Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Chrome Chromium Microsoft Open Source The Internet Windows

Microsoft's Chromium-Based Edge Browser Looks Just Like Chrome (neowin.net) 128

Last December, Microsoft announced that it has embraced Google's Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop, a move that shocked many. We now have some leaked screenshots of the browser in its current state, and they appear to show a browser resembling Google Chrome. Neowin reports: A lot of the design language and icons have remained similar to what they were like before, but there are definitely many changes that will be familiar to Chrome users. For one, the options to see all your tabs and to set aside the currently open tabs have been removed compared to the current version of Edge. To the right of the address bar, you'll be able to find your extensions, as well as your profile picture similar to what Chrome looks like. Bing is integrated into the browser -- as you'd expect of a Microsoft-made browser -- and the New Tab background can be set to rotate based on Bing's image of the day. Scrolling down will reveal a personalized news feed powered by Microsoft News, similar to the old Edge. The layout of the feed can be customised based on your preference from among a number of options.

The settings options for the browser have also changed. While Edge settings are currently available via a slide-out menu from the right, the new Edge's settings are accessible through a new tab similar to Chrome. It'll show the Microsoft account you're logged into, as well as the usual array of toggles and tidbits you'd expect. Ominously, the about page for the browser now acknowledges the contributions of the Chromium project, as well as other open source software, a stark reminder that this isn't the Microsoft of yesteryear. This is a new browser, and a new Microsoft.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Microsoft's Chromium-Based Edge Browser Looks Just Like Chrome

Comments Filter:
  • Chrom-i-edge-i-um (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nwaack ( 3482871 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @06:24PM (#58221866)
    Maybe MS is going for the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" tactic here. Personally, if I were the execs at MS I would've wanted to team up with Firefox to try to take down the giant rather than pretend to be just like the giant.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      The GIANT was Microsoft. They had a 20+ year lead! They blew it. Over. And Over. And IE7-11... It's beyond even posting a link about for chrissake. Google came in, saw barely-eaten lunch, and the rest is monopoly-for-a-reason-instead.

      As much as Google is xyz_bad_thing, Microsoft has been xyz_bad_thing for 20 years, in every single direction including search monetization. Google is simply not as completely incompetent in every single thing they have attempted.

      Horse-race won, windows 10 by a lap.

      Frankly IMO i

      • by Rhipf ( 525263 )

        Would Chrome be used by as many people as it is if it wasn't side loaded with so many other programs?

        I really don't know but it would be an interesting study I think.

        People complained about Microsoft bundling IE with Windows but I don't remember Google getting much flack for side loading Chrome (there was some but not really that much).

        • People complained about Microsoft bundling IE with Windows but I don't remember Google getting much flack for side loading Chrome (there was some but not really that much).

          It wasn't a very good decision at the time, the 'browser ballot' was a mess and the result would have just been that people would have had to acquire a browser separately to install on their system even if that browser wasn't their browser of choice they would need it just to download their browser of choice. Netscape didn't lose because Microsoft bundled IE, they lost because Navigator wasn't a better browser (it wasn't necessarily worse though) so even though people had the choice they used IE. This was p

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by geek ( 5680 )

      Firefox is notoriously difficult to use for this purpose. It's why you never see it done outside of just rebranding it entirely like Waterfox and Ice Weasel.

      Mozilla has rested stubbornly on their laurels for 20 years. Turning that ship around and making changes will be hard. The other part of this though is that people do not see Google going away any time soon. Using their engine is a safe bet. Mozilla could be dead in a year based on market share, declining interest and a general perception of being last

      • Re:Chrom-i-edge-i-um (Score:4, Informative)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @03:28AM (#58223662) Journal

        Mozilla has rested stubbornly on their laurels for 20 years.

        And by stubbonly resting on their laurels you mean creating an entirely new language and surrounding ecosystem for the sole purpose of being able to write a stable multithreaded browser engine.

        Something which no one else managed.

        That's pretty much the polar opposite of resting.

