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Former Edge Browser Intern Alleges Google Sabotaged Microsoft's Browser (ycombinator.com)

Posted by msmash on from the he-says-she-says dept.

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.

7 of 427 comments (clear)

  1. I Believe It by SpaceForceCommander · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I believe this 100%. Google Docs has basically become unusable unless you're using Chrome.

    1. Re:I Believe It by alexo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I use FireFox, both mobile and desktop, and google docs and spreadsheets work fine for me. Haven't tried Slides recently but it worked fine the last time I did.

      Open Google's image search in mobile Firefox.
      Then do it in mobile Chrome.
      See the difference in functionality?
      Now change Firefox's user agent to masquerade as Chrome.
      Suddenly the full functionality is back.

  2. Embrace Extend Extinguish by Pentium100 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We may be seeing Microsoft getting a taste of its own medicine.

    1. Re:Embrace Extend Extinguish by Pentium100 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      No, but it's like seeing the previous dictator swinging on a rope, put there by the new dictator who is exactly the same. The state of the things didn't change, but the good feeling of "an asshole getting what was coming to them" is still there.

  3. NDA by jtara · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I guess Microsoft does't require interns to sign an NDA...

  4. Re:Boo hoo by jrumney · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes, it sounds very much like Microsoft's "hardware acceleration fast-path" was a hack that relied on very specific HTML layout of the YouTube site, and when Google changed it (by adding an empty hidden div no less - something that should have absolutely no effect on a standards compliant layout engine not to mention the video hardware acceleration) it broke their precious benchmark cheat.

  5. Re:Boo hoo by alexo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Google already downgrades search functionality for firefox mobile. Once I changed the user agent to chrome, all the missing features suddenly appeared and were working with no issues.

    Make no mistake, Google is just as evil as Microsoft was in its day.