Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern on the Edge team at Microsoft, says one of the reasons why Microsoft had to ditch EdgeHTML rendering engine in Edge browser and switch to Chromium was to keep up with the changes (some of which were notorious) that Google pushed to its sites. These changes were designed to ensure that Edge and other browsers could not properly run Google's sites, he alleged. Responding to a comment, he wrote: "For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.

For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.

Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced -- and they're the ones who looked into it personally. To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further. And this is only one case.

SwiftOnSecurity, regarding Microsoft's switch to Chromium as Windows's built-in rendering engine: This isn't about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork. Electron is a cancer murdering both macOS and Windows as it proliferates. Microsoft must offer a drop-in version with native optimizations to improve performance and resource utilization. This is the end of desktop applications. There's nowhere but JavaScript. John Gruber of DaringFireball: I don't share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps, but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform that attracts people who care. But I worry. In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that should have been nothing but good news for the platform -- more users means more attention from developers. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see.

The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps -- users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right -- were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don't know or don't care about what makes for a good Mac app.

With the news earlier today that Microsoft is embracing Chromium for Edge browser development on the desktop, VentureBeat decided to see what the other browser companies had to say about the decision. From the report: Google largely sees Microsoft's decision as a good thing, which is not exactly a surprise given that the company created the Chromium open source project. "Chrome has been a champion of the open web since inception and we welcome Microsoft to the community of Chromium contributors. We look forward to working with Microsoft and the web standards community to advance the open web, support user choice, and deliver great browsing experiences."

Mozilla meanwhile sees Microsoft's move as further validation that users should switch to Firefox. "This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice. We are not going to concede that Google's implementation of the web is the only option consumers should have. That's why we built Firefox in the first place and why we will always fight for a truly open web." Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web. Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge) all have their own corporate interests.

Opera thinks Microsoft is making a smart move, because it did the same thing six years ago. "We noticed that Microsoft seems very much to be following in Opera's footsteps. Switching to Chromium is part of a strategy Opera successfully adopted in 2012. This strategy has proved fruitful for Opera, allowing us to focus on bringing unique features to our products. As for the impact on the Chromium ecosystem, we are yet to see how it will turn out, but we hope this will be a positive move for the future of the web."

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today embraced Google's Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. Microsoft wants to make some big changes, which it says will happen "over the next year or so." The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

And yes, this means Chrome extension support.

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and is building a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium, news blog Windows Central reported Monday. From the report: Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 back in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but launched with a plethora of issues which resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain any traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser. Codenamed Anaheim, this new web browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.

If you're a tab-hoarder, and you use Chrome browser, Google may have some news for you soon. The company is working on a scrollable tabstrip to make it easier for users to navigate through tabs, a developer was quoted as saying. Peter Casting, who works on Chrome UI, said, "scrollable tabstrip is in the works. In the meantime, try shift-clicking and ctrl-clicking to select multiple tabs at once, then drag out to separate Windows to group tabs by Window." TechDows, which first reported the development: We're expecting this as the related bug, the 'UI: tab overflow' bug created 10 years back, reports opening too many tabs causes add tab button (+) to disappear and tabs do not scroll then, the expected result has been mentioned as 'scrollable tabs.' Further reading: Google is raiding Firefox for Chrome's next UI features.

Microsoft and Google engineers appear to be working on a Chrome browser running on Windows on ARM. "9to5Google has spotted various commits by Microsoft engineers assisting with the development of Chrome for Windows 10 on ARM," reports The Verge. "The details follow claims by a Qualcomm executive last month that the chip maker was working on an ARM version of Chrome for Windows 10." From the report: A native ARM version of Chrome would make a lot of sense for Qualcomm, Microsoft, and Google. Chrome is one of the most popular desktop apps available on Windows 10, and without a native version for ARM it's difficult to take ARM-powered Windows 10 devices seriously for many. However, it was only last year that Microsoft pulled Google's Chrome installer from the Windows Store, because it violated store policies. Those policies restrict rival browsers to using Microsoft's own Edge rendering engine, specifically that "products that browse the web must use the appropriate HTML and JavaScript engines provided by the Windows Platform." Microsoft also blocked similar browser apps for Windows 8.

Unless Microsoft relaxes its rules then this native Chrome support for Windows on ARM won't be found in the Windows Store. Microsoft and Google's work could still help improve performance for Electron-based apps like Slack and Visual Studio Code which rely on parts of Chromium.

