Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your Web pages With Microsoft Edge?

Posted by EditorDavid

on Saturday January 29, 2022 @06:34PM from the living-on-the-Edge dept.

• ›

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 29, 2022 @06:37PM (#62219529)

  Yes, Edge has a higher marketshare than firefox and I test I firefox too, would be a moron not too. basically Safari and Chrome first, Edge then firefox, if our team has time (usually don't) we might test 1 or 2 others as well.

  • • Re: marketshare.

      In Soviet Russia...

    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 29, 2022 @07:56PM (#62219699)

      Yes. Added to this is not only that iOS Safari has a host of CSS behavior differences compared with macOS Safari, but that iOS Safari has CSS behavior regressions in specific build numbers of iOS that sometimes need to be accounted for (i.e.: broken in one build, fixed in the next). Apple needs to run all of their builds against the CSS Acid test suites and fix their crap before unleashing them on the public.:(

    • Re:

      Since the last Windows version of Safari now is 10 years old it's not worth testing.

      And I'm not getting a Mac just to test a web browser compatibility. Even less an iFååån.

      • Re:

        If you don't care about iOS and Mac users, I guess it's fine.

        • Re:

          Nobody loves iApple users. iAPple is a fad mostly present in the US, ignored in the rest of the world.

  • Re:

    Out of curiosity, do you find people actually use it? I've never encountered someone who does, and I wonder whether Microsoft's marketshare may merely be tricking people into opening now and again.

    • Re: marketshare.

      I use it, and like it. I was using chrome but was getting tired of its high memory and cpu usage (I'm one of those people with dozens of tabs open). I first went to Firefox (hadn't really used it for at least 5 years) but wasn't happy with it, then tried Edge and was impressed. Speedy, doesn't hog memory, easy to use. I'm using it almost exclusively at this point.

    • I've been using MS Edge. Seems to work fine.

      It's based on Chromium [wikipedia.org] and the blink [chromium.org] rendering engine.

    • Re:

      I use it at work. It's easily better than Chrome, having stolen its engine and having a less confusing interface. Mind you, still way worse than FireFox.

    • Re:

      I use Edge. I used to use Chrome all the time but I found the memory usage was getting pretty extreme and the CPU usage always remained high. I did an experiment with Edge where I moved my profile information open and tried it for a few weeks to see how it worked. What I ended up with was lower memory usage and lower CPU usage. It got even lower when I enabled the sleeping tabs option built into the browser.

      For me Edge uses fewer system resources and runs just as fast as Chrome. What I like is that it doesn

• HTML (Score:5, Insightful)

  If you have complex data structures, then write the backend in whatever you want (C would be my first choice) and output standard html files for display.

  Compatibility problem solved with less security nightmares as a bonus!

  • Real men program in Assembler, to gain the most speed.

    Heroes code in hexadecimal.

    • Re:

      Real heroes enters the bootstrap using switches and single-step each operation.

      • Re:

        Real h4xors write bits using rowhammer.

    • Re:

      webasm, to be precise.

      Yes, it's blazing fast.

    • Re:

      I once did a "copy con: program.com" to manually type in a keylogger using alt-numpad codes to hack a physically locked down PC used as a 'secure' terminal. fun times.

      • Re:

        Newbie. Real programmers started with PIP. Backwards.

        Must be another slow news day on Slashdot. But at least the responses aren't making me feel as stupid as the last time this happened.

      • Re:

        Not as hardcore by far, but I routinely use cat > myscript to write short bash and python scripts rather than firing up vim. Challenging yourself to write every line correctly, first time, is good for engaging the grey matter.

  • Re:

    I think the parent was being sarcastic, as most Mericons dont know what that is...

  • Re:

    Why bother testing when you can start shipping your code and hope for the best.

    More seriously, standards or not, if you don't test, chances are it's not going to work.

  • Re:

    "Standard HTML"

    The nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.

  • Re:

    That part got mangled, either by the editor or my writing. The complicated data structures were in the old JS files. My new version has a couple of options, but I think all of them will be using simpler data structures. It's the JavaScript that is triggering the nausea...