        • by geek ( 5680 )

          Mozilla has rested stubbornly on their laurels for 20 years.

          And by stubbonly resting on their laurels you mean creating an entirely new language and surrounding ecosystem for the sole purpose of being able to write a stable multithreaded browser engine.

          Something which no one else managed.

          That's pretty much the polar opposite of resting.

          No one cares that they wrote a new language. It's completely irrelevant to the choice someone would make to using it. 99.9999% of the people have no fucking clue what the language is, what it does, or why it matters. It was also pointless on Mozillas part. Google didn't need to do it and they are eating their lunch. Maybe if they had just fixed their shit to begin with and not wasted all that time making a new language their browser wouldn't suck?

          • No one cares that they wrote a new language.

            People want a faster browser. That's something they care about. Firefox these days is more responsive on modern machines because it makes better use of multiple cores. That's all down to the new language. People don't care directly, but they certainly care about the implications.

            It was also pointless on Mozillas part. Google didn't need to do it and they are eating their lunch.

            Ah yes, Mozilla should have spent their money on becoming the world's largest adversiser

        • Are you kidding? Firefox had severe memory management problems for well over 10 years, resulting in chronic freezes and pauses every few seconds. They spend hardly any time trying to fix that and kept redesigning the UI many times over, despite users balking about useless cosmetics and "brand experience."

          Mozilla only ramped up efforts when market share severely tanked.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @06:30AM (#58224042) Homepage Journal

        Mozilla has rested stubbornly on their laurels for 20 years.

        You didn't notice that they replaced the entire add-on ecosystem, replaced the JS engine and ripped out tonnes of legacy code? Strange because a lot of people on Slashdot were complaining about it.

        • by geek ( 5680 )

          Mozilla has rested stubbornly on their laurels for 20 years.

          You didn't notice that they replaced the entire add-on ecosystem, replaced the JS engine and ripped out tonnes of legacy code? Strange because a lot of people on Slashdot were complaining about it.

          No they just took Chromes extension ecosystem with a handful of very small modifications. They rested on their laurels.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • the fact that its news here that when you clone a source folder, the ui looks just like the build of the folder you cloned is somewhat depressing.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @06:33PM (#58221898)

    So now, if someone complains that a site doesn't work in Edge, we can just check it in Chrome. And if it works in Chrome, we can tell the user "file a bug with Microsoft, they didn't copy Chrome correctly".

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      One fewer browser to test against...

      Yes. Now instead of testing against Firefox and Chrome, we only need to test against Firefox and Chrome. Much simpler!

  • These are squared off tabs, not rounded....courage! /s
  • One more time, "Embrace Extend"

  • by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @07:03PM (#58222008) Journal

    Still using Firefox, though. 'Cause, maybe they've changed, maybe they haven't. I'm going to give it a little longer and see.

    What I'd like to know, is what are we going to do with all those website that require Internet Explorer to work properly?

    ...besides not go to them, that is. That's not always possible. I just ran into this the other day -- an admin portal on a server that only worked with IE. It's not like I can go in and change the firmware.

    • This won't make any difference for those sites. If they require IE, then they won't work in edge or edge chromium.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The Bank of Japan's web site requires Internet Explorer. Part of it runs on an ActiveX control.

      When Microsoft announced that IE is being retired, they went into panic mode. Having stubbornly resisted making a proper site for two decades now, they now have to redevelop it from scratch.

    • IE is still shipped with Windows 10 as a completely separate browser from Edge so I guess the answer is...just use IE for those sites.
      IMO Microsoft's decision of starting from scratch when developing the engine for Edge was the right one. Trying to emulate all the broken IE's behaviours would've been madness.
      • IE is still shipped with Windows 10 as a completely separate browser from Edge so I guess the answer is...just use IE for those sites.

        IMO Microsoft's decision of starting from scratch when developing the engine for Edge was the right one. Trying to emulate all the broken IE's behaviours would've been madness.

