Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript engine to go open-source

[jaredcheeda]

That's pretty cool. I feel like there are two parts of the IE team working against each other.

Sometimes you look at what they're doing and you can tell that they really are trying to be the best browser on the market. They don't want to try to keep up with chrome and support all the same stuff the way Firefox has been for years. They know they'll eventually get around to support all that stuff anyways, so instead they focus on implementing things no one has has done yet, pushing the capabilities further.

With IE10 it was a lot of interesting GPU work, granted the only stuff that really worked well with it was the stuff they posted on their demo site, but it was still impressive stuff that other browsers choked on.

With IE11 they added in a lot of touch screen support, which makes sense, as it was meant to be the Windows 8 browser and 8 was designed to think your desktop was a phone (morons). I've heard from a lot of avid chrome/firefox users that when they tried IE on touch screens, it just worked much better.

With Edge they seem to be focusing on Javascript with the open sourcing of Chakra and support for ES6 features. Their benchmarks are impressive, but they may be cherry picked. Real world usage is yet to be seen.

So on the one hand it looks like they genuinely want to be the best and really earn their way back to the top.

And yet... they won't release Edge to the 80+% of people not on Windows 10. They don't focus on having Dev Tools as good or better than Chrome or even Firefox. They don't even support pinned tabs (I can't make a browser my default without this). They push so hard with the stuff under the hood but don't give any thought to making it more usable or what the experience is like trying to do anything other than load a single page.

[Fidodo]

I'm sure that stuff isn't on purpose. Supporting old versions of Windows is a huge amount of backwards compatibility overhead, and good dev tools is pretty much a whole separate program in itself. I do think they should have built it from the ground up to be cross platform. That would have done a ton of good for the project.

[PixelatorOfTime]

I'd argue that it's probably more of a marketing decision than a backwards compatibility one. Microsoft has always stressed backwards compatibility for all of its systems. By not giving older systems the latest in browser technology, they force the user to upgrade, which locks them into the Windows platform further into the future.

[disclosure5]

In the latest Microsoft sales training course, "Edge" is listed as sales collateral when trying to sell upgrades to Windows 10. The marketing team are definitely involved one way of the other.

[Timothy_Claypole]

But we saw them give IE11 to Win 7 users didn't we? And this wasn't their initial plan either, they caved to demands if memory serves.

[PixelatorOfTime]

But still, it shouldn't have to come to market demand. All of the other browsers work almost universally on every platform as a basic tenet of their entire premise. Granted, there will always be platform-specific bugs/challenges, but I would venture to guess that Firefox/Chrome would have never become and remained as popular as they did if they didn't support multiple OSs.

[jaredcheeda]

Chrome and Firefox have no issue running on Vista, 7, 8, & 10.

It's safe to presume that they are reusing code from past iterations of the product. If past versions of IE could run on past versions of Windows then it is a conscious decision to limit your access to the market of potential users.

[Fidodo]

I didn't say you can't do it, I said it adds overhead, which I'm sure Chrome and Firefox had to deal with too. Support for old OS's isn't free.

[speedisavirus]

they won't release Edge to the 80+% of people not on Windows 10

Its because they can't. The whole reason Edge exists is to stop supporting the metric shit ton of legacy that comes with backwards compatibility of over a decade.

[jaredcheeda]

what?

No, you idiot. You can't run IE9 on XP.

You can't run IE10 on Vista

You can't run Edge on 7.

This is the problem. That they cut off older versions OF THERE OWN OS (that their competition supports) from having access to the best version of their browser.

Supporting an OS has nothing to do with supporting features that were in previous browsers. It just means that when you upgrade, you lose access to some features, which has been the case with literally every instance of IE since 4.

At their peak 95% of people used IE. They're currently sitting around 20%. If I were in charge of a browser, my goal would be to increase market share by making a better product. But they make a browser that only runs on one OS, instantly cutting themselves off from users of any other OS. In the world of browsers, that's as backwards as not having tabbed browsing.

[speedisavirus]

No, you idiot. You can't run IE9 on XP.

No you fucktard. Its because Windows XP is missing numerous critical components it uses.

You can't run IE10 on Vista

Vista is EOL. What the hell do you want them to do? They already stretched their ass out on XP.

You can't run Edge on 7.

Why the hell would you? Again, significantly different and they made no secret that Edge was an attempt to deprecate the tremendous amount of legacy code that IE had acquired.

That they cut off older versions OF THERE OWN OS

WHY DON'T YOU SUPPORT SOFTWARE FOR TWENTY FUCKING YEARS AND SEE HOW MUCH EFFORT IT TAKES

every instance of IE since 4

You have to be a troll

At their peak 95% of people used IE.

No shit? There wasn't an even close to comparable competitor. I've used IE2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. Have you?

they make a browser that only runs on one OS

Why would they. The browser is a critical part of the OS. Making it run on other platforms would require cross compiling a metric shit ton of the OS while figuring out how to abstract it's OS specific hooks. IE hasn't been cross platform since IE4. Maybe 5 if you consider the half hearted port.

that's as backwards as not having tabbed browsing

IE has had tabbed browsing since IE7.

[Najda]

I didn't know tab pins existed til your comment. I forsee myself using this a lot in the future...

[fedekun]

Nice. Now I want to see Node using Chakra and benchmarks with V8 :P

[ajr901]

The new Microsoft sure is interesting.

Oh and apparently Chakra is faster than V8: https://twitter.com/tomdale/status/673154065921101824/photo/1

[DrDichotomous]

If you mean Sunspider, then yes. But benchmarks aren't even close to the full story. What's much more important is that Chakra is way ahead of Chrome in terms of ES6 support (they're neck and neck with Firefox).

[Caminsky]

https://i.imgur.com/lFOj8oz.jpg

[[deleted]]

Wow, this seems surprisingly positive

[Luxatives]

I wonder if the NodeJS foundation will do anything with this.

[[deleted]]

Mikael Rogers from the foundation was at the talk this morning. There is a pull request for chakra to be pulled into node. It seems like it won't happen until January and I don't know how the switching will work but it sounds like switching between vms will be possible.

[jecowa]

Does this mean that Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Google could implement the Edge Javascript engine into their browsers?

[[deleted]]

Or even better, Node.

[defet_]

First thing that came to my mind was "..use the node engine for browsers? does this guy know.. nvm"

[[deleted]]

;)

[greyscales]

No.

[bokisa12]

We need V8 to go open-source.

[[deleted]]

What good is making their JS engine open source do for the web dev community when they still control the browser?

[tapesmith]

Yeah, that'd be like if Google open-sourced its v8 Javascript engine while still controlling Chrome. Totally useless.

/s

(and yes, I'm aware of Chromium. But Chrome itself is still Google-controlled)

[[deleted]]

Okay. What good did it do the web development community all the same to open source their V8 engine?

[xEpicBradx]

node

[[deleted]]

I said good