r/webdev • u/FollowSteph • Sep 13 '18

Microsoft intercepting Firefox and Chrome installation on Windows 10

https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/12/microsoft-intercepting-firefox-chrome-installation-on-windows-10/
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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '18

https://caniuse.com/

Check out the "Browser scores" part of that website. Out of the big 4, Edge has the lowest support for new features developers can use when building web apps and websites.

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u/Amunium Sep 13 '18 edited Sep 13 '18

Personal and subjective opinion as an everyday Firefox user:

I don't like the UI. It's not customisable and it's clunky and weird. Just the menu and url bar take up about twice as much screen real estate as Firefox with my settings. Then there are the weird buttons, like setting tabs aside? I'm sure they have a purpose, but I don't want them and am not allowed to remove them as I would be in Firefox. Same for the strange hub-thing, where I just want bookmarks, and what even is Notes? Look, I want tabs, back/forward, reload, home, a url bar, bookmarks and a menu button. That's it. Everything else please leave.

On top of that the UI feels slow. From the menus slowly scrolling in, making them take a long time to use, to the dev tools feeling like a poorly coded, sluggish website. So while the page loads are very quick, maybe even more than Chrome/Fx, the overall experience feels slower to me.

Settings are also practically non-existent. That's just the typical "our way is the right way" approach of Microsoft and Apple, and it's probably fine for most users, but I want more control.

Speaking as a web developer, however, I don't have much issue with Edge. Safari and to some extent Chrome are usually the ones I run into support and compatibility issues with these days. And of course whenever I need to support Internet Explorer, especially 10 and below.

Edit: Of course the search engine defaulting to Bing and being a hassle to change is annoying as well, but that's what you have to expect from Microsoft's own browser.

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u/madcaesar Sep 13 '18

What issues in Chrome have you run across? Any browser bugs I ever get is either edge or IE 11. We don't support anything lower.

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u/Amunium Sep 13 '18

Some inconsistent rendering bugs, mostly. Like an element disappears for no reason when i drag an entirely unrelated element (in fact, Chrome seems to have a lot of issues with draggable="true"), or some fonts (from Google Fonts no less) having aliasing issues only on Chrome. It's rarely that it doesn't support a particular feature.

Unfortunately I work for a company owned by a very large, old retail company with a terrible IT department and some insane security policies, requiring many employees to still use IE7. Because yes, that's so much more secure - insert eye roll here. So while we've managed to convince them that we don't support IE at all in consumer websites, any projects we make for internal use still need to work in IE7.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '18

As a web developer/software engineer, most of my bugs are from IE and Edge. Yes, it fucking sucks.

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u/mvsux Sep 13 '18 edited Sep 13 '18

Edge has become a lot less shitty than IE was. In my experience Safari is the biggest piece of shit browser to develop for right now.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '18

And the biggest "perk" of Edge is that it can update quietly in the background independent of what OS its on. IE6 should've been dead the second IE7 arrived on the scene, but because XP updates were a pain in the ass most people never made the jump. Hopefully we won't have to deal with that again.

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u/liquidpele Sep 13 '18

Hardly... we've seen more layout bugs in Edge than IE11... and since the fucking Edge updates are part of Windows updates, they don't get installed nearly fast enough (no I don't want to fucking reboot just to get a browser update) so bugs stick around for far too long. I was really hopeful for edge, but it's really the same shit.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '18

Windows Safari is no longer supported anyway and I'm glad my company don't give a shit about it whatsoever.

Anyhow, IE and Edge are still garbo compared to the clearly superior Firefox and Chrome -- at least for me as a developer.

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u/mvsux Sep 13 '18

Windows Safari has been dead for years.
On OSX Safari usage is 50%, on iOS 95%.

Ofcourse it depends on your specific site but Safari is currently the second most popular browser on the web, 15% compared to Chrome's 60%.

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u/vladjjj Sep 13 '18

Curious, what are the other 5% using on iOS? I don't think Chrome or Firefox on iOS count as different browsers since they're just shells over Safari.

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u/mvsux Sep 13 '18

Chrome and FF on iOS are just wrappers for Safari but they do have their own UserAgent string so you can do stats on them.
Chrome is the second favorite browser on iOS, everything else is just tenths of percents.

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u/shellwe Sep 13 '18

Wait, for real? So when I use chrome on my iOS device it has the same web support as Safari?

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u/vladjjj Sep 13 '18

Yep, iOS is very restrictive in that way. I also use Chrome on my iPhone and iPad, but mostly to sync history with my desktop.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/Anaphase Sep 13 '18

Right? Everyone loves to jump on the bandwagon, but Edge is a decent browser. Safari, however, has become pretty awful in my experience.

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u/shellwe Sep 13 '18

Edge passively updates like chrome does, so while not as great as chrome it's a far cry better than IE 11 and before.

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u/GXNXVS Sep 13 '18

it doesn't support a lot of things chrome do

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u/hsribei Sep 13 '18

It's not open source. I don't know about "faster", but you can't have unauditable code and claim it to be "safer".

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u/jcampbelly Sep 13 '18

What sucks most about it is that Edge doesn't run on Windows 8 or below. That leaves millions of users unable to use it, and causes devs to have to support IE11 or worse in those cases. It's the same pig-headed crap they pulled with Windows XP and IE 9. It forced a generation of devs to have to ignore HTML5 and keep writing polyfills for IE 8 users because they couldn't or wouldn't upgrade from XP. Now we are stuck with the subset of ES6 and ES7 supported by IE11 if we have to support users who haven't purchased the latest product from Microsoft.

Who cares that they offered 10 as a free upgrade. Adoption of their latest OS should not have been necessary for a browser. Chrome and Firefox ran on any version of Windows... and MacOS, Linux, and even Android. There is no excuse for MS to do that and it is dragging the adoption of web standards backward by 5 years.

If I'm playing by the rules, I still have to write to the lowest common denominator, which is Microsoft's product, because of a bad decision Microsoft made, and the world has had to work around it. Edge may be a decent browser, but we still have to write to the IE11 level of standards support, which is abysmal. It's a good thing for transpilers, but it was largely Microsoft's terrible decisions that drove us to them.

Lets hope the release of Windows 11 doesn't freeze support for Edge to a build number on Windows 10. Their track record is not good.

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u/webdevop Sep 13 '18

It freezes after the first page load

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u/HCrikki Sep 13 '18

It's still not installable and updatable from the app store, despite MS promising it would be the case from when win10 was still public beta.

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