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Former Edge Browser Intern Alleges Google Sabotaged Microsoft's Browser (ycombinator.com)
Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern on the Edge team at Microsoft, says one of the reasons why Microsoft had to ditch EdgeHTML rendering engine in Edge browser and switch to Chromium was to keep up with the changes (some of which were notorious) that Google pushed to its sites. These changes were designed to ensure that Edge and other browsers could not properly run Google's sites, he alleged. Responding to a comment, he wrote: "For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?" This is already happening. 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). 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. And this is only one case.
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). 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. And this is only one case.
And speaking of trying out proprietary technologies in your own browser, we all remember Active X and IE HTML extensions and Frontpage server side extensions.
This whole thing is bollocks anyway. Google isn't breaking sites in other browsers like Microsoft did, the are just developing new tech that eventually they propose as a standard if it works out. And the YouTube "attack" on Edge sounds more like a bug, especially since they fixed it in an update. Likely the Edge code was brittle and heavily optimized to win battery benchmarks at the expense of compatibility, i.e. it was tuned to YouTube so specifically that the addition of an invisible div broke it.
Jog on Microsoft.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Remember Explorer vs. Nautilus and the rest?
"It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows,
Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)",
Silverberg replied: "What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is dr-dos and then go out to buy ms-dos. or decide to not take the risk for the other machines he has to buy for in the office."
BTW: The web version of Microsoft "Teams" runs fine with Chrome on Linux, but only if the "UserAgent" is faked to indicate a Windows-based browser. Exactly the same evil strategy, used as of today, by Microsoft.
Except that's not what actually happened.
When Windows 3.1 was in Beta, Microsoft put in some code that displayed an error message if you weren't running Microsoft's own MS-DOS. But all it did was display an error message. You could just ignore it and Win 3.1 would still run -- I was running DR-DOS at the time and it worked just fine.
A few beta testers were using DR-DOS and word got out that Microsoft had done something to prevent people from using anything other than MS-DOS. In the official retail release of Win 3.1 Microsoft changed the code and deactivated the error message. It was still in there but didn't display. You could activate it by using a hex editor to change a couple of bytes.
yeah but MS now is behaving better than google.
Google, has many umm 'addons' to the internet specs that offer better , faster, but is 100% google.
Btw, YOUTUBE, fix your shit UI, I am sick of seeing video suggestions with NO TIME STAMPS, I need to know if your stupid video suggestion is 7 years old, or 2 days old. Give us a fucking date stamp, you bunch of stupid ass useless coders - who are so minimalists, it makes DOS 1982 software look like it has more features.
Oh and if you delete users videos, and my 'list' shows video deleted, tell me THE FUCKING ORIGINAL TITLE, idiots, i have to save my list to a drive document because you suck at coding.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Your experience was not representative of the full effect. I was at Novell at the time, and helped reverse-engineer some of the techniques Microsoft used to scare Windows users away from DR-DOS. I personally witnessed the deposition with the Microsoft engineer who wrote the code to show the messages (in Caldera's anti-trust case against Microsoft). This code appeared in more than just the beta, and DR-DOS did not work just fine. I saw evidence (from legal discovery) about how Microsoft stealthily undermined developers who wrote drivers for DR-DOS (driving at least one out of business). Microsoft's crusade against DR-DOS was intentional, and NOT slight or benign.
MS haven't learned their lesson, they just don't like the fact that someone else is now in a position to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Don't dish it out if you can't take it.
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Mozilla regularly complain about Google shenanigans, see e.g. https://twitter.com/cpeterso/s...
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- 'K' in Men in Black.