jppelt The problem with everyone using Chromium is it creates a monopoly on web technologies where Google can basically shoehorn functionality in without it going through the typical W3C standard bodies. With Microsoft Edge dropping EdgeHTML (which was actually more competitive when it came to new ECMAScript / JavaScript standards and was more performant in some areas) and moving to Chromium, we've gone from four competitors in the market to three building their own web engines. And I don't know when "less competition" has ever been a good thing.
You have:
- Google w/ Chromium with Blink (a fork of WebKit) and V8 as its JavaScript engine.
- Mozilla w/ Firefox with Gecko and SpiderMonkey.
- Apple w/ WebKit. I'm including ports of WebKit such as WebKitGTK+ (used by the likes of Epiphany and Midori from back in the day).
Even for Qt, it was always either QtWebKit or Qt WebEngine. Qt5 WebEngine uses Chromium underneath, so that's still not helping to promote competition.
Now instead we're just seeing a bunch of different user experiences on top of existing javascript / web engines. I can't really blame anyone for that, they're basically their own virtual machines and even just the security model around them can be a real PITA to implement. I'm just simply stating what the status-quo is.
Just saying because every year around this period I read that the next year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop...
It's been "year of Linux on the desktop" for me since 2008. I don't believe there is any magical market share number where suddenly Linux is experiencing its "year on the desktop". In my opinion everyone, individually, has their own "year of Linux on the desktop".
Personally, I just don't see the value in using Microsoft Edge. It being ported to Linux isn't surprising though, if they're using something like electron forge or electron builder than its trivial to do. They already have the expertise from doing it for Skype, Teams, and Visual Studio Code. Functionality-wise I think Vivaldi far exceeds it.