        Oh I agree that starting over with Edge was the right thing to do, and not having backwards compatibility probably reduced the size of Edge by a couple orders of magnitude. :-)

        Yes IE still ships with Windows 10. My current company issued me a mac (Part of my responsibility is mac support) and IE is no longer supported on the mac. So for the two or three IE-only websites I have a Windows 10 instance running in a virtualbox. Which is kinda cool and kinda ridiculous at the same time. [1]

        [1] Cool in that it

  • Pretend to be chrome, people don't care, pre-installed explorerium takes over the world. Pinki and The Brain!
  • by koavf ( 1099649 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @07:32PM (#58222174) Homepage
    And the second best time is today. It is a sad day for the Web when Microsoft shifts not to making Edge's code free software and developing a community around it but throwing in their lot with the Apple/Google/Opera behemoth based on Blink/WebKit. And to be clear, I don't even have a beef with their browsers and rendering engines on a technical level (other than proprietary components of Chrome, Opera, and Safari) but how can it be good for the Web if virtually everyone is using the same browser that is controlled by a handful of mammoth companies?
    • It is a sad day for the Web when Microsoft shifts not to making Edge's code free software

      If you wanted to spread STDs can't you just screw people in traditional ways?

      • by koavf ( 1099649 )
        Making the code open would be virtually no cost and maybe someone could get something useful from it. I am sure *some* community would form around EdgeHTML. And really, we can't know how bad the code is because we can't directly audit it.
        • Making the code open would be virtually no cost and maybe someone could get something useful from it.

          What "useful" Edge feature are you interested in? A rendering engine that fails miserably to render a large portion of pages? A PDF engine which craps itself when displaying PDFs? Timeline integration (MS is writing plugins for that already).

          And really, we can't know how bad the code is because we can't directly audit it.

          The code quality itself is probably high. The result of running the code we can directly see, and even Microsoft has abandoned trying to maintain it. I don't think much good would come of making something open source and you're wrong that it comes at no cost. Edge is st

          • by koavf ( 1099649 )
            I can't speak to which features of Edge I would like to see--I've opened the browser four times for a few seconds. But either way, the world benefits from being able to poke around at high-quality code. I don't have the skills and knowledge to develop a web browser but again, I think others would. Security exploits are a low priority for me, since virtually no one uses Edge now and everyone who does is probably just passively doing it because it's the default browser on Windows. All of those users will shif
  • Shocking! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @08:18PM (#58222416)

    You mean to tell me that a relatively new customization of an open source project... still looks a lot like the original!? I'm shocked!

    • No you don't understand. This is a leaked screenshot of the current state. If this wasn't what they were planning on releasing then they wouldn't hide it and it wouldn't need leaking now would it. Therefore it's a finished product. The only reason it will be released in November is because that's when they will finally get the March 1903 Windows 10 release in a usable state.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I had a look at the screenshots and as far as I'm concerned they look absolutely nothing like Chrome at all. They display the hideously ugly appearance the Microsoft currently seems to favour. i.e. Total lack of style. Even the style in Windows 1 was much more attractive.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    If nobody was using Edge (and nobody was), then nobody will suddenly switch from Chrome to Microsoft Chrome either.

  • It was actually very expected from using absolutely other's code. But don't worry, even without this Windows 10 UI is a big fucking mess. Keep on destroying Windows, Microsoft. I just don't understand, what was seriously wrong with the original Edge (for it's purpose and market share), do they really expect Edge to become a very popular Chrome rival?
  • ntr

  • We are down to two browser, and the only thing really separating Firefox is that their backend is different.
    For now.
    How much longer until til they decide to switch to Chrome for their stuff.
  • ... more then a unique engine to show webpages is needed, so we don't back to IE6 nightmare
  • by niff ( 175639 )

    So the chrome downloader will look like chrome?

    Thanks for that smooth user experience, Microsoft.

  • The menu dots in Chrome are vertical, in MS's version they're horizontal!
    Nothing alike.

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

Working...