14 DAY TRIAL // The failure of Microsoft Edge was finally acknowledged by Microsoft a few weeks ago when the company confirmed that it’s switching to the Chromium browsing engine and thus giving up on its very own EdgeHTML.
And while opinions on whether this is a good thing or not are still mixed, a lot has been said about the reasons Microsoft Edge eventually turned out to be just a failed browser.
But as far as a former Microsoft software engineering intern is concerned, Google itself is also responsible for the decision to abandon EdgeHTML. Joshua Bakita, who was an intern on the Microsoft Edge team, says in a post on Hacker News that the frequent changes Google made to its web apps broke down compatibility in the other web browsers, including Microsoft’s.
“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),” he explains in his post.
“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.”
“Intentional” change
At the same time, the former Microsoft intern says everything was intentional and Google’s teams even refused to provide more information on the changes they made to their services.
“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,” he added, suggested this happened in more than just one case.
Microsoft is migrating to Chromium and all these compatibility issues would go away, as the changes that Google makes apply to all browsers relying on this engine.
This is why Chromium-based browsers are easier to maintain, and with Microsoft moving in this direction, the company can make sure that Google won’t be evil with its Windows 10 default. Or, at least, not as evil as before.