HANDKERCHIEF, n. A small square of silk or linen ... especially serviceable at funerals to conceal the lack of tears.

Support? What support? There is no support - I believe when I upgraded to Windows 10, then ditched the stupid "Edge", and resurrected IE11, strange things began to happen after an update ever since. Before Windows 10, IE11 always worked flawlessly for me in Win 8.1 Pro...

a) I use Chrome for the odd application, but I don't like it at all.

b) I use FF for most day to day work such as writing this. It also crashes once a day.

c) I use IE11 for all my searches primarily for two reasons:

1. It is configured MY way with everything I need at my fingertips. Importantly if I highlight text on a page, it is automatically in my Google Toolbar as a search term when I immediately hit enter.

2. The Google Toolbar gives me ample space to easily enter search terms.

The only problem, which I never had before is I now have unresponsive script messages - mostly AdSense and other tracking rubbish.

Edge to me is simply the red headed step kid of Chrome.

BTW - I always have masses of Tabs open in FF and IE11. I like to do ten things at once.

I like to do ten things at once.

I don't think there is an update---or end of support for that. :)

I have had FF crash on me ONCE since 3x

chrome is not a fave

Edge (on the only Win10 I have allowed) is smooth and fast

IE 11 is sturdy, but I have no love to code for any IE older than 8, so....

.... as they say....

Good Riddance to Old Rubbish!

I don't think there is an update---or end of support for that

I'm almost convinced if you use IE11 on a Windows 10, then they've done an update on it - not for the better either.

Edge (on the only Win10 I have allowed) is smooth and fast

But can it do all the things I want, the way I want? Is it configurable?

After I finished the post above FF crashed once again, and it's the latest version.

Install 'ublock origin' flashblock and noscript on firefox and you'll find the crashes go away. Those are caused by that obscene excess of javascript content pages that more and more sites use. I run hundreds of tabs in firefox, multiple instances, and I couldn't run a 10th of what I run without those extensions.

chrome is a memory hog because of it's sandboxed per page design, so it's not even in the running as a daily browser for me. ublock works well in chrome too by the way.

I've never even seen MSIE 10 or 11 so I can't say anything about them, but I did have to spend some of today once again fixing some stuff for MSIE 8, as usual. Can't dump it fully because it's still 1% or so of our users.

For what it's worth, we're seeing, in a very conservative demographic, MSIE use PLUMMETING. We're currently at about 5% of all total visits as MSIE 10 or less (can't get the 11 data yet). So it's clear that users are just dumping MSIE, which is one reason MS is dumping their support. Good for MS, by the way, there's no reason to use older MSIE versions, nor can you expect to even see the modern web with them, as more and more sites just stop testing or supporting them.

If I were you, I'd start learning to wean myself off of MSIE, I don't think MS has any plans to continue that branch of browser, Edge uses its new rendering engine, EdgeHTML, and I don't see MS maintaining two rendering engines long term.

Personally until I hear otherwise, I'm treating Edge as a modern browser technically, ie, no special support.

Because MS did another one of those totally pointless UserAgent changes our stats don't yet show MSIE 11 numbers:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0)

sigh. As if one needed further proof that asbergers runs rampant in the programming industry, these types of stupid changes that help nobody and only hinder users who don't want to waste time rewriting logic to handle such stupidity.

Install 'ublock origin' flashblock and noscript on firefox

I already use NoScript 2.0.9.02 in FF 43.04, I have no problem with ads as I largely ignore them. I largely block Flash as it annoys the hell out of me arriving at news sites, and some stupid video begins to play.

I have to "Whitelist" many regular sites with NoScript otherwise those sites simply don't function.

Those are caused by that obscene excess of javascript content pages that more and more sites use

Sadly so, but most seem to be from third party sites.

