At JSConf in Florida today, Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing Chakra, the JavaScript engine used in its Edge and Internet Explorer browsers. The code will be published to the company’s GitHub page next month.
Good move, but they should just go the whole way.
It could be that making Edge cross platform would not be feasible, so making it open source wouldn’t be a big deal.
Edge is also not better than Chromium, but Chakra may well be a better JS engine than v8 (I guess we’ll know soon).
C’mon, Microsoft made their Office suite cross-platform. Surely a browser can’t be that hard, especially when the rendering engine was written from scratch and it no longer supports ActiveX.
I wonder whether one will be able to make modifications to Chakra and then make Edge use the modified version.
MS removed ActiveX and some other stuff from MSHTML (aka trident) to build EdgeHTML, it’s not “written from scratch”.
Edited 2015-12-05 18:15 UTC
Yep… Edge is basically an incremental update on the IE11 engine, but discarding a bunch of legacy support. It’s a decent engine (wrapped in a crap UI), but it’s not an all-new one.
Open sourcing software code doesn’t have to be about making something cross platform. In general, that’s just a side effect. Most people open source software to get more eyes on code to help develop it by finding bugs, structural flaws, security and privacy issues, and to just show how the software end product works. Cross platform porting is often just “oh, we can get it to work on $obscure_platform, too”. While technically interesting, it’s not usually part of the primary reasoning behind release.
Arguably open sourcing a java script interpreter is largely about finding bugs and security issues, since many exploits are targeted at flaws in java script engines to get malicious code injected on target machines.
But it certainly doesn’t hurt either if that’s your goal. I mean, why do the work yourself when you can release it to the world and have ‘the community’ do it for you?
The community = free labor.
Though the community will contribute with some stuff, I strongly suspect the whole code will still be modified, improved, etc. by Microsoft guys (same thing occurs with Android or Facebook open source stuff).
Freeing your code is more a political thing than a technical benefit for them.
Which to me, says we should stop having so many new engines each with their own new set of bugs.
I’ve mixed feelings about this, while I agree to some extent, having a monoculture would leave absolutely _everyone_ exposed to any bugs exploited.
Seems best to me for multiple implementations of standards to exist.
But while that might be an intention, it’s only true if the project can attract those eyes… to get developers to work on the code, and to do become sufficiently expert to find those bugs and flaws.
As such, improved security is itself just a side-effect of a healthy open-source project… you can open up your code, but that alone achieves little.
This whole many eyes thing about security is mostly BS. In theory it’s a good thing, but in practice you end up with a small handful of nerds, most of whom are interested in the latest features than actually developing real mitigations.
There’s already a Distribution named Chakra,
https://chakraos.org/
This was my first thought too. What a Linux geek I’ve become. 😛
Edited 2015-12-06 02:53 UTC
Open your Chakras
Opensourcing does not implicate open development. This does not mean that Edge will have opensource version also (something like Chromium vs. Chrome).
Is anything stopping you from creating a fork?
In general these “closed source goes open source” projects are about improving goodwill, gaining trust in the product and getting outside input. You have to look at the amount and kind of outside contributions to see how open the development has become.
I am quite amazed by how fast Edge is developing. They clearly overpromised and underdelivered in July and with extensions but they are adding features and background (HTML5) improvements very quickly. Not good enough as my daily driver on my workpc, but working very nicely on my phone and for some light home-use
Edge crashes when I log into Spiceworks every time whether it is right away or when trying to read a ticket. Clearly, it is still buggy!
Without having any idea what SpiceWorks is (it sounds like a helpdesk system): How do you know that Edge is the problem and not SpiceWorks?
Perhaps because switching from IE11 to Edge without updating Spiceworks it started to crash ? Which parameter has changed in the process ?
Yes, it is a helpdesk system. How do I know, because it all other browsers, including IE11 work fine.
Searched a bit for you and Edge doesn’t seem to be the problem: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1196571-spiceworks-does-not-w…
Where is your ticket/question on the spiceworks community?
Because browsers should not crash even with standards non-compliant websites.
Browsers often crash lately on Windows 10 because of lousy Intel, Nvidia and AMD drivers that try to accelerate your scrolling. This wasn’t the case a couple of months ago and it is getting fixed this last week, but at the moment it is a PITA
(also, when someone says something crashes that often means something doesn’t work the way he was used to)
I have tried SpiceWorks (it looks interesting, but isn’t as good as our own servicedesk system) and it works just fine on Edge for me
First, I would like to see MS releasing an Microsoft Office for Linux desktop, that would be the best ever from MS offering.
Second, I would love to see an open source version of their Windows desktop, not necessarily the Windows server version.
Why do you want an open source Windows? Freedom reasons? Ability to reuse components in other projects?
Yup, looks like a bit overkill to open source a whole operating system just to port a soft on it. Many people succeed in porting applications from one platform to another just using the regular native sdk.
Embracing and extending node.js?