Microsoft Edge Is Coming Out For Linux Next Month

[Mike Frett]

"Our mission to bring Microsoft Edge to the platforms our customers use daily"
"Our customers" use Linux? Moving away from Windows?

Anyway, I'll try it. Can't promise I'll keep it, but I will try it.

[Ardje]

If anyone from Microsoft happens across this forum, please do something right and bring Office to Linux!! (hint office 365 web edition is a joke for real users... it doesnt count).

Actually, I've always considered Office, or word in particular a big farce.
A very big program to type a single letter and keep you occupied with that for a year.
Now, if anything commercial was great, it was wordperfect. It really was structured, and it worked on almost anything. From linux to sunos to other unices, to dos, to windows. With or without graphical head. Yes, it worked on plain serial terminals.
Word and alikes (applixware, expensive software that I never used because it was like Word, staroffice/libreoffice) just don't grasp the concept of structure. And especially word tries to hide the chaos hard, so you can never fix the stupid mistakes you make when there is no structure.

So please stop with office and bring some better software to the table that's actual usable instead of a money sink.
For now I have to do stuff with pdflatex, or luatex it is currently I think.

[aksdb]

"Our mission to bring Microsoft Edge to the platforms our customers use daily"
"Our customers" use Linux? Moving away from Windows?

Microsoft doesn't sell just Windows anymore. Very prominently there's Office and Azure; both could be interesting for Linux users as well. So yes, Linux users can very well be customers of Microsoft, without licensing Windows.

[Ardje]

And this Edge it's not even the old Internet Explorer, it's Chromium as everybody here know that very well. Microsoft can't re-instantiate their monopoly on the World Wide Web but Google can do it make web compatible with Chrome not with W3Consortium standards.

Akshually...
khtml->webkit->webkit+blink instead of webcore

So almost all browsers already do the same same...

And then there is netscape...
That's actually the last browser that always got it right with respect to X-Servers... Mozilla is just a shim compared to how good Netscape was with respect to following the X-server protocols.

[kpedersen]

Yes, but often open-sources is used as an excuse to have unstable ABI's.

It should not be necessary to rebuild a binary between distributions or even releases.

In practice, yes, it is annoying as hell. I also dislike the way most UNIX-like software is not relocatable (so I can't just have an old prefix in my home directory).

But in some ways this does force people to maintain their build system and prevent it from going crusty each year. Much of my day to day work used to be "add this minor improvement to this tool". Sounds easy enough but then it turns out it was written in Borland C++ Build 6... It is always Borland C++ Builder 6 haha!
Which meant before I could even start on the feature I had to modernize a lot of the code and build system.
If developers had been forced to maintain it year on year (just to run the darn thing) I could have jumped in immediately with the fun stuff

But before you get a stable ABI, it helps to have a stable API and if you look at the ever changing nature of software like Gnome 3... unstable ABI's are the least of our problems.

[Volta]

Only ms clowns like birdie will use this crap.

[birdie]

We all know that "most" is not enough for digital preservation. But from my experience, "most" is highly exaggerated. Granted, your random one-window-diablo-character-editor will probably work, but Diablo won't. Without any patches. Same for e.g. accounting software I tried. We already talked about it in this forum some month ago where you stated that compatibility is 100%. At least we're now down to 'most'.

Yes, they tried hard not to break the ABI, but in the end, they introduced subtle bugs which made software crash in the best case. Who knows if there are examples of breakage where you get a different result shown in some window?

But source level compatibility in Linux is a freaking joke as well! And, yes, games from that era often do not work because too much was hardcoded in them which doesn't exist today, like a screen resolution, bit depth, GPUs, graphics APIs, timers, etc. etc. etc.

[Volta]

But source level compatibility in Linux is a freaking joke as well! And, yes, games from that era often do not work because too much was hardcoded in them which doesn't exist today, like a screen resolution, bit depth, GPUs, graphics APIs, timers, etc. etc. etc.

You're a joke. Last year I played native UT2k4 perfectly fine.

[dpeterc]

Let's hear it for Motif!

CDE is built on top of Motif, so what is your point?
I can compile Motif on modern Linux or Linux from 20 years ago; I also use it on MacOS Catalina.

As for the Edge browser on Microsoft, I don't understand all this hatred. People who do not like it, are not forced to use it.
I am sure that for a web developer who works on Linux, it is very beneficial to be able to run and test their development on several browsers on the same computer.

[Klassic Six]

But source level compatibility in Linux is a freaking joke as well! And, yes, games from that era often do not work because too much was hardcoded in them which doesn't exist today, like a screen resolution, bit depth, GPUs, graphics APIs, timers, etc. etc. etc.

What is your point?? Not willing to fixing bugs goes way back to late 90s to keep the ABI (air quote) stable is a joke.