Microsoft Builds Open-Source Browser Using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS 74
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's new browser, Edge, has a new rendering engine, EdgeHTML. Like Edge, the new rendering engine is only available in Windows 10, but it does more than just power the company's new browser: It's also readily available to developers. To show off what EdgeHTML can do, Microsoft has built a browser using predominantly JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Next, the company released the browser on the Windows Store and the sample code on GitHub.
Still uses WebView (Score:5, Insightful)
You could write a web browser in any language as long as you could call out to external libraries.
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I think the point is to show that it's not just iphone apps that can be crippled browsers masquerading as an app.
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yeah, how many apps are just a webview and an iAd view, basically monetizing somebody else's content.
Re:Still uses WebView (Score:4, Interesting)
You could write a web browser in any language and claim it is open source, even if you call out to external proprietary libraries to do all of the grunt-work.
FTFY, but only to properly frame the BS that Microsoft is trying to perpetrate. You see, EdgeHTML is quite proprietary [wikipedia.org].
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What's the last language you used without calling out to an external library?
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English. I have an extensive library of my own...
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"Gesundheit"
"Voilà"
"Tacos"
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English absorbs words and they become part of the language, albeit ones with roots in different languages.
Dude, we didn't even change the pronunciation of "taco", or those other words (much). They're not loanwords if you're trying to use them faithfully and you know what language they belong to. Ice-a creamu, that's a loanword. CD pray-er, debatable.
Re: Still uses WebView (Score:2)
Forth, you insensitive clod.
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Hmm, C, if you count me writing the parts of the library I needed. Especially C/C++/Assembler if you count statically linking and building all libraries from full source code, which is actually very common. But using a third party proprietary object-only library, that's really really rare for me.
Sounds like turtles (Score:2)
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Browsers are not for cows. It is not cows all the way down. There is no need to moo.
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So fork it. It's open source. Or is it? The title suggests it is but TFS mentions "sample code" on GH. Which is it?
Also I thought open source was Unamerican according to MS?
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Oh wait, I just read it again and guess I misunderstood the first time.. This browser written in HTML/CSS/JS is the sample, demonstrating the awesomeness this EdgeHTML engine.
Anyway, I'm not going to be able to check it out due to my Unamerican OS.
Re:More spyware and ads? (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah... it isn't a browser, its a skin for the HTML/CSS renderer and JS engine. I'm not sure what they are trying to prove: Mozilla's gecko hasn't exactly taken the application world by storm... and *it* is actually crossplatform.
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lso I thought open source was Unamerican according to MS?
You are referencing a statement made almost 15 years ago. Shocking that a culture can change, right?
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True enough. Still, I wasn't aware of any major change of heart in their part. I haven't been following them too closely, but I would expect to have heard about something that significant. Would love to be wrong, actually.
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I'm a linux / android guy who only uses windows on my work assigned locked down laptop. But my desire to run those OSs stems from their open source nature (although it did start with a frustration of windows - but that was over 10 years ago.)
But I have been reading a lot of stories on slashdot that at least some divisions are becoming open source friendly.
Re: More spyware and ads? (Score:2)
They're also developing a bunch of cross platform stuff that isn't open source, but legitimately runs on other platforms. Like Cortana, one of the big new features they're using to market Windows 10? That's in open beta on Android, and they will be releasing it for iOS as well.
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It's more shocking that it can, but doesn't.
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So fork it. It's open source. Or is it? The title suggests it is but TFS mentions "sample code" on GH. Which is it?
Also I thought open source was Unamerican according to MS?
No, it's a "cancer", as per Steve Ballmer (although technically he was referring to the Linux software kernel).
Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," during a media interview with the Chicago Sun-Times.
I heard you like browsers (Score:5, Funny)
I heard you like browsers, so I put a browser in your browser so you can browse while you browse
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Firefox did it first, of course: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
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I heard you like browsers, so I put a browser in your browser so you can browse while you browse
Came here to look for this comment. Did not leave disappointed.
Duh (Score:2, Insightful)
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It's just a WebView component embedded inside a web page.
One thing I wasn't able to deduce from the article is whether or not "x-ms-webview" components can exist in publicly served webpages. Are the only for use in Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications?
If they are available elsewhere (ex. open up a local html file with one, or from an intranet site, or from the public internet), it would seem that this *could* be a step backwards in some ways. To quote one of those articles:
The crux of the functionality stems around the powerful WebView control. Offering a comprehensive set of APIs, it overcomes several of the limitations which encumber iframes, such as framebusting sites and document loading events. Additionally, the x-ms-webview, how one declares a WebView in HTML, provides new functionality that is not possible with an iframe, such as better access to local content and the ability to take screenshots.
... so the page loading the component could, or example, be a really clean phishin
Er.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I work at Microsoft and generally feel glad about open-source advancements made around the company but this hardly warrants a "open-source browser" headline. Welcome to 2005 [mozilla.org].
But doesn't this integrate better with Win10 than the Mozilla engine you linked to? MS is trying to make WIn10 appealing and it appears that the future of desktop applications will really be a better integrated browser which is the ultimate irony when one considers the legal battles MS encountered when it made IE so tightly integrated with the desktop.
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Maybe you're not updated, but forget Mono... .NET itself is open source now.
As for the track record; it's growing: http://microsoft.github.io/ [github.io]
*Yawn*. Why would anyone outside the MS ecosystem possibly care? I am glad for them, but nobody else is going to GAS.
What License? (Score:2)
If it's not GPL but another "you can look, but we own everything you add, you cannot distribute it to anyone, and we can close it up anytime we want" license, I think I'll pass.
A browser written in HTML, JS and CSS? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Well I just wrote this shell using nothing but Bash, so nyah nyah nyah!
That's nothing...one time I moved a file from one place to another using only the command line.
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That's nothing...one time I moved a file from one place to another using only the command line.
I think I know how you did it. It's true you generally need a mouse and a GUI to actually _move_ a file, as you need to drag it one pixel at a time, otherwise you run into Zeno's paradox. You can't just instantly quantum-leap a file into another position, at least not without reversing the polarity and crossing the streams. However, there are command-line utilities such as xautomation [hoopajoo.net] to control the mouse pointer, so presumably you used one of those to automatize the movement.
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I think I know how you did it.
I hate to reveal my secret, but I will tell you that it involved typing mysterious, cryptic things that are better left to the imagination.
Re: A browser written in HTML, JS and CSS? (Score:1)
I know how to use the pip command in CP/M too.
This is a replacement of MSHTML (Score:2)
This is to get people away from using the ubiquitous MSHTML ActiveX control.