Web Browsers

The future is Chromium based

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Ever have that feeling where you wake up from a nap, or from a good night’s sleep and feel like you entered another dimension? I think I can add this to my top 10 WTF did I wake up to moments.

For the past few years, Microsoft has meaningfully increased participation in the open source software (OSS) community, becoming one of the world’s largest supporters of OSS projects. Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.

Translation: Our browser has sucked since the day of its conception, fuck it let’s go open source!

As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge — but other browsers as well — better on both PCs and other devices.

Extend, Embrace, Extinguish, EXTERMINATE!

Working with open source is not new for Microsoft Edge. Our mobile browser has been based on open source from its beginnings over a year ago.

Shorter Microsoft: We’ve been lazy longer than you think.

Ultimately, we want to make the web experience better for many different audiences. People using Microsoft Edge (and potentially other browsers) will experience improved compatibility with all web sites,

Shorter Microsoft: Our browser will offer you the greatest things that you’re already able to do on almost any browser that isn’t currently ours. INNOVATIVE!

Not that I care… I’m Waterfox master race.

Is YouTube running slow for you? This might be why.

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I’ve been noticing lately that YouTube loads slower than it used to… this article shines some light on possibly why.

In a thread on Twitter, Mozilla’s Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube’s Polymer redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only available in Chrome. This in turn makes the site around five times slower on competing browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Mozila Firefox. He went on to say that:

I use Waterfox and have no interest in migrating over to Chrome… do no evil my :assy:

Just when I switch to FireFox I find this out…

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So this isn’t looking very good for FireFox users…

Mozilla has announced a new Extension API for Firefox browser called ‘WebExtensions‘ that is compatible with API used by Blink-based Chrome and Opera browsers, and they want to deprecate current Firefox XPCOM/XUL/XBL APIs from 12 or 18 months from now.

I’m hoping Seamonkey gets fixed before this happens, or that the developers get the more important plugins like NoScript working under the new FireFox. I don’t see why they’re doing this, the one saving grace of FireFox is the giant library of addons you can choose from. And now they’re going to try and be more like Opera and Google Chrome? There’s a reason why people use FireFox and Seamonkey, and that’s to not use Opera and Google Chrome. I’m not the only one with a gripe about this either.

I’m all for change and everything, but this is like the changes that have been done recently to Windows 10, or someones favorite Linux distribution, unnecessary and annoying.

Time for a new browser

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Seamonkey has been pissing me off lately with a couple bugs. When I watch a video for the first time and want to adjust the volume the video freezes. Another bug and this the most annoying one, whenever I download a file it randomly fails and I have to retry. Most of the time I can get it to work on a retry, but with certain downloads it requires me to redownload a file more than twice… and that’s a waste of bandwidth and time that I don’t need. Another bug and this seems exclusive to my CentOS 7 install is the inability to play audio within the browser… So I’ve made the switch to firefox.

It’s gonna take some getting used to, not a whole lot though since it’s fairly similar to seamonkey, and that makes sense since they’re both under the mozilla umbrella. I installed my usual selection of plugins (FlashBlock, NoScript, etc), and installed NewsFox as my RSS reader. At some point I’ll get around to installing Thunderbird.

I can tell I’ll need to get used to FireFox’s aesthetic. But it shouldn’t be too difficult.