Microsoft Edge, ungooglability and a new class of bugs

Microsoft definitely has a naming problem. .net core was one thing, but calling a browser Edge was just trolling developers. Try searching for “Edge CSS” or “JavaScript Edge”. It’s a lesson in frustration, which means the bugs in the new browser are extra painful to debug because it’s that much harder to find the blog posts and Q&A for the last person to fix the problem.

And Edge doesn’t behave like IE, or Firefox, or Chrome. I’m sure Microsoft, like the other vendors, are updating OSS frameworks to help them target Edge, but there’s still a lot of Javascript and CSS that breaks silently, so no Console logs to help, no odd numbers in the calculated CSS, and no hacks to persuade Edge that it can render just like the big browsers.

I want to like the browser, I really do. Anything that brings the end of IE closer has to be welcomed, but even after the Anniversary update of Windows 10, it’s far from ready. If I try to open IIS failure logs in Windows 10, it opens up IE, and displays with the correct CSS, and then tells me I should use Edge, where the CSS is broken. It’s frustrating as a user, and as a developer. It’s an alpha product, and it should have been treated as such. Give it to devs, allow power users to opt in, and iterate it. Microsoft still needs to learn what it means to develop in the open.

Documentation

Unfortunately the problem is then compounded by Microsoft’s documentation problem. For all the faults of IE, at least Microsoft had a good reputation for documentation at the height of MSDN. Unfortunately, MSDN is starting to decay, and there’s a number of conflicting alternatives springing up. For us developers, the seemingly preferred route for latest information is blog posts (or the comments thereon – which were the only source of information for a knotty Docker problem we had), but there’s also GitHub, docs.microsoft.com and the occasional update to the existing MSDN documentation suite.

Microsoft seem to be trying to frustrate developers. Especially when they have evolving, and conflicting APIs (I’m looking at you Azure, and the Python vs PowerShell vs Node APIs, and the Portal experience). The documentation experience at Microsoft feels like the Google UI experience before Material Design. And it needs a similar overhaul.

I love seeing Microsoft trying to be more open and I see it working, to a certain extent, in the C# and .Net space, aside from the .Net Core RC release cycle chaos. They’ve come a long way from the days of alt.Net (although I agree that we need to recapture that passion, both for the sake of new developers, and for the sake of keeping Microsoft in check), but they’re in danger of alienating developers once more with the confusion, and the inconsistencies within certain platforms.

In that context, removing project.json and keeping .csproj was the right decision. One clear and consistent path. Now go and apply it across the board.

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