According to a Microsoft ex-employee, Google had been purposefully changing its codes to thwart Edge browser. The ex-employee has claimed that EdgeHTML maintenance was slowly becoming impossible as Google kept on breaking compatibility in its sites and thus forcing Microsoft to patch its software. The engineer also says that this is the reason why Microsoft has now given up and decided to move to Google’s Chromium platform.
JoshuaJB’s told Hacker News that-
“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).”
Joshua claims that Microsoft’s hardware acceleration was helping the Edge achieve better battery life and this instigated the folks at Google. It is no secret that Google Chrome browser has been a battery sucker for most parts. The nail in the coffin was after they had broken the hardware acceleration program which caused the whole Edge web browser to stop working.
He further added that-
“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.”
That being said JoshuaJB feels that the changes done to YouTube were not a direct attempt to sabotage Edge browser. However, his colleagues and Microsoft begged to differ and blamed Google for distorting Edge performance.
Last month Microsoft announced that it would be migrating Edge browser to the Chromium open source engine while the EdgeHTML serves the legacy Universal Windows Apps. Now, this brings us to an important question, does the world deserve to be dominated by three top browsers?
This concern is especially true since a bunch of browsers like Opera, Vivaldi and Edge are now being powered by the Chromium platform.
