It was recently revealed that Microsoft is working on a major overhaul for its Edge browser where they would be adopting Chromium, Google’s rendering engine for websites, and thus ditching EdgeHTML in the process. It seemed like a smart idea with regards to compatibility, but it seems that Microsoft might have been forced into the matter.According to a report from The Register, it seems that there are multiple reports of people claiming that Google had allegedly intentionally “broken” the browsers of Apple and Microsoft for their websites, which in turn allowed Google to boast that they had a better browser, and in the case of Microsoft, forcing them to adopt Chromium or forever keep fighting what seems like an uphill battle.
A post on Hacker News allegedly from someone who worked on Edge claims that to be true. “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.”
Others, such as developer Steve Troughton-Smith, have lent credence to these claims with examples of their own. Even Mozilla criticized Microsoft’s choice to shift to Chromium. Google has since issued a statement which reads:
YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when they’re discovered. Google has been a champion of the open web since its inception and has continued to work with others in the ecosystem to make the web faster, safer, more capable, and more interoperable. We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies, the Web Platform Tests project, the open-source Chromium project and more to improve browser interoperability.
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