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Microsoft Say Edge May Come to Linux "Eventually"
When Microsoft announced it was switching the foundations of its home-grown Edge browser to a Chromium base we asked if it might allow the app to come to Linux.
[...] Microsoft's Kyle Pflug responded to the tux question on Twitter. He said that a Linux build is something the Edge team would "like to do eventually" but they 'can't commit to Linux just yet'.
Not yet – it's something we'd like to do eventually (our build system runs on Linux) but we're taking things one step at a time starting from Win10, and can't commit to Linux just yet.
— Kyle Pflug (@kylealden) April 8, 2019[...] That said, the availability of Edge on Linux would help web developers working on Linux. They'd no longer need to keep a Windows VM within reach solely to double check changes.
[Editor's Comment: Irrelevant submitter's comment regarding systemd removed. --JR 120454 Apr]
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Friday April 12 2019, @01:04PM (1 child)
Maybe I am just not getting it, but if the browser is based on Chromium, and it doesn't seem very much like they took a giant hammer to it and made it incredibly incompatible and then claimed it as their own--why would developers on Linux choose to use it instead of just using... Chromium and a user agent tag?
Certainly, at first, there will be secret handshakes and stuff that the vanilla browser of Chromium won't understand. I'd expect some enterprising Linux developers that are adherents to Sun Tzu's "Art of War" will understand that to have a realistic chance at success when trying to overcome and defeat ones's enemy, one must know that enemy first.
That may lead to people understanding what the secret stuff that changed is, and then release... extensions or add-ons or ini file changes or whatever, and then something that is more compatible with the now mostly compatible Edge (because they now have based it on Chromium) is good enough to test with. The whole point of MS's claimed efforts was to make it easier to develop for. They realized that the MSN network isn't going to work best on Internet Explorer anymore.
Even if the new boss of browsers is the same as the old boss (convenience is more important than privacy or security as usual), MS is heralding in a new era of monolithic browser use. I suspect that because they gave up, firefox is going to fare even worse--because if two major 'browsers' are the same and the next of the 'big three' isn't really used by that many people in comparison--development done on the cheap and out of convenience will use what came installed. A variant of Chromium.
Just like how Internet Explorer used to be... Maybe firefox will rise out of its ashes, but for some reason I think they will just blow themselves up this time around--if not for the copying Chromium features and calling them different, then for the strange behaviors that can exist in a large company without issue but not so much at a fading internet star.
Hopefully someone smart can write and release, I dunno, Cloudscape Navigator or something, which pierces through the vaporous privacy policies and ushers in a new era of user preference settings that don't depend on privacy violations as a business model. Maybe it can rain on the parade of Google and Chromium, but I won't hold my breath... Google did too good a job of becoming a type of Microsoft in all the things Microsoft wanted to be good at.
(Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Friday April 12 2019, @08:52PM
You've successfully proven that you're smarter than the management at Mozilla
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"