OK, Google: Unshackled from Windows, Edge team is free to follow where Chromium leads Having hitched its wagon firmly to Google's, Microsoft is to join the four-week and eight-week release cycle cadence that is now in the offing for its Edge browser. While the two giants might have traded barbs at the weekend over the impact big tech has had on the media, in the browser wars Microsoft is seemingly following …
Firefox. It got a bit rubbish for a while, but I find it's perfectly serviceable these days. And no, it is not in any discernible way slower than Chrome. Some synthetic benchmarks find it to be slightly slower, but even if it is, it makes bugger-all difference in real use. Also, for some reason it makes ad/tracker blocking much easier than the browser created by an advertising company.
I think the days of browsers that actually work fairly well are gone. Many web sites are heavily customized for desktop or mobile "experiences" to the extent that important content is missing on the mobile version and the desktop version that has the content ,renders very badly on a small screen even when that small screen has better resolution than the desktop screen. You can also get essential content missed out when a screen is swapped from landscape to portrait. There was a day when the browser you were using just affected the presentation of the content and never the content itself.
The only ones with any significant user base are Safari and Firefox. And Firefox needs to see more Chrome converts or it risks becoming one of the many tiny also rans. Since Safari is Apple product only, the Windows/Android world risks becoming a Google browser monoculture if more people don't start wising up.
Hard to imagine why Microsoft thought effectively handing over control of the browser to Google was a good thing.
I remember the days when software companies did due dilligence to make sure their code actually worked, did what it said on the tin, didn't puke up a lung because you dared to use it, and didn't reinvent the "User Experience" wheel every bloody day. I long for the day when they QA tested their stuff before shipping it, released fixes & patches only when something that had been so obscure that even their exhaustive QA hadn't found it (like some brand x printer driver causing crashes because it made some obscene function call to a memory location nobody had ever anticipated), and generally strove to release software that was fully working out of the box.
I remember the days when you didn't need to agree to a gigabyte legal contract just to install a fekkin' font. Actual programs were understood to be as-is & might have bugs, but the folks that wrote it tried VERY hard to find them, fix them, & mitigate them before releasing their stuff to the world.
*Sighs*
I feel so damned old...
Hmm, might that have anything to do with Google's intent to strangle add-ons ?
I'm guessing the Chrome team have a year-long plan to change just enough stuff to make life miserable for add-on makers, and now Borkzilla is happily skipping along, grinning widely about how "reactive" it is going to be.
Um, Borkzilla, one of your problems is that you are already way more reactive than you can code. Just need to look at the history of Windows Update to confirm.
Slow down, and do more some quality control for a change.
Hard to do thanks to the iPhone, at least on sites browsed by mobile devices. If the Mac can grow into the mid double digits like the iPhone that might be enough to prevent that sort of thing from happening again on the desktop, at least on sites with general content. I could see it on sites that are designed to mainly attract a Windows or Android audience, though.
LTS version? Yeah, I think we may have heard of that. I don't think 8 weeks counts though.
This is an insane decision. The browser is pretty much core to using a PC nowadays, especially in the Work From Home environment many of us currently find is pushed into. The last thing users need is an ever shifting browser base while trying to use it to do work.
> It will probably be very difficult for embedders to track the 4-week schedule
And that is the point. The harder it is to keep up to date with Chromium updates the easier it will be for Google to say "don't use that alternative browser, it's not secure, use Chrome like god intended" and all will be well in the land of panopticon advertising.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
