Month: December 2018

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Windows Central reports that Microsoft is planning to replace its Edge browser, which uses Microsoft's own EdgeHTML rendering engine and Chakra JavaScript engine, with a new browser built on Chromium, the open source counterpart to Google's Chrome. The new browser has the codename Anaheim.

The report is short on details. The easiest thing for Microsoft to do would be to use Chromium's code wholesale—the Blink rendering engine, the V8 JavaScript engine, and the Chrome user interface with the Google Account parts omitted—to produce something that looks, works, and feels almost identical to Chrome. Alternatively, Redmond could use Blink and V8 but wrap them in Edge's user interface (or some derivative thereof), to retain its own appearance. It might even be possible to do something weird, such as use Blink with the Chakra JavaScript engine. We'll have to wait and see.

Since its launch with Windows 10, Edge has failed to gain much market share. The first iterations of Edge were extremely barebones, offering little more than a basic tabbed browser—no extensions, little control over behavior. Early releases of Edge were also not as stable as one might have liked, making the browser hard to recommend. Three years later on and Edge is greatly—but unevenly—improved. The browser engine's stability seems to be much better than it was, and performance and compatibility remain solid (though with the exception of a few corner cases, these were never a real concern).

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Today Google is launching Flutter 1.0, the first stable release of its open-source, cross-platform UI toolkit and SDK. Flutter lets developers share a single code base across Android and iOS apps, with a focus on speed and maintaining a native feel. The announcement was made today at Google's Flutter Live conference in London—a show dedicated entirely to the launch of Google's new developer track.

Flutter enables cross-platform app code by sidestepping the UI frameworks of both Android and iOS. Flutter apps run on the Flutter rendering engine and Flutter framework, which are shipped with every app. The Flutter platform handles communication with each OS and can spit out Android and iOS binaries with native-looking widgets and scrolling behavior if desired. It's kind of like applying a "video game" style of development to apps: if you write for a game engine like Unity or Unreal, those engines are packaged with your game, allowing it to run on multiple different platforms. It's the same deal with Flutter.

Flutter apps are written in Dart, and the SDK offers programmers nice quality-of-life benefits like the "stateful hot reload," a way to instantly make code changes appear in the emulator. For IDEs, there are plugins for Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, and IntelliJ. Apps come with their own set of Flutter UI widgets for Android and iOS, with the iOS widgets closely following Apple's guidelines and the Android widgets following Google's Material Design.

Enlarge / The Helm Personal Server, in situ in my office during the review.

As Ars security-meister Dan Goodin noted in his initial write-up back in October, the Helm Personal Server is a small-ish ARM-based email server that sits in your home and does for you what Gmail or Outlook.com or whomever your current email provider does for you. It’s a full-featured, single-domain (for now) MTA in a box that you can use with an unlimited number of email addresses and accounts, and it gives you 128GB of space to use as a mail store for those accounts. It also gives you CalDAV calendaring, notes, and CardDAV contacts, and it does it all with open-source applications that are chosen and configured in a way that demonstrates a solid bias toward individual security and privacy.

And I like it. I like it a lot. I didn’t think I would, but after spending a week with the device, I’m almost ready to spring for one—almost. And that’s high praise, coming from a paranoid email self-hoster like me.

Based on my short time with the Personal Server, the praise is properly earned. The Helm team based its product mostly around the same mail stack that I personally prefer and use—the holy trinity of Postfix for SMTP, Dovecot for IMAP, and SpamAssassin for keeping things clean. The device properly uses SPF, DKIM, and DMARC—and handles all the DNS stuff necessary to make those things work. End-user data is smartly encrypted at rest and in flight. Clever use of tunneling to AWS-based gateways transparently works around common ISP blocks on email service ports. And, perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to know what any of that stuff means to use the device securely—casual folks who maybe just want to lessen their reliance on Google or Microsoft will find the transition to Helm relatively painless, and there aren’t many ways to screw it up and make yourself less secure.