No. Google wants an open internet because search (and hence ads) needs a lot of input. Google gets that input from the open internet (and, notably, shares that input with other search engines). Facebook gets input from 1.8Bn people, and owns access to it all.
(This is a generalization; Goog certainly owns access to plenty of input: email, docs, and hosting. But it is not, I think, on the scale of FB, because frequent, casual input requires a social context.)
Google's nightmare scenario is that everyone starts to use FB Pages for content, FB ads for that content, and something FB payments to pay for services, etc. In this way FB manages to build a private (but very large) vertically integrated internet. Like Alibaba. There are only three ways to disrupt this trend: the browser, the operating system, and the hardware. Each of these mediates between FB and the user, and each one is Google's opportunity to capture attention. (And this, I think, is why engineering talent is so valuable, just as much to deny FB from making things as to make things yourself.)
The nightmare scenario for the open internet is a Facebook Phone running Facebook OS.
Because no private company should have that much control, we've been down that path and it was bad enough I thought it should be obvious.
Then there's things like adding DRM, a user hostile "feature" google shoved down our throats. Visit netflix on a linux box and you'll discover that "works with chrome" is the new "works with IE".
It works in Ubuntu. Maybe I'm missing your point. It didn't used to work on Linux at all, without jumping through a ton of hoops pretending to not be Linux.
That is exactly the attitude web developers had toward the IE/Netscape situation around the year 2000.
I think that as web developers we have the responsibility to consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences. If not us, then who?
I understand your point and I actually make sure that my websites target IE10 and up, but it usually happens after I'm done in Chrome.
Have you worked with Edge/IE? The pain starts with, as a Mac user, having to boot up a VM and ends with the, in my opinion, horrible development tools compared to Chrome or even Firefox. In this state Edge will never be more than an afterthought.
>I think that as web developers we have the responsibility [...]
I'm all for being idealistic, but you can't expect developers to use a software that lacks in performance, features and security. I'm talking about Firefox by the way, because if you really
>consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences
These things are somewhat self-reinforcing. Many sites feel slower with Firefox because they've been developed on Chrome and avoid the slower sides of Chrome, yet won't take advantage of the paths in Firefox that are faster than Chrome.
This has been especially evident on some Google properties like Google Docs, or the incident where Inbox couldn't support Firefox because it implemented a function correctly where Chrome didn't.
That said, I hardly notice any performance difference on most sites, and IMHO Firefox behaves much better with a large amount of tabs. Security is the main issue, but Firefox sandboxing is starting to roll out.
It hardly matters; the Edge teams said that any differences in behaviour compared to Webkit are bugs[1], so they've given up their position as an alternative.
For good reason. Microsoft left their browser dev abandoned for 5 years after they "won" their bitter war against Netscape. And only the Firefox (nee Phoenix) browser rising from the ashes of Netscape fought on.
Edge is a decent browser, but Microsoft was not kind nor to be trusted back then. They have to earn their new trust.
On the open-source front we now have several great browsers - Safari/Webkit (which is very strong on mobile), Chrome/Blink (was Webkit) which dominates, and Firefox/Gecko which is a solid reliable browser thats crossplatform.
won't be really hard to improve the market share:
- make edge cross platform.
- make the extensions system on par with chromes and as easy to launch an extension
- fix its UI lag on Windows 10
- maybe open source it
Honestly I think the numbers on this would be poor. OS X users use Safari, and rightfully so because the performance tends to be very good compared to other browsers on Apple hardware. At best they could hope for bundled installs with Office 365 to bloat their numbers, but I'm just not sure it's worth the effort.
The rest I'm not really sure that there is much benefit to it save the UI lag fix. The oft-tossed about technical debt is incredibly real with Microsoft's browsers, and I believe a lot of the debt that IE had was inherited by Edge to ensure a transition for Microsoft's clientele relying on the IE support for their sites.
Unless Microsoft wants to branch into having a "business browser" and a "consumer browser", they can't give users a clean and non-burdened version of a Microsoft Internet Browser. I really doubt they're going to want to deal with the headache of splitting the focus to two versions. They can make all the changes they want public facing, but as long as they have a sacrosanct part of the browser that can't be altered or removed, they're destined to be an afterthought if a thought at all.
My point is OSX + Linux is like 5% of the desktop OS. No matter how awesome Edge team made it, 1-2% more users will do VERY VERY little compared to the 50% of users they have lost on desktop machines in the past 5 years. They would be absolutely insane to even spend 1 money on adding new OSX users when Windows users (who get their app for FREE and with NO WORK) are leaving left and right. Gotta fix the bleeding before you worry about the lipstick.
Opening a new tab on Edge for me takes 2-3 seconds - and it feels like it freezes while the page loads. On the same machine Chrome and Firefox peform much better in this respect.
p.s. when the page loads in Edge its actually quite fast and scrolling feels smoother than other browsers - but the initial delay breaks the whole experience for me.
Slow how to me it still loads any website the fastest. The biggest complain about chrome is that it is bloated specially if you use more than few tabs. But I don't see google working on fixing or improving that much simply because using more than a few tabs is an edge case which probably less than 1% of the users use.
> using more than a few tabs is an edge case which probably less than 1% of the users use
Using basic functionality of a browser (opening multiple tabs at a time) is an edge case? Every person I know that uses Chrome has at least 5-10 tabs open at a time. I wouldn't call it an edge case, but I would guess that the minority uses less than 3-4 tabs at a time.
That's the Endless Treadmill. Netscape Navigator is slow, use this new and fast browser called IE. [time passes] IE is slow, use this new and fast browser called Firefox. [time passes] Firefox is slow, use this new and fast browser called Chrome. Chrome is slow...[to be continued]
Neither is Firefox. (Unless you clobber them with a bazillion extensions, leave Flash always-on and open 3000 tabs) However, that is the perception.
I agree that in the recent years there's been a major push to make browsers great again, but the speed comes at expense of memory bloat. This might be an acceptable tradeoff - until you need to do something non-browser as well.
Firefox has come a long way since the day I switched that's for sure, but it was slow back then, and that was before I even had the necessity for any extensions.
Even now, for me Chrome cold boots far faster than Firefox does - after doing a taskkill /f /im chrome.exe, chrome opens anywhere from 0.4 to 1.2 seconds after hitting "ok" on a run dialog with "chrome" entered in it, but the same thing with "firefox" in it takes from 3 to 8 seconds to open.
And that's not even a fair test either, as chrome has about 20 or so extensions installed and firefox has none.
Don't even get me started on the android variants of the two either, firefox just feels sluggish and unresponsive next to chrome.