    Reminds me of the JS utility I wrote back in those days to support the so-called project. It took an arbitrary HTML file as input and output a JavaScript program that would generate the HTML file... It was easier to bypass the template gene

• by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Saturday January 29, 2022 @06:39PM (#62219533)

  Seriously, topic. It's another chromium based browser. It makes compatibility testing quite easy, which was one of the main reasons why microsoft gave up on its other browser engine and instead migrated their in built windows web browser to chromium.

  • So far, this is the only right answer that acknowledges it's shared engine. I would only open Edge if a bug report comes in that can only be reproduced in Edge.

  • Re:

    Granted testing is now a lot easier, However, I would still test it to be sure. Your Chrome and Edge have a different upgrade cycle, So if you are doing something that might handle it a bit differently on a newer version of the engine than the older version. Also to note, they are different set of defaults and look and feel, which may cause alignment to be off on the different browsers.

    • Which versions? What bandwidth?

      Do you test on older versions of browsers, that is indeed a more important test?

      And what about slow internet lines, that break all that asynchronous code that nobody really understands?

      • Re:

        If that elusive IE 4.x crowed is your target audience you're either a scammer or a selling adult diapers, or both.

        • Re:

          dude, sometimes on older devices like ipads, or androids, the latest browser is just NOT released, or just plain WONT run.

          There are many pages that fail to run on old ipads with less ram because of sloppy code or too many adds/trackers, but if you take all them out and run blocked, they suddenly work 100% ok on old browsers/ipads, because your dumb ass tracker code or ads services are coded by snob heads who think 1 gig of ram is needed to replace a 800x200 gif.

      • Re:

        Its not just plain slow speed connections , but higher latency too.

        not a problem on Starlink, but other services would have this problem or if you are on a poor reception area.

        • Re:

          It is not actually latency but jitter, when results are returned in a different order that buggy code expects.

          And once you are buried in a sophisticated framework it is very difficult to know what is really going on.

  • Re:

    Everything but Firefox descends from KHTML. That doesn't mean they all render the same.

  • • Re:

      Closest approach to "Embrace, extend, and exterminate" as Microsoft's tradition? In this Edge situation, the embrace is clear, but I think there has been little extension so far. But I wouldn't be surprised to see evidence of extermination plans.

      However that also reminded me how much I dislike branding with frequently used words. You know they'd trademark the words, too, if only they could get away with it.

      • Re:

        Most of the extension stuff has been putting tabs to sleep, lowering the frequency of JavaScript updates on background tabs that are not yet sleeping. Being more aggressive in cleaning up memory. All things that are very good and should have been part of Chrome but without competition they had no reason to do anything.

• The browser is gaining momentum and actually it's not that bad after-all. I've seen many people use it unbothered by it taking over as the default browser, although they frown on using bing for search... so yes

  • Re: Yes

    I use the fuck out of Edge. My preferred browser. Shows how bad the browser market is right now. Chrome makes me feel dirty, and so does Edge but the vertical tabs are very nice.

    • Re:

      I installed edge once (on Linux) and at first launch the EULA scared me so much I uninstalled immediately.

      You can get vertical tabs in the other browsers through extensions and "Tree Style Tabs" for Firefox which is even nicer.

• by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday January 29, 2022 @06:52PM (#62219561)

  The question SHOULD be: Are you testing your pages with Firefox and Safari? Not are you testing your pages with Chrom* (which is essentially what Edge is)?

  Or an even better question: Do you believe that only one browser engine should take over everything, especially one that is controlled by a single company that obviously doesn't value your input or privacy?

  • Re:

    Exactly. As a SeaMonkey user I feel totally left out, as more and more web pages don't work in the browser. We are back to the time most web pages only worked with Internet Explorer because that was the standard.

    • Re:

      Software Architect here who very explicitly doesn't support Firefox for our products. Our customers are predominantly corporates, and it tends to only be the occasional infrequent sysad or particularly techy user who even cares about Firefox support. There's just no business case to jutify supporting it in my line of work.

      Frankly, Chromium is open source and it just seems stubborn now that Firefox hasn't moved over to it yet. Just like we don't particularly need competition of Linux kernels, I don't feel li

      • Supporting just one rendering engine for the entire web is a really bad idea for so many reasons.

