Microsoft to add a touch of Chrome to Edge Microsoft is developing tools for its Edge browser to import extensions from Chrome. Microsoft Edge engineer Jacob Rossi tweeted... Lots of questions on this: yes we're working on a porting tool to run Chrome extensions in Edge. Not yet finished and not all APIs supported — Jacob Rossi (@jacobrossi) 18 March 2016 …
The reality is that Firefox will lag behind Chrome by 6 months to a year, requiring extensive pollyfills. Edge will be missing so many APIs you won't be able to support it however hard you struggle.
You'll be forced to abandoned the utopia of "run everywhere" yet again, and declare Edge (along with Safari) are the new IE6.
That's a pretty dumb argument, extensions are by definition not standard, and allowing some extensions designed for a competitive product to run on yours is just a competitive edge that you're trying to narrow. And from there you jump to "because not ALL extensions will work on Edge (or Firefox), that will make it the new IE6"? Shouldn't you be saying that it makes CHROME the new IE6, i.e. the source of lots of non-standard addons? (Not that I support this idea in any way, but that's what your logic implies).
They ARE standards though. Chrome is just the only player with the resources to implement them quickly. Firefox always gets them eventually, and the losers never do.
When people say "the new IE6" it's not talking about IE6 in its heyday as the defacto standard. It's retrospective; the old rusty anchor that's weighing everyone else down.
They ARE standards though. Chrome is just the only player with the resources to implement them quickly. Firefox always gets them eventually, and the losers never do.
Firefox is pretty good at implementing standards and participating in their development.
As for the new IE 6, well that has to be Safari.
"They ARE standards though. Chrome is just the only player with the resources to implement them quickly."
That's not really true. Chrome implemented its own proprietary Javascript API for extensions. Then Mozilla and Microsoft looked at it, and said "that's a good idea, we'll make that a standard then". (That's why lots of the API is in a "chrome.____" namespace).
So Chrome had an implementation of the "standard" by default. Mozilla and Microsoft are going to have to do a significant amount of work to implement it. And while Google obviously made a lot of good choices when designing the API, there are going to be plenty of places where the API does things "the Chrome way" and Mozilla and/or Microsoft are going to have to do extra work to implement it.
Once they finish off the APIs, my extension can run on Chrome and Edge - Double the market...well OK, browser support.
Of course Chrome could update their API to 'break' stuff, but how would that make the devs feel about Google?
If FF pulled their finger out and did the same, they'd be defacto universal-extensions, that google then broke.
Edge will be missing so many APIs you won't be able to support it however hard you struggle.
That's not true as http://caniuse.com will illustrate: IE 12 (aka Edge) has pretty decent HTML 5 support.
The problem for Microsoft is that take up of Edge by users is very, very poor. Stats I have access to illustrate this quite clearly: IE total down from 25% to 18% YoY. IE 11 squeezing out versions 8,9,10 and Edge failing to gain noticeable traction. Once people have switched to Google, or Firefox ESR for companies, why should they go back to Internet Explorer?
Other than that supporting Chrome-style extensions makes a lot of sense for both developers and sys admins.
"The problem for Microsoft is that take up of Edge by users is very, very poor."
That would be because the version that shipped with Win10 was so feature poor (*). Most people I know who have tried Win10 have asked themselves, or someone else, "How do I go back to using IE instead of this Edge crap?". Having found the answer, they are not inclined to try Edge again unless they are bored and curious and that's no way to win market share.
(* Extreme case in point: during the beta, I discovered that Edge simply did not run in non-cloudy accounts and therefore I *had* to figure out how to disable it in favour of IE for *all* web content. Having done this, I have no idea when (or whether) Edge was finally able to run in a local account. MS put this application out to public beta *way* too early.)
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Microsoft needs their own solutions. By Microsoft copying everything which Google does make Google look like the king of the hill and makes Microsoft look like a want-to-be endlessly chasing and never catching the competition. Microsoft, by God, has 118,000 employees. With that massive amount of employees, Microsoft can write their own software like they use to. Now they can only watch others it's a lost race. Imagine asking Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft a question about software and when you get to Microsoft they respond with monkey-see-monkey-do. Microsoft has lost so much of their respectability when Ballmer just sat on his hands and did nothing about the new mobile revolution. Remember what that idiot said about the iPhone, "It will never get traction."
100,000 of 118,000 work in the licencing department.
And the other 18,000 are cheap offshore code monkeys.
<owld git mode>
I remember the day when American tech companies employed Americans to design, write and test code, and they boasted about their innovation. Nowadays all American companies boast about is how many jobs they're going to move to some cheap offshore shitty-hole
</owld git mode>
You forgot to add
1) All the Indians on H1b visas doing the development work in the USA for 30%(if that) of the cost per hour of Americans
2) All those being made to train their Indian replacements
Never mind the Quality, feel the Width.