If I were you, I'd start learning to wean myself off of MSIE

I will if someone can point me to an exact replacement - there is none so far. It is primarily scripts which cause the problems in IE11, and AdSense seems to be behind most of it

Why do people keep saying Edge uses a new browser engine? It doesn't! It's still Trident simply renamed, which by the way is not inherently a bad thing. The bad thing is though that Microsoft threw in the towel on the GUI for IE12 and lamed out by attempting to copy Chrome, I can't stand having to figure out where the address bar is for one thing! Now IE12 has a much better engine (for what it does support) and a non-customizable GUI like Chrome. Heck, even Safari can be customized. They've really started to blur the version numbers and developers need versions to test against period. Both IE12 and Safari are the least standards compliant though at least it's not still ~2010 though if Apple doesn't get it's act together Microsoft will bypass them visibly in the next few years. One of the problems for IE and Windows is that Microsoft is dead set on release dates; software doesn't do release dates, software is ready when software is ready and never before that point.

In general it's good that Microsoft is consolidating all the older versions of IE though if waging a browser war requires a general IE12's GUI is itself an experienced private, experienced though still a private and that is what the end-user will see, not the standards compliance. They don't sell half baked bread at bakeries and they shouldn't release poor GUIs for browsers though at least with IE there may be hope in the future, Chrome will always remain completely dumbed down.

John

According to my tests Edge is more compliant than any previous MS browser, and that is a move in the right direction. IE 11 provides fair service at the present... but there is an end of life scheduled so we need to prepare for that (as coders).

The browser I'm waiting for is HyperBrained©, where you insert a plug at the base of your brain and go from there. :)

[en.wikipedia.org...]

EdgeHTML is a proprietary layout engine developed by Microsoft for the Microsoft Edge web browser. It is a fork of Trident that has removed all legacy code of older versions of Internet Explorer and rewritten the majority of its source code with web standards and interoperability with other modern browsers in mind.[2] The rendering engine was first released as an experimental option in Internet Explorer 11 as part of the Windows 10 Technical Preview build 9879.

The browser doesn't pretend to be trident, for very good reason, they are basically cutting the msie engine off and my guess it will only last a few more windows versions, probably only being kept alive for legacy corporate active x stuff. That's a nice clear description, and explains why MS removed the MSIE from the useragent, they don't want this browser to be confused or mistaken for MSIE, which means, they want to be free to not carry all that horrible internal cruft that led to issues and bugs and is probably a maintenance nightmare, which is why it doesn't take rocket science to predict the demise of the shipping MSIE version once they feel solid about the new browser.

A fork means a new thing. For example, KHTML was forked by apple into applewebkit, which was then forked by google into blink. Forks happen because the cost of working with the forked codebase are higher than can be justified in terms of the end goals of the project. Or because it's just such a royal pain trying to colllaborate, something I can attest to, easy to see why Google gave up on Apple, or why OpenBSD gave up on OpenSSL (no connection despite the name), Safari is already being called the MSIE of modern browsers online. In a sense, you can say that the old KHTML Konqueror browser along with mozilla/gecko are the foundation of all non msie browsers in the world now, pretty much all now that Opera uses blink. A beautiful thing to behold, since the original codebase was GPL 2, the forked code can never be made non gpl. Which means, because of that original fork, most people in the world are using free software to view the internet, either mozilla gecko or khtml derived. One of the biggest free software wins ever, and nobody really even notices it.

Forks free you to cut out old junk, and free what's worth keeping in the codebase for future development. LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL, but it is not OpenSSL. Something, incidentally, the world should be extremely grateful for, hats off to the OpenBSD forkers.

Forks are major events in software lives, my most popular by far software is a fork of an old program that has a tiny fraction of the functionality and power of the new, forked version, so I'm not confused by the work and terminology of what a fork really is, having done one myself. Hard work I might add. github 'forks' that are really just code repo clones should not be confused with a real code fork.

I'm glad Microsoft forked their trident engine, it was obviously too filled with junk to ever really be right, but it was a gutsy move on their part. Stepping away from the "build it to be part of the OS so you can claim it's part of the OS to the antitrust agencies globally" couldn't possibly have resulted in quality engineering. Which showed as MSIE for years was the primary attack vector for blackhats around the world.

Almost makes me feel better about having to have spent programming time adjusting some utilities I do to EdgeHTML. Unlike the above poster, my stuff needs to be technically correct and accurate.