        • No. Supporting multiple rendering engines when your customer requirements are only to support one is a really bad idea for so many reasons, the main of which is you will be outbid on a contract by someone who doesn't generate pointless overhead.

          Before you can decide what to do in any programming activity, be it writing a new database, provisioning a cloud something something, or simply making a webpage, it's important to understand your *customer's needs*. Everything else is irrelevant.

          • No. Supporting multiple rendering engines when your customer requirements are only to support one is a really bad idea for so many reasons, the main of which is you will be outbid on a contract by someone who doesn't generate pointless overhead.

            Well, yes and no. If the customer says "just make it work against Chrome" but it's a public-facing project, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't test it against the other browsers - when complaints come in, in the end it's going to hit your reputation not the customers.

            Or, at a minimum, you should have documentation showing that you told the customer it was a bad idea.

            If you're working on something internal for the customer, then sure.

          • It isn't THAT hard to support Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I've done it. If you can't you're an incompetent web developer.

            Supporting only ONE web browser is 2022 is like those morons in the early 2000s that wrote HTML that only worked on IE6. There is a reason we have HTML5. So less stupid "browser specific" hacks are needed. Often times by supporting multiple browsers you detect flaws in your own code and sometimes incomplete browser implementations of the spec. which should be passed upstream as a bug report so they can make their browser standards compliant.

            Lastly, often times the customers doesn't know what the hell they want. Any customer specifying only one browser is an idiot and short-sighted.

          • Re:

            >"Supporting multiple rendering engines when your customer requirements are only to support one is a really bad idea for so many reasons,"

            if you are creating an INTRAnet site, one where ALL the users are trapped in one browser within that company. Fine. But if it is a public-facing site, OR a site/application that is sold to multiple companies, it is not at all reasonable to support only Chrom*.

            And if one is unable to create something that works in both Chrom* and Firefox, something is seriously wrong

            • Re:

              No even then, in the case of an intranet, it isn't fine.

              There will always be an upgrade cycle, always come a demand to switch to another browser. Precisely then the technical debt created by creating sites for only one browser, and thus with a higher degree of non-standardness, will hit you.

          • Re:

            If you're coding the HTML right, you're only going to see extremely rare edge cases that don't match between browsers. Code to the standard, not the browser. Otherwise, a future browser update fixing a quirk could break your site.

          • Re:

            Customers that require only one engine are shooting themselves in the foot, and it is the responsibility of infra architects and developers alike to talk them out of it. The best companies I know demand of their partners that their websites work and are supported on a range of browsers. The worst companies I know are the ones that are continuously in trouble over web interoperability issues because they didn't.

      • Re:

        I can only accept that if all you produce will pass the HTML and CSS validator tests with flying colors.

        If you exclude Firefox you need to rethink your decisions or sleep very light expecting a random call from some VIP customer at night.

      • Re:

        Dear lord you must be very young and very inexperienced, not showing even a shred of understanding of how dangerous that thinking is.

    • Re:

      Same.
      Good thing I didn't like stuff like JIRA, confluence, reddit, imgur's crappy beta design or SAP apps in the first place, so nothing of value was lost there.
      Bit of a shame about gitlab, though.

      Personally, as far as I as dev am concerned and they're tech companies, I consider that a really bad sign.
      I'm only going to touch e.g. an Atlassian product with somebody else's 10-foot-pole, certainly not rely on them for anything important.

    • Re:

      Consider that a security feature. Long live Netscape!

    • Re:

      SeaMonkey uses the Firefox engine underneath. At some point you have to realise you can't test every edge case from every person who thinks the best idea in the world is yet another fork.

      Honestly if you feel left out, question what your developers are doing.

      No we're not. There's a big difference between "this webpage works only in one browser" and "this webpage works in every browser except one". The internet works fine in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and a whole lot of mobile browsers.

      • Re:

        The difference is less big if it is "this webpage works only in one engine".

      • Re:

        >"SeaMonkey uses the Firefox engine underneath."

        SeaMonkey uses an ANCIENT Firefox engine underneath. But really, there should be VERY few sites that simply MUST use "features" that are bleeding-edge.

