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.

Comments

Boo hoo

[Anonymous Coward]

"but due to a failure of YouTube."

You mean a failure of Edge?

Re:Boo hoo

[jellomizer]

Microsoft has to learn how to make software like everyone else. You need to keep compatibility with the big fish, and not just do your own thing, and thinking everyone will switch to your method.

I am sorry, I had to code too many IE 6 workarounds and not put in new features due to having to keep IE 6 compatibility for so long, I have no sympathy to this Edge engineer.

Re:Boo hoo

[DontBeAMoran]

The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your ally.

Re:Boo hoo

[jrumney]

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.

Re:Boo hoo

[stinerman]

Sure, I'm not losing sleep either, but if Google is making useless changes to their websites in order to specifically screw with Edge, that's bad. If they are making useful changes to their websites...and it happens to screw with Edge. Not really their problem. Of course I didn't RTFA, so I can't really say which is which.

Re:Boo hoo

[Spy Handler]

Yeah it's funny when Google is messing around with Microsoft and deliberately making Microsoft products run slower. Microsoft is simply getting a taste of its own medicine, as they used to deliberately make things broken in IE6 back when they had the dominant browser.

But it's not so funny when (or if) Google adds stuff that slows down Firefox or other open source competitors to Chrome.

Re:Boo hoo

[EndlessNameless]

So what you're saying is... Google is following in Microsoft's evil footsteps?

Re:Boo hoo

[markdavis]

>"But it's not so funny when (or if) Google adds stuff that slows down Firefox or other open source competitors to Chrome."

Bingo. And if anyone thinks that isn't already happening or won't happen, they need a reality check. Chrome has decimated Firefox's market share- and most of it undeserved. Firefox is the last light in the "true" open-source, multi-platform, modern browser era. We will all absolutely be worse off if that light is extinguished.

Ask yourselves if there is really any good reason now to "automatically" install Chrome on machines or recommend it to friends and family. If not, consider making it Firefox. The painful redesign of the Firefox engine that lost some of the addons ended up making Firefox just as fast and more resource friendly while still being much more user-oriented and configurable than Chrome... and with a huge bonus of not being tied into all kinds of other incentives to do bad things with your data. (Looking at you, YouTube/Android/Gmail/Gmaps/Gwhatever users..).

Re: Boo hoo

[ironicsky]

I came here to say this.

ActiveX
Silverlight

Incompatible CSS and IE specific JavaScript.

Microsoft is one of the reasons the internet was a standards nightmare, while Mozilla, Google and Opera all played nice with standards, Microsoft didn't.

Re:Boo hoo

[Sumus Semper Una]

Microsoft has to learn how to make software like everyone else. You need to keep compatibility with the big fish, and not just do your own thing, and thinking everyone will switch to your method.

So much this. All the other browsers had to deal with these same changes to Google sites too. Why was it so much more painful to Microsoft? Well, I thought this piece from the article was pretty telling:

What's particularly interesting about this is that whether Google did this intentionally or not, Microsoft fell into a trap that it set for itself. When Bakita says, "we couldn't keep up", and goes on to say that the issue is fixed in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, that's actually because Microsoft set a path for itself where it could only add new features to Edge with feature updates to Windows 10. That limits the company to twice per year.

I'm sorry, but this browser was doomed as soon as it arrived due to fundamental flaws in its design. Blaming Google is just focusing on the convenient obvious symptom instead of addressing the root problem.

To be fair, that's exactly the kind of mistake I'd expect to see an intern make.

Re:Boo hoo

[cheekyboy]

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.

Re:Boo hoo

[alexo]

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.

Re:Boo hoo

[DontBeAMoran]

Google would be able to change YouTube's code a lot faster than Microsoft could push out updates for Edge.

Re:Boo hoo

[Tuidjy]

Google would be able to change YouTube's code a lot faster than Microsoft could push out updates for Edge.

And Microsoft is well aware of this. Why? Because that's exactly how they were conducting their "embrace, extend, extinguish" policy when they were the big bully on the block.

Do you notice that it's an intern complaining, and not an official Microsoft statement? I guess that they are ashamed, or unwilling to remind those of us who remember of all the hoops we had to jump to keep stuff IE (was it 6) compliant. Client side VisualBasic, not-quite JavaScript, non-compliance to standards, etc.

Google has read Microsoft's "Book of Evulz", and is following it to the letter.

Re: Boo hoo

[Bert64]

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.

Re: Boo hoo

[Kvan]

Mozilla regularly complain about Google shenanigans, see e.g. https://twitter.com/cpeterso/s...