[edited by: lizardx at 8:00 am (utc) on Jan 24, 2016]

Install 'ublock origin' flashblock and noscript on firefox and you'll find the crashes go away

I have Flash blocked months back, and I've had NoScript back since whenever [Whitelisted sites excepted]

Eleven days have elapsed since your post, while primarily using IE11 for searches in that time - Firefox has crashed 17 times, an average 1.6 times a day, when it was lying there dormant.

IE11 [primary search] in that time only gave me three nagging script errors, and one page restart.

FWIW

JAB, I think basically the long standing microsoft policy of trying to take over the web by creating a monster direct linked IIS and MSIE Is finally being killed internally. This policy created a huge potential risk to the free internet, and I suspect what they are doing is just dumping all that old code, which had no legitimate engineering purposes.

You see more and more of these moves by their new boss, an opening and attempt to stop being the old microsoft, hard, when you still have the culture, but it's a pattern that's grown obvious after balmer left. MS just starting shipping a linux networking component for their cloud stuff or something, and this Edge thing is just another effort to stop obstructing reality, ie, a browser that is not MSIE, does not carry the MSIE baggage, and which is basically just another interface to the web that can be updated, isn't burned into the core of the OS, ie, what MSIE always should have been from the start.

I think it's a bit optimistic to expect microsoft to do things well at this late stage of their corporate lives, internally it sucks to work for, they can't attract the best and the brightest, who all want to go work for cool interesting companies that will let them do cool interesting things, minus many many many layers of excess hierarchy that can only kill creativity. I'd never work for that type of organization, and neither would any good programmer or designer or developer. So the weak quality of Edge, etc, that is the new MS.

I left MS products behind me in 2005, I saw the warning signs with XP, and bailed, never regretted it. I'd rather deal with the headaches of Free operating systems, at least those give me options of what to use and do. Even though they have rough edges. But complaining about MS failures or weaknesses, it's their corporate culture at this stage. I personally think Bill left because he could also see the warning signs internally and knew it would not be fun anymore, or interesting. You don't see Larry Ellison leaving Oracle at that age, do you? Or Steve Jobs Apple? He had to die to leave. When engineer geeks leave, it's because the stuff isn't fun or interesting or challenging anymore, it's a just a grind. And when the head leaves, that's very very revealing. And not to be ignored. If you see Zuckerberg leave facebook, you'll know it's because facebook internally sucks as a corporation.

IanCP, I had those issues with firefox, but to be fair, I ran 2 to 3 firefox instances, each with 50 to 100+ tabs open.

You have to be very careful whitelisting sites, if you aren't careful, you let in all those 3rd party monstrosities as well.

ublock is critical, if you aren't running it, that's a very likely component of your crashes, I didn't get firefox to stabilize until I moved from adblock to ublock origin. There's no reason not to install it, so if you are tired of firefox crashing, that's a very very good tool to use. Ublock origin (not ublock regular) is very well programmed and massively drops the ram use, and seems to do a very good job stabilizing firefox. The developer knows what he's doing.

Firefox does have this weakness, but then again, it's really not a fair comparison, I couldn't dream of running the number of tabs I do on chrome or msie, it's out of the question. Well, I can't run msie because that requires windows, but I'm sure it couldn't handle the load at all.

One thing I found that tended to crash firefox more than most things was self updating web pages that were very very long, ie, with active javascript, like a very long comment thread, that had active New type items listed. It seems like firefox has something glitchy in how it handles those very long active pages. Turn js off, no issues usually. Well, no, that's not true, if you load a massive data table, firefox may crash, same type of issue, too much ram is used too quickly I think.

If your firefox is crashing with few tabs open when dormant, then you have another issue, not related I think to what you believe it's related to. I'd start firefox with a fresh profile and see how it runs then, I'd suspect a profile data file corruption or something like that, spyware, hard to say, but that's not normal firefox behavior.

the most common cause of firefox crashes is extension conflicts, and using a new profile to test is a good way to determine that too. I keep to a good simple extension toolkit, made by quality coders who don't mess around, and have shown they can do the job over many years. I don't use pointless extensions ever, almost all firefox unstable issues are considered to be extension related, and thus it's really not fair to judge unless you judge apples to apples in terms of the extension you use.