        • Re:

          The ad providers disagrees. They always seek new features to spam their crap onto you with.

          • Re:

            Mod parent up, even though Flash died for their sins.

    • Re:

      >"Exactly. As a SeaMonkey user I feel totally left out, as more and more web pages don't work in the browser. "

      That is partially because SeaMonkey uses an ancient Firefox engine underneath (60 vs 9X now, that is a 4-year gap). So that is to be expected in some regards for sites that rely on the latest eye-candy.

      But really, there SHOULD be few sites that simply MUST use "features" that are bleeding-edge to the point of locking out misc browsers.

  • Re:

    Sadly this is happening. Sites are broken or perform badly on Firefox... I don't know how much longer I can "resist"

    • Re:

      Don't give in - complain to the broken sites. They probably don't know any better.

      • Re:

        >"Don't give in - complain to the broken sites. They probably don't know any better."

        +1 Many places have no idea how crappy and/or broken their sites are. And if customers don't tell them, they might not even know. Bank of America played that trick several years ago. I let them know if they didn't fix their site, I would take my business elsewhere. (Actually it worked OK but "complained" I wasn't using "Chrome", which is insulting and stupid). It was eventually fixed. Have no idea how many complai

      • • Re:

          Just be aware that if someone introduces a new functionality it's not required that everyone else copies it.

          You can as well file a bug report against Chrome for Javascript issues. But what we will have is just the same crap as we have seen with Internet Exploder but in a secondary generation.

  • Great point

    Are you testing your pages with Firefox and Safari?

    I think maybe a lot of people do test with Safari, since you'd want a site to be able to work on iOS or iPadOS pretty well, at a minimum...

    But I feel there's a moral obligation to test in Firefox also, and not be a cause for the web browser universe to sink into only being two choices. Even if just casual occasional testing and fixing whatever you see, would go a long way to keeping Firefox viable.

    • Re: Great point

      We mock and openly avoid supporting alternate platforms so they shut down. Then we lament that there is not another option.

  • Re:

    Yeah, website quality is back at where we were 20 years ago.
    As long as now Chrome, then IE, can work around the errors you make, everything is fine.
    *sigh*

• No, for the same reasons I don't test on Opera, Brave, or Vivaldi: They're all just Chromium variants. I test in Chrome. If it works in Chrome, it'll work in Edge and all those others.

  • Mostly

    Individual projects make changes. I had a Safari-only bug last year. Apple had changed something making some HTML element subtly different. (I don’t remember which one; maybe <option>). So something rendered fine everywhere else.

    • Re:

      Safari isn't based on Chrome. Chrome's engine was forked from Safari's Webkit. At this point they're two similar but distinct engines.

• I don't test with Internet Explorer either.

  • Re:

    Sacrilege! IE6 for life!
    (Ducks and hides behind a dinosaur)

    • Re:

      Pretty sure I have a "Midnight Madness" t-shirt around here somewhere. Microsoft gave them away as an incentive to download the first Explorer. Maybe Version 1? Basically Mosaic if I remember correctly.

• Yes, who wouldn't if you care about supporting the broadest number of browsers out there?

  And thanks for the reminder, it had been a while. I just discovered a bug in my server config about enforcing SSL --- Chrome apparently makes the switch on the client side automatically, but Edge didn't. I wouldn't have caught this without an Edge test.

  • Re:

    This is what we call an edge case, isn't it?

• Edge is just chrome these days, so not really a concern.

  It's more like
  -Chrome
  -Safari
  -Opera

• it's not called Internet Explorer, so no - Chrome is king now.

• None of us code/test to it directly. We do have a Selenium automation suite of tests and we use those to verify that Edge is working like Chrome.

  After 18 months, our QA has yet to send us a bug that is Edge specific.

  So...I wonder why the question was even asked. If Edge was still based on their WIP engine, that would have been different and I'd consider it for my personal and absolutely we'd be smoke-testing and acceptance testing on it.

  But as it is Chromium, there's no point in the extra effort.

• My web site is a totally static, read-only, thing. ZERO interaction.