"The HTTP-over-QUIC experimental protocol will be renamed to HTTP/3 and is expected to become the third official version of the HTTP protocol, officials at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have revealed," writes Catalin Cimpanu via ZDNet. "This will become the second Google-developed experimental technology to become an official HTTP protocol upgrade after Google's SPDY technology became the base of HTTP/2." From the report: HTTP-over-QUIC is a rewrite of the HTTP protocol that uses Google's QUIC instead of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) as its base technology. QUIC stands for "Quick UDP Internet Connections" and is, itself, Google's attempt at rewriting the TCP protocol as an improved technology that combines HTTP/2, TCP, UDP, and TLS (for encryption), among many other things. Google wants QUIC to slowly replace both TCP and UDP as the new protocol of choice for moving binary data across the Internet, and for good reasons, as test have proven that QUIC is both faster and more secure because of its encrypted-by-default implementation (current HTTP-over-QUIC protocol draft uses the newly released TLS 1.3 protocol).

In a mailing list discussion last month, Mark Nottingham, Chair of the IETF HTTP and QUIC Working Group, made the official request to rename HTTP-over-QUIC as HTTP/3, and pass it's development from the QUIC Working Group to the HTTP Working Group. In the subsequent discussions that followed and stretched over several days, Nottingham's proposal was accepted by fellow IETF members, who gave their official seal of approval that HTTP-over-QUIC become HTTP/3, the next major iteration of the HTTP protocol, the technology that underpins today's World Wide Web.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via MIT Technology Review: A lumpy disc of dark-gray steel covers a bench in the lab space of Boston Metal, an MIT spinout located a half-hour north of its namesake city. It's the company's first batch of the high-strength alloy, created using a novel approach to metal processing. Instead of the blast furnace employed in steelmaking for centuries, Boston Metal has developed something closer to a battery. Specifically, it's what's known as an electrolytic cell, which uses electricity -- rather than carbon -- to process raw iron ore.

If the technology works at scale as cheaply as the founders hope, it could offer a clear path to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from one of the hardest-to-clean sectors of the global economy, and the single biggest industrial source of climate pollution. After working on the idea for the last six years, the nine-person company is shifting into its next phase. If it closes a pending funding round, the startup plans to build a large demonstration facility and develop an industrial-scale cell for steel production. The process to produce steel results in around 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere annually, "adding up to around 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to a recent paper in Science," MIT Technology Review reports.

The electrolytic cell that Boston Metal developed was realized after it was proposed to be used to extract oxygen from the moon's surface. "The by-product was molten metal," the report says. "But producing something like steel would require an anode made from cheap materials that wouldn't corrode under high temperatures or readily react with iron oxide. In 2013, [MIT chemist] Sadoway and MIT metallurgy researcher Antoine Allanore published a paper in Nature concluding that anodes made from chromium-based alloys might check all those boxes."

Vivaldi announced Wednesday it has released a major update to its namesake desktop web browser, remaining as one of the rare companies that is still attempting to fight Google's monopoly in the space. Major features in Vivaldi 2.0 include: Syncing browsers across computers:Version 2.0 allows users to sync data, including bookmarks, passwords, autofill information, and history. Vivaldi uses its own servers to store the data, which is all encrypted end-to-end.
Panels: These are expandable, multi-tasking dashboards that can be opened in the sidebar.
Tab management: Additional features are included that allow for better searching through tabs, stacking them, and even renaming them.
History: Offers new ways to track your usage, including generating statistics and a visual history feature. Vivaldi was founded by Jon von Tetzchner, who also co-founded Opera and served as its chief executive for a number of years. Jon has been vocal about what many find unfair tactics employed by Google and Microsoft to aggressively expand the user bases of their respective browsers. Slashdot had a chance to speak with Jon recently: Slashdot: One of the biggest complaints that people have about browsers today is just how much memory they consume. Is it a lost-cause? What is Vivaldi doing to address this?
Jon: This is very true. Browsers can use a lot of memory. We have worked hard to reduce that load. The most important thing we have done there is the lazy loading of tabs. When you have a lot of tabs, you use a lot of memory, but with Vivaldi, we will only load the tabs once you need them. We also have the ability to hibernate background tabs, by right clicking the tab bar, which will free up a lot of memory. Besides this we are always looking at how to make the browser use less memory and be faster. There is a lot of details there, but with the feedback from our users, we continue to improve every single part of the browser.

