Microsoft’s curiously vague announcement about moving the Edge web browser to Chromium has unleashed a torrent of questions about the future. Well, here’s the answer to one of the biggest questions.
Yes, the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge will support Google’s Chrome’s far more voluminous and capable library of browser extensions.
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At least that’s the intention.
“It’s our intention to support existing Chrome extensions,” Microsoft’s Kyle Alden explained on Reddit.
So that’s great news.
Alden also spoke to the schedule for moving both Edge and Windows 10 to Chromium. As noted, the web browser will happen first. But switching over the OS—remember, web-based UWP apps and the PWA engine in Windows 10 both use EdgeHTML today—to Chromium would break things. So Microsoft will offer both side-by-side so that developers can move to Chromium on their own schedules.
“Existing UWP apps (including PWAs in the Store) will continue to use EdgeHTML/Chakra without interruption,” he explains. “We don’t plan to shim under those with a different engine. We do expect to offer a new WebView that apps can choose to use based on the new rendering engine.”
He also addresses whether new Chromium-based Edge will let users install PWAs from the browser, just like Chrome does.
“We expect to provide support for PWAs to be installed directly from the browser (much like with Chrome) in addition to the current Store approach,” he said, though it’s worth noting that the Edge team had previously planned this feature on the old browser too. “We’re not ready to go into all the details yet but PWAs behaving like native apps is still an important principle for us so we’ll be looking into the right system integrations to get that right.”
And yes, the new Edge is coming to Xbox One.
“We are at the early stages of our journey, but it is our intention to bring the next version of Microsoft Edge to all Microsoft devices,” he wrote.
So good news all around.
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#380115">In reply to brduffy:</a></em></blockquote><p>Developing for iOS or Android native makes sense as long as you are going to create small utilities, games, or consumption apps. The fact is that Windows remains the biggest market for native productivity applications by a wide margin. </p><p><br></p><p>If you don't insist on the "latest and greatest" tools, many of MS's legacy non-UWP tools still work fine and can be used to create first-class applications even if they're not being enhanced. One rarely uses all the capabilities of a particular tool anyway. In some cases the legacy tools are still being enhanced. High DPI support was added to Windows Forms just last year (for Windows 10).</p><p><br></p><p> MacOS is a much smaller market, but perhaps the platform tools are more stable than MS's, I don't know.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#380204">In reply to curtisspendlove:</a></em></blockquote><p>I'm not clear on what you consider "consumer applications". There are millions of PCs and Macs that aren't used for business purposes but are used by people at home.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#380498">In reply to curtisspendlove:</a></em></blockquote><p>I'm not sure if I agree with your definition since PCs were not historically considered consumer devices even though many consumers were using them at home. But given that definition I'd say that any program that is used exclusively by businesses is not a consumer application and everything else is. </p><p><br></p><p>Given that podcasts can be easily listened to in a browser a podcast player sounds rather superfluous on the desktop. The fact that such development is taking place in the appropriate environment doesn't seem to have many negative implications for the desktop.</p><p><br></p><p>While I'm sure not every use of a markdown editor is professional, it's hardly something commonly used by average users at home.</p><p><br></p><p>Although a lot of money in total has been made from selling iOS and Android apps, it's not clear if the median revenue earned on those platforms is any better than it would be on Windows or the Mac. </p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#380686">In reply to curtisspendlove:</a></em></blockquote><p>There's no point in us exchanging anecdotal stories about people who love particular applications or small software development companies. In the absence of real statistics we would both be just speculating. </p><p><br></p><p>We do know that about 80% to 95% of all mobile apps are free although we don't know how many of them get revenue from in-app purchases.</p><p><br></p><p>Personally I find sophisticated email and calendar apps to be overkill, but that's just me.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#380706">In reply to curtisspendlove:</a></em></blockquote><p>IMO most of the development on iOS and Android is either based on "loving the craft" or extremely wishful thinking, not based on actual financial success. </p><p><br></p><p>I think your definition of "consumer" applications is still drifting around. There are many applications in Windows that are used by consumers. </p><p><br></p><p>I don't see why developers should feel threatened by Microsoft killing WMP or Groove. MS doesn't have to be involved in everything and Groove was never successful. In fact Groove was available on many platforms so its failure had nothing to do with Windows.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#380216">In reply to JG1170:</a></em></blockquote><p>"It's time to accept that the Android App ecosystem is where the World is going"</p><p><br></p><p>The world of mobile, mostly, the world of the desktop, mostly not. If Android was going to dominate on the desktop we should have already seen a healthy market share for Chromebooks and it hasn't happened. Perhaps if Google were to pull a UWP in reverse, depreciating the current mobile architecture in favor of a full-featured and powerful desktop OS , it might happen, but it's still would be a long-shot.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#380323">In reply to JG1170:</a></em></blockquote><p>Android was designed from the ground up to be a mobile OS and the limitations of that architecture don't go away just because somebody creates a fork of it. A better alternative to Windows or MacOS would be a new OS that was designed with an architecture and features that compete with the productivity aspects of those legacy OS's. </p><p><br></p><p>IMO the closest thing to a "productivity-lite" environment is web apps and Chromebooks as originally envisioned is the logical platform for that middle road. The fact that Chromebooks haven't done all that well suggests that users aren't all that interested in a middle solution. Adding Android apps seems more an act of desperation than being part of the plan.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#380547">In reply to Wondering_Bard:</a></em></blockquote><p>There's a long history of developers complaining when their ideological beliefs are in conflict with business priorities . Back in the days when IE was dominant web devs complained that they couldn't use the same HTML for IE as they did for other browsers despite the fact that those other browsers were irrelevant from a business perspective at that time. </p><p><br></p><p>So this sort of dev "bitching" isn't the exclusive behavior of any particular segment of the developer community.</p>