Ex-Microsoft Intern: Google Deliberately Crippled Edge Browser

Allowing any one company too much control over the internet and the long-term development of web standards has always been a bad idea. It didn’t work well in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the de facto standard, and it isn’t likely to be a particularly great outcome in 2018, either, now that Chromium has emerged as the single dominant player in browsing. According to a former Edge intern/developer, Microsoft has given up on its own EdgeHTML engine because it couldn’t keep up with the ways Google kept breaking major websites to disadvantage it.

In a post at Hacker News, JoshuaJB (identified via Neowin as Joshua Bakita), in response to a post theorizing that Google could exploit its dominance by integrating preferential support to boost Google app performance at the expense of other platforms or products, writes:

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.

The irony of defending Edge and Microsoft after years of decrying the way Redmond has shoved everyone towards using Edge at every opportunity is not lost on me. Neither is the irony of defending Microsoft in general. The company’s hostility towards open source development and its fondness for monopoly may have faded somewhat in recent years, but they’ve scarcely been forgotten.

But I don’t need to stick up for the way Microsoft pushed people to use Edge to see the danger in giving any single company too much control over standards and practices. We don’t know if the story above is actually true — as of this writing, it hasn’t been independently confirmed. But it’s not hard to believe, and we’ve seen historical examples of how this kind of monopoly can work against companies that attempt to create alternatives. IE6 dominated the internet to such a degree that websites were often programmed to perform well in Internet Explorer, even when this broke standards or failed to conform to best practices. Competing browsers that attempted to implement standards correctly would then fail to work with IE6 pages.

Ars Technica gives another example of how Google has designed sites like YouTube to favor its own approach, to the detriment of other browsers.

As another example, YouTube uses a feature called HTML imports to load scripts. HTML imports haven’t been widely adopted, either by developers or browsers alike, and ECMAScript modules are expected to serve the same role. But they’re available in Chrome and used by YouTube. For Firefox and Edge, YouTube sends a JavaScript implementation of HTML imports which carries significant performance overheads. The result? YouTube pages that load in a second in Chrome take many seconds to load in other browsers.

The fact that Chromium is open source won’t ultimately matter much if one company still represents the overwhelming force behind its development and the associated development of future web standards. In mobile, Apple still has some sway, thanks to Safari on the iPhone. But Mozilla Firefox, with its 9 percent market share, is now the only bulwark against Chrome’s total domination of the desktop browser market.

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