Slashdot: You are offering a browser, and a web email client and service provider. Is Vivaldi attempting to offer a catalog of services? And if so, what more could we expect from the company in the long-term?
Jon: The focus for us is the browser, but we believe the browser should be able to do more than it does today, so we will continue to expand on the features we offer in the browser. We have been open about the fact that we aim to provide an email client in the browser, but that will come in the future, but we are, as you pointed out, providing the free email service. This is in addition to our free blog, forums and sync service. We feel there is a need for these services, free from ads and free from building of super profiles. Our free webmail service is thus without ads and we do not scan mails, except for spam and viruses. We will continue to add services to support the browser or where we feel a service supplements the browser in a good way.

Slashdot: You have been vocal about some of the tactics Google and Microsoft use to promote their own browsers. Following the news cycle, we don't think things have changed much. What's your view on it?
Jon: No, sadly things have not changed much. Microsoft continues to push their browser in their operating system, at times taking over the default browser as well. They also block competing browsers on their Windows 10S. Google sadly blocks some competing browsers from using their services, even browsers such as Vivaldi, that is based on Chromium. We need to change our identity when visiting many Google services. I guess my feeling is that those large companies should not and should not need to behave this way.

Slashdot: Chrome continues to be a market leader. Firefox, despite some of its recent changes, has lost some of the market. How hard is it for a browser company to survive these days? And why is it important that someone continues to fight back?
Jon: We all know that browser choice is a good thing, even more so than for most other products. The browser is your view into the Internet and we all spend a lot of time there. Healthy competition means product innovation and lower prices (this is not only about the price of the product, but also what you have to give up in other ways, such as your private information). Monopolies tend slow down innovation and also there is a tendency for them to use their position in one market to attack another.
It is not trivial to compete with these large corporations, but it is something we enjoy. We fight for our users and for the future of the Internet. That is definitely something worth fighting for.

Slashdot: Are you folks still working on a mobile browser?
Jon: Indeed we are. We aim to get it out there as soon as we can. We are ramping up the team after then 2.0 release to move faster. Further reading: The Next Web, and VentureBeat.

An anonymous reader quotes Digital Trends: With the launch of Chrome 69, Google stunned users last week with a surprising decision to no longer display the "www" and "m" part of the URL in the Chrome search bar, but user backlash forced Google to soften its stance. Google's course reversal, although welcomed by users, is only short term, and the search giant said it will change course once again with the release of the Chrome 70 browser....

Critics have argued that by not displaying the special-case subdomains, it was harder for users to identify sites as legitimate, and the move could lead to more scams on the internet. Others go as far as questioning Google's motives for not displaying the "www" and "m" portion of a web address, and these users speculated that the move may be to disguise Google's AMP -- or Accelerated Mobile Pages -- subdomain to make it indistinguishable for the actual domain....

With the launch of Chrome 70, Google plans on hiding the 'www' portion of a web address inside the search bar, but it will continue to display the 'm' subdomain. "We are not going to elide 'm' in M70 because we found large sites that have a user-controlled 'm' subdomain," Google Chromium product manager Emily Schecter said. "There is more community consensus that sites should not allow the 'www' subdomain to be user controlled."
ZDNet notes that while Chrome's billion-plus users were surprised, "Apple's Safari likewise hides the www and m but it hasn't caused as much concern, likely because of Google's outsized influence over the web and Chrome's dominance of the browser market."

TechRepublic quotes a community feedback post that had argued that "Lying about the hostname to novices and power users alike in the name of simplifying the UI seems imprudent from a security perspective."

An anonymous reader quotes ITWire: Google's move to strip out the www in domains typed into the address bar, beginning with version 69 of its Chrome browser, has drawn an enormous amount of criticism from developers who see the move as a bid to cement the company's dominance of the Web. The criticism comes a few days after Chrome's engineering manager Adrienne Porter Felt told the American website Wired that URLs need to be got rid of altogether. The change in Chrome version 69 means that if one types in a domain such as www.itwire.com into the browser search bar, the www portion is stripped out in the address bar when the page is displayed.

When asked about this change in a long discussion thread on a mailing list, a Google staffer wrote: "www is now considered a 'trivial' subdomain, and hiding trivial subdomains can be disabled in flags (will also disable hiding the URL scheme)..." A Google staffer attempted to justify the change, writing: "The subdomains reappear when editing the URL so people type the correct one. They disappear in the steady-state display case because this isn't information that most users need to concern themselves with in most cases..." But this drew an angry response from a poster who questioned the statement "this isn't information that most users need to concern themselves with in most cases" and asked: "According to who? This is simply an opinion stated as a fact...."

