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by penagwin 2631 days ago
I think there's a tongue-in-cheek joke about IE/Edge being so bloated as is, that the only route they could take was to slap electron on top for even more memory usage.

All jokes aside, are they still using Chakra or switching to V8? I know there was a ton of work in node.js to make it work with chakra, not to mention edge was one of the early adopters of many ES2015/ES6 features, it seems odd to me to abandon all of that momentum.
1 comments
muizelaar 2631 days ago
They're using V8. https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/5865#issue-38...
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devoply 2631 days ago
Which begs the question why would anyone use Edge when they can use Chrome?
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flanbiscuit 2631 days ago
I _believe_ they are doing this because they are heavily investing in Electron (Skype, Visual Studio Code, Teams, more). Having both Chromium and V8 be part of Edge (and the OS) means they can remove them as bundled dependencies from Electron on Windows and lighten the payload of those apps. I wouldn't be surprised if we see future Windows builds of Electron becoming smaller because of this.

There is not proof of this, this is just a hunch I have.

Eletrino[1] and Quark[2] tried tackling this idea of using native OS engines but they seem to just be side projects and/or experiments.

[1] https://github.com/pojala/electrino

[2] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark

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petecox 2631 days ago
Porting VS Code to Chrome OS, without need for an electron-based GTK app inside a 'Linux container'?

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1031

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penagwin 2631 days ago
The alternative would be Microsoft ships windows with an outdated browser, or they include Chrome/Firefox, or they don't include any browser.

For me, I plan to use Edge to install Chrome, business as usual :P

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keithnz 2631 days ago
Not sure that's the question when you already have edge... I think it turns into...

question is, why use chrome when edge is basically chrome but already installed on windows out of the box?

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robryan 2631 days ago
Because it is the windows default. From the Microsoft perspective they maintain the branding and can still pit features on top when they need to and direct people towards bing.
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megous 2631 days ago
They trust Microsoft more than Google?
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devoply 2631 days ago
That's an interesting point. 10 years ago I would, today with Windows data mining gone mad I wouldn't. They are on par.
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thelarkinn 2631 days ago
/* Looks to other top HN Posts */

A majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities (niemanlab.org)

Ironic?

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