find new and interesting ways of handling things after all.
Aside from Google controlling web standards I'm already extremely concerned about how complex web standards have been allowed to get.
Building a viable renderer and JS engine now requires the resources of a megacorp behind the effort, which has pretty horrifying implications for web freedom.
Google practically forced this shit because they can force things in their services that only work in Chrome/Blink. YouTube is an example of this.
The only thing that stops YouTube from working on ancientish browsers is that dumb ‘upgrade your browser’ page and things under the hood with videos.
Bypass those and you can get YouTube running on a PowerBook G4 from 2003.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Edge to just spoof a Chrome user agent to bypass those checks, then? This is clearly an anti-trust violation on Google's part.
ChakraCore already is open source
They did. Back when Edge was known only as Spartan, MS was attempting to bring IE11's Trident engine up to Blink/Webkit/Gecko standards. To stop every single website ever from throwing 'IF IE' tags at it, Spartan would say it was Chrome.
But I assume that was removed when the release version of Edge came along?