This is not the first time Google has been criticised for its moves to change the fundamental structure of URLs. Its Accelerated Mobile Pages, introduced in October 2015, have been criticised for obscuring the original URL of a page and reducing the chances of a reader going back to the original website. Probably for this reason, Apple last year decided that version 11 of iOS would update its Safari browser so that AMP links would be stripped out of an URL when the story was shared... "This is Google making subdomain usage decisions for other entities outside of Google," said yet another poster. "My domains and how subdomains are assigned and delegated are not Google's business to decide."
The controversy moved Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein to write a new blog post. Its title? "Here's How to Disable Google Chrome's Confusing New URL Hiding Scheme."

UPDATE (9/15/18): Google has announced that after public outcry, they'll return the 'www' to Chrome's URL's -- but only until the next release.

Since the release of Chrome 69 earlier this week, countless of users have gone on social media and Google Product Forums to complain about "blurry" or "fuzzy" text inside Chrome. ZDNet: The blurred font issue isn't only limited to text rendered inside a web page, users said, but also for the text suggestions displayed inside the address bar search drop-down, and Chrome's Developer Tools panel. [...] According to reports, the issue only manifests for Chrome 69 users on Windows. Those who rolled back to Chrome 68 stopped having problems. Users said that changing Chrome, operating system, or screen DPI settings didn't help. "Our team is investigating reports of this behavior. You can find more information in this public bug report," a Google spokesperson said last night after first user complaints started surfacing online. Some users have also expressed concerns over Chrome not showing "trivial subdomains" including www and secure lock sign in the address bar.

The Tor Browser has rolled out a new interface with the release of v8. From a report: The Tor Browser has always been based on the Firefox codebase, but it lagged behind a few releases. Mozilla rolled out a major overhaul of the Firefox codebase in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57, the first release in the Firefox Quantum series. Firefox Quantum came with a new page rendering engine, a new add-ons API, and a new user interface called the Photon UI. Because these were major, code-breaking changes, it took the smaller Tor team some time to integrate all of them into the Tor Browser codebase and make sure everything worked as intended. The new Tor Browser 8, released yesterday, is now in sync with the most recent version of Firefox, the Quantum release, and also supports all of its features. This means the Tor Browser now uses the same modern Photon UI that current Firefox versions use, it supports the same speed-optimized page rendering engine and has also dropped support for the old XUL-based add-ons system for the new WebExtensions API system used by Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and the rest of the Chromium browsers.

Google first released its Chrome browser 10 years ago today. Marketed as a "fresh take on the browser," Chrome debuted with a web comic from Google to mark the company's first web browser. From a report: It was originally launched as a Windows-only beta app before making its way to Linux and macOS more than a year later in 2009. Chrome debuted at a time when developers and internet users were growing frustrated with Internet Explorer, and Firefox had been steadily building momentum. Google used components from Apple's WebKit rendering engine and Mozilla's Firefox to help bring Chrome to life, and it made all of Chrome's source code available openly as its Chromium project. Chrome focused on web standards and respected HTML5, and it even passed both the Acid1 and Acid2 tests at the time of its release. This was a significant step as Microsoft was struggling to adhere to open web standards with its Internet Explorer browser.

Another significant part of Chrome's first release was the idea of "sandboxing" individual browser tabs so that if one crashed it wouldn't affect the others. This helped improve the speed and stability of Chrome in general, alongside Google's V8 JavaScript engine that the company constantly tweaked to try and push the web forwards. After a decade of Chrome, this browser now dominates as the primary way most people browse the web. Chrome has secured more than 60 percent of browser market share on desktop, and Google's Chrome engineers continue to improve it with new features and push the latest web standards. To mark the milestone, Google said it would make a surprise announcement on Tuesday -- some improvements coming to Chrome.

While we know that Linux app support is coming to a range of Chromebooks from Lenovo, Acer, Dell and others, a post on the Chromium Gerrit reveals that devices running Linux 3.14 or older will miss out. BetaNews: Chrome OS is able to run Linux apps through the use of containers which help to keep the rest of the operating system safe from harm. As container support requires features that are only found in more recent versions of the Linux kernel, it means that many Chromebooks -- whose kernels are usually not updated -- will not be able to run Linux apps.