It won't end well.
We have to extensively re-work the rubbish code that is produced for us in Bangalore and Mumbai.
The bean counters still think that getting all the dev work done there is cheaper in the long run.
It ain't.
Really glad to be retiring soon.
In most cases I end up disabling Edge and setting IE as default, unless the user prefers Chrome
But here's the rub. Microsoft released Windows 10 and Edge in an incomplete state, Edge being bolstered by IE11 because they knew ahead of time that releasing Edge on its own, despite any speed or rendering advantage it might have had over IE11, was never going to work - it would actually provide as big a reason as any for home users in particular to stay away from the browser and, by extension, the whole system release. It was this that allowed Chrome and Firefox to gain an increased foothold in an area where Microsoft were already losing ground.
My thought is that putting the ability to import Chrome extensions is either a misguided attempt to swallow Chrome whole or, more likely, a tacit admission that Microsoft aren't really up to adding their own addon subsystem or providing the kind of services that Chrome, Firefox or Opera provide and have provided for a considerable time.
I've found that it's best to firewall the Edge and bunch of essential (for MS self-interests only) services on W10. Then it works like a dream;)
I'm really surprised MS allowed to use Windows firewall for this (as host file is no longer honored for MS' stuff). I bet they'll be fixing this "hole".
..for everyone who supports a family member who refuses to believe anything other than the blue E leads to the internet. Also those who are stuck on small business networks. If this goes through, its uBlock Origin on all of those bloody machines and perhaps, just perhaps, I will be able to go a week without restoring backups after another Cryptolocker derivative strikes, or someone downloads a "Flash upgrade, because the website told me I should".
Fingers crossed and a pint to those at Microsoft who finally acknowledged that if its not made in Redmond, it does not mean its crap.
Between this and SQL Server for Linux perhaps there is hope after all. Maybe some of this common sense will float over to the Windows 10 division and they can knock off this GWX nonsense.
Probably not, but its fun to think about.
Yes, but hiding file extensions is a feature that some fucknut marketing idiot in Microsoft decided to force on users "to make things easy". Or just to confuse the living shit out of a great many users because they now have no clue what a file actually is without double clicking it and seeing what happens. These are the same users that can generally cope with the file extension indicating a meaning and usually, after a few prods, get the idea that to change a file from one type to another one cannot simply change the file extension.
Can't we simply ban 'bad files' from being used in email at a global level?
i.e. A global ban on .exe files (and other high risk extensions, .SCR .BAT etc).
Get vendors to implemented this in all email processing software, both client side email applications (Outlook, Thunderbird etc), server side software (Exchange etc), and web hosted solutions (outlook.com, gmail etc).
Anyone trying to send emails with these files should have the emails rejected and/or bounced back, by any system on route.
If there is genuine reason for someone to send one of these files, then they'd need to zip/7zip the file first. Which at least would force the recipient to have to go through a few hoops first, with appropriate warnings from the client software.
On second thoughts, even if this was implemented, all that would happen is the junk emails would end up with links to exe's, hosted on compromised web sites or cloud storage, and the same people dumb enough to run them from within an email, would just click the link anyway, ignoring any warnings that the file may not be safe!
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"Mozilla is ending Firefox's own XUL, XPCOM, and XBL add ons."
That will be the day I ditch Firefox (after being a staunch supporter for as long as I care to remember) and switch to the inevitable fork of the last version* to support XUL, XPCOM, and XBL.
* I actually didn't mind the Australis changes, hence why I've not switched to Palemoon, but take away my add-ons and the main branch of Firefox will be completely and utterly dead to me!
I've never really got the point of a browser plug in for PDF docs.
Yes please, open the document in a small constrained window with poor controls, and minimal functionality, rather than opening in the proper application I installed for this very purpose (Foxit in my case)!
In Chrome, I usually disable the PDF Viewer under chrome://plugins/
remember Internet Explorer is for businesses
Largely because:
a) Group policy actually does something with it
b) The clusterfuck that is SharePoint relies on it, or more accurately it's bugs, non-standards and Microsoft specific plugins. And MS are still in the pushing SharePoint at everything they can game.
Unfortunately this doesn't stop Microsoft still setting Edge as the default, uninstallable browser in Windows 10 Professional and Enterprise editions (made worse as it has a near identical icon to Internet Explorer as well). Hijacking the default PDF file association is another gem as well.
Edge doesn't support ActiveX so can't be used for those hideous older Sharepoint sites.
While I really appreciate the impending death of ActiveX, unfortunately it's not just older SharePoint sites that rely on it. It's used for horibblenesses such SharePoint Excel services integration, although at least this one is being depracated/removed in SharePoint 2016.
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