Recently Microsoft confirmed that they embracing the Open Source Chromium platform for their Edge browser on Windows and other popular operating systems. Most of the internet users have welcomed this move.
Once in the ’90s, Microsoft had the dominance in browser market share with their famous Internet Explorer. But those days are gone with the release of Chromium-based Google Chrome browser and the increasing dominance of Google in the field of web.
An alleged Microsoft’s engineering team intern, Joshua, who reportedly worked in the Edge browser development team, has recently revealed the reason that convinced Microsoft to give up on EdgeHTML rendering engine for Chromium solutions.
Joshua Bakita said, “I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update).”
Most of the web services from Google or from the third-parties are made of Google’s widely spread web properties. And we all know that YouTube issues are one of the main reasons why users left Edge browser.
Then he also added, “Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome’s dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.”
“Now while I’m not sure I’m convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced – and they’re the ones who looked into it personally. To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further”, further he stated.
The report claims that Google made all of these changes intentionally to prove that Edge’s performance is not as good as Chrome. Even when Edge team asked for more information about the changes they made, Google simply refused to provide that.
Now using open source Chromium-based browsing engine for default Windows browser may end the browsers war between Microsoft and Google.
This is not the first time Google is accused of using the market monopoly to stop their competitors. Previously they were fined by EU Court for the illegal restrictions to stop OEMs using third-party services on Android-based smartphones.
View Comments (17)
"the reason that convinced Microsoft to give up on Edge for Chromium."
They did not give up on Edge, they gave up EdgeHTML rendering engine and possibly Chakra Script for Chromium Rendering engine. Please state technical facts correctly as best as you can.
Indeed, fixed!