Yes, we can imagine

[NaCh0]

Can you imagine if all of a sudden ________ apps start performing better than anyone else's?

Yes we can. Ask the DR-DOS team.

Re:Yes, we can imagine

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Yes, we can imagine

[ron_ivi]

If anyone missed the DR-DOS history, this is a good summary: https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/

"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."

Re:Yes, we can imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

Attitudes like this are basically the reason people are going to pissed in about 10 more years when Google really is the new Microsoft. We have the chance to fix the issue now, but people like you are too obsessed with rubbing Microsoft's nose in the dirt over 15+ year old mistakes to realize you're enabling Google to do the exact same shit.

Re:Yes, we can imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yes, we can imagine

[WaffleMonster]

Fix what issue? Should Google stop developing new technology? A lot of the improvements to the standards have come from Google and other doing this kind of work. HTTP3 is based on Google technology that was pioneered with Chrome and Google sites, and it's excellent.

HTTP3 is Google wrestling control over the remaining part of the stack Google doesn't have full ownership over.

You might think pushing congestion control out to user space where Google has intentionally given themselves a 2x advantage over TCP is "excellent". When I look at that it's nothing more than a pure power grab for self-serving reasons actively harmful to everyone else.

There is nothing substantive HTTP3 brings to the table TFO+TLS 1.3 does not already provide.

Microsoft's stuff was closed source proprietary bug-ridden crap. Lack of support broke sites, while Google is careful to ensure that sites work fine in other browsers. Remember when you couldn't download stuff from Microsoft.com because it needed IE?

How is memory lane at all relevant to the issue at hand? Microsoft sucks or sucked or whatever therefore ... what? Google gets a pass?

What exactly has Google done wrong here?

*IF* the assertions are true Google intentionally leveraged it's monopoly position to intentionally sabotage other browsers to get more people to switch to Chrome.

Re:Yes, we can imagine

[tbird20d]

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.

Re:Yes, we can imagine

[squiggleslash]

While there's probably no doubt Google is trying to take over the browser market, this "We built our web browser so it will be especially fast when rendering YouTube, and Google broke it by adding a hidden element to a webpage" argument is a spectacularly bad example.

Bear in mind what the Edge engineer is tacitly admitting here: Microsoft tried to cheat on a benchmark. They optimized the entire browser to render ONE popular website REALLY REALLY well, and their optimizations were so specific that the entire house of cards collapsed when Google added a single element, an element that wasn't even visible. So, they cheated, Google changed something, and suddenly Edge was rendering YouTube with the same performance it would render everyone else's video website.

Let's focus on real examples of Google breaking standards or favoring those Chrome supports over better supported standards, not Microsoft trying to cheat on benchmarks and Google fucking it up for them.

I Believe It

[SpaceForceCommander]

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

Re:I Believe It

[alexo]

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.

Embrace Extend Extinguish

[Pentium100]

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

Re:Embrace Extend Extinguish

[93 Escort Wagon]

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

So is it really okay if Google screws over other web browsers with Chrome-specific hacks, just because Microsoft did it a decade or so ago? Cuz in doing so, Google is also causing problems for people who aren't using Edge or Internet Explorer.

I think if it was evil when Microsoft did it, it's also evil if Google does it.

Re:Embrace Extend Extinguish

[markdavis]

>"Satisfying as that may be, it still change Google into a bunch of hymn singing angels."

Exactly. Which is why it is more important than ever to support Mozilla Firefox. We absolutely do NOT want to end up with Google in control of everything.... any more than what we dealt with when Microsoft was ruining the web.

There was a time when Chrome pulled ahead of Firefox in performance. That time ended. It is a good time to switch to or switch back to Firefox. You will have web-standards-based browsing on all platforms, open source, open development team, just as many addons, but with more user control and customization.

Re:Embrace Extend Extinguish

[Pentium100]

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.

Chrome is the new IE

[PhunkySchtuff]

Chrome is repeating all the tricks that Microsoft used in the 90's to ensure browser dominance.
Don't be evil. Yeah, right. Sell eyeballs at any cost.

NDA

[jtara]

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

Re:Nope. Wrong.

[Etcetera]

That's not the point... Just because OSS is involved doesn't mean Google isn't asserting dominating control over the Internet.

This is not something to cheer on no matter how much irony there may be in Microsoft being the victim this time.

Microsoft "Teams" sabotages Chrome

[ffkom]

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.

Karma's a bitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's to the 90's and early 2000 when Microsoft did the exact same shit