Here's the full list of Chromebooks that won't be getting the Linux love: AOpen Chromebase Mini (Feb 2017; tiger, veyron_pinky), AOpen Chromebox Mini (Feb 2017; fievel, veyron_pinky), ASUS Chromebook C201 (May 2015; speedy, veyron_pinky), Acer C670 Chromebook 11 (Feb 2015; paine, auron), Acer Chromebase 24 (Apr 2016; buddy, auron), Acer Chromebook 15 (Apr 2015; yuna, auron), Acer Chromebox CXI2 (May 2015; rikku, jecht), Asus Chromebit CS10 (Nov 2015; mickey, veyron_pinky), Asus Chromebook Flip C100PA (Jul 2015; minnie, veyron_pinky), Asus Chromebox CN62 (Aug 2015; guado, jecht), Dell Chromebook 13 7310 (Aug 2015; lulu, auron), Google Chromebook Pixel (Mar 2015; samus), Lenovo ThinkCentre Chromebook (May 2015; tidus, jecht), Toshiba Chromebookk 2 (Sep 2015; gandof, auron).

An anonymous reader writes: "Google has patched a vulnerability in the Chrome browser that allows an attacker to retrieve sensitive information from other sites via audio or video HTML tags," reports Bleeping Computer. The attack breaks CORS -- Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, a browser security feature that prevents sites from loading resources from other websites -- and will attempt to load resources (some of which can reveal information about users) inside audio and video HTML tags. During tests, a researcher retrieved age and gender information from Facebook users, but another researcher says the bug can be also used to retrieve data from corporate backends or private APIs. Ron Masas, a security researcher with Imperva, first discovered and reported this issue to Google. The bug was fixed at the end of July with the release of Chrome v68.0.3440.75.

Google is reportedly working on a secret project to get Windows 10 running on Chromebooks. XDA Developers' Kieran Miyamoto reports on the latest developments surrounding "Campfire" -- the Chromebook equivalent of Apple's Boot Camp. From the report: Earlier this year, a mysterious project appeared on the Chromium Git. The Chrome OS developers had created a new firmware branch of the Google Pixelbook called eve-campfire and were working on a new "Alt OS mode" for this branch. We have since confirmed this Alt OS refers to Microsoft Windows 10 and found evidence that it wasn't just an internal project but intended for public release.

The developers have reworked the way in which they distribute updates to a rarely-used section of ROM on Chromebooks called RW_LEGACY. The RW_LEGACY section on a Chromebook's ROM traditionally gives users the ability to dual-boot into an alternative OS, but it is something of an afterthought during production and the section is rarely updated after a device leaves the factory. Now, with Campfire, Google will push signed updates to RW_LEGACY via the regular auto-update process, so firmware flashing won't be a concern for Joe Public. A recent commit for enabling Alt OS through crosh with a simple [alt_os enable] command indicates that it will be a fairly easy setup process from the user's end too. We may expect to see the first demo of "Campfire" at Google's upcoming Pixel 3 launch event in October. Also, the report notes that the Google Pixelbook won't be the only Chromebook with Campfire support, citing "mentions of multiple 'campfire variants.'"

An anonymous reader writes: "The Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is working on adding a new feature to its browser that is similar to the Site Isolation feature that Google rolled out to Chrome users this year," reports Bleeping Computer. "[Chrome's] Site Isolation works by opening a new browser process for any domain/site the user loads in a tab." The feature has been recently rolled out to 99% of the Chrome userbase. "But Chrome won't be the only browser with Site Isolation," adds Bleeping Computer. "Work on a similar feature also began at Mozilla headquarters back in April, in a plan dubbed Project Fission." Mozilla engineers say that before rolling out Project Fission (Site Isolation), they need to optimize Firefox's memory usage first. Work has now started on shaving off 7MB of RAM from each Firefox content process in order to bring down per-process RAM usage to around 10MB, a limit Mozilla deems sustainable for rolling out Site Isolation.

jrepin writes: KDE unveils the final release of Plasma 5.13, the free and open-source desktop environment. Members of the Plasma team have focused on optimizing startup and minimizing memory usage. Plasma Browser Integration is a suite of new features which make Firefox, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers work with your desktop. For example, downloads are now displayed in the Plasma notification popup, and the Media Controls Plasmoid can mute and skip videos and music playing from within the browser. Browser tabs can be opened directly using KRunner via the Alt-Space keyboard shortcut. System Settings design has been improved further. Window manager gained much-improved effects for blur and desktop switching. Wayland work continued, with the return of window rules, and initial support for screencasts and desktop sharing. You can view the changelog here.