• During my testing with Edge, I discovered that is faster, uses less memory, and doesn't crash (no "Aw snap or He's dead Jim") as much. I love that when I close reopen Edge my browsing sessions come back reliably. So, I use it as my main browser and test against Chrome and Firefox when I have to,

  I know this sounds controversial but give it a try, you might find yourself surprised as I did.

  • Re:

    Still happily a Firefox user but when I have to Remote Desktop, Google's WfH solution, seems to work equally well in Edge.

    If Edge is now sufficiently Chromium, is there justification for installing Chrome?:)

    • Re:

      Google hasn't crapped up Chrome with a bunch of uninstallable add-ons that are related to browsing the web. Like loans, coupons, etc.

  • Re:

    Eh? You're praising Edge for the features Google added to Chrome? What, were you an Internet Explorer user until recently?
• With standard Chrome I feel as if I am a droid making Google money by watching a continuous flow commercials.
  
  It all depends on what the customer wants.
  On what browsers does the website have to be working and tested?
  Every checkbox comes with an increase in price, to justify the increase in work it brings.
• Youâ(TM)d be dumb not to.

• I might, if I still created websites. I would first have to find out the differences between edge and chrome. Might not need to use edge if the same as chrome. But if it is too different, then I would have to test with edge.

• My personal web pages are basic HTML. There is no reason for me to test them against any browser. I do view them with Firefox.

  • Re:

    The great thing about HTML's definition is there are so many variations of it. If only you are ever going to use your webpage you're very really pandering to your customer base, but beyond that, even basic rendering of HTML needs to be checked against different browsers.

    • Re:

      Thing is, there is nothing that is guaranteed about layout, etc for HTML.

      And some of us are quite happy to accept that, and put out very basic documents.

      "This site best used in Lynx, or by telnetting to port 80 and mentally parsing the HTML yourself"

• I think the more important question is this: do you have to do any stupid CSS hacks to get Edge to render your page like one does for Webkit or Firefox?

• If the client is using a mandatory Internet Explorer solution, I test my web app on IE. If my boss tells me we only support Chrome, I'm not going to waste my time and other peoples' money by testing on Safari.

  If a client comes to my boss and says, "Hey new feature X is broken in IE, can you fix it," we're probably going to fix it. But if nobody is using that browser, nobody cares.

• That's some next-level paranoia of MS there. WTF does that even mean? How is one "blackmailed" to test on Edge?

  Like maybe:

  We have your cat Snuffles. If you want her to remain in good health, I suggest you make sure your website runs properly with Microsoft Edge. Because, like, it's a good browser, and more people should give it a try.

  - Fullstack X

  P.S. just to be clear, totally not affiliated with the MS Edge development team in any way
  

  • Re:

    Mod parent Funny, but I don't think there is any level of paranoia that is sufficient these years...

• Just for the fuck of it, I've been testing my personal portfolio under Internet Explorer on Windows 98.

  Yes, I'm 100% serious.

  Why? Because HTML is still fucking HTML, and you don't NEED all the new shiny and fancy JavaScript frameworks to convey basic information to users.

• But does it support Gopher?

• I hate Edge. But I hate Chrome and Google more. Stop supporting Chrome as a browser, and Google (Gmail, Docs, etc) as a company, it is actually hurting society and hurting you and your future.

• I don't and never will. Since IE days, MS browsers can take a hike for all I care. I've been actively advising people to use other browsers since those days. Several of my online games have an FAQ entry that basically says "Q: I'm having a problem. I use IE vers... A: Use a different browser."

  There's absolutely nothing MS can ever do to get my good will back. I won't lift a single finger to make sure their stuff works on my site.

• Yes, government. Also non-Chromium Edge and in some cases later versions of IE.

• Why would you? It uses the same engine as Chrome, so it should be OK? That was the whole point for Microsoft when switching to Blink-based Edge; to re-establish web-monoculture... Or are there dependencies I'm missing?

• MS Edge is of no interest to me. If it doesn't display the page, then contact MS and ask them to fix their product.

  The world of web-design has given MS more than enough free technical over the decades. Fuck 'em.

• • Re:

    What? Edge is cross platform now.