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Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim (www.techradar.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Some of the top browser makers around have issued a letter to the European Commission (EC) alleging that Microsoft gives the Edge browser an unfair advantage and should be subject to EU tech rules.

A letter seen by Reuters, sent by Vivaldi, Waterfox, and Wavebox, and supported by a group of web developers, also supports Opera’s move to take the EC to court over its decision to exclude Microsoft Edge from being subject to the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

As Edge comes pre-installed by default on Windows machines, users must navigate the Microsoft offering in order to download their browser of choice. The letter states that, “No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge's unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows. Edge is, moreover, the most important gateway for consumers to download an independent browser on Windows PCs.”

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The early versions of edge were absolutely terrible and didn't support modern standards. I fully believe that YouTube didn't work on Edge but I don't believe it was anything to do with Google and everything to do with Microsoft not being able to build a web browser.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm a web dev, fully disagree with you. I don't even think this comment is based in any reality, just MS hatred (which, to be fair, I currently hate them for other reasons, but it's a big company with many parts)

I warned my colleagues against doing all development and testing in Chrome, because they would inevitably code towards "Webkit features" unknowingly, and leave both Edge and Firefox in the dust. I set up Edge as my default because, in an effort to catch up in popularity, they were being very strict and communicative with standards. If I wrote a page to work in Edge, it would work in other browsers. Meanwhile, there were horrific features like linear gradients that needed a full 15 lines of CSS specifically because Webkit would implement it, realize their implementation had gaps, reimplement it, and end up with 14 used-in-release syntaxes that you needed to account for, instead of the Edge/Firefox "Build it right" philosophy.

I sincerely doubt the current YouTube situation is actually because YouTube is a complex site. 90% of the motivation for whatever feature they're putting in is to push Chrome and fuck over other browsers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not saying that I like the fact that they've gone over to a new render engine, I don't.

But frankly the alternative wasn't working and either they couldn't or were unwilling to put in the effort to develop their own system.

I fully believe Google might have been doing some messing around with YouTube. but that doesn't necessarily mean that they did and no one was ever able to provide any evidence for the accusation.

With regards to things like linear gradients, kind of get your point but also at the same time who the hell still codes raw CSS? I've been out of the industry for probably about 8 years and even back then people were using SASS, so needing a bunch of vendor prefixes is kind of irrelevant really.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Citing SASS feels like “Who codes HTML when we have Dreamweaver” type of comment.

SASS just translates your styles to CSS, so even if you write one simple line, it’s polyfilling 13 - and for various technical reasons it’s better if one line polyfills one line for consistency. Just to give one example, an app might bloat its page load by inadvertently having 1MB-large CSS files post SASS translation.

I’ve heard the comment about “not keeping up, wasn’t working” in regards to Edge several times, but I haven’t heard any concrete examples of that that didn’t relate to Chrome flexing its position or jumping the gun on standards. It’s even realistic a large percent of that was people, web devs included, having trailing feelings of “Ugh, IE - I mean Edge” long after that stopped making sense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Dreamweaver is an IDE (a bad and crappy one). SASS is a pre-processing language.

They don't even remotely do the same thing

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It seems that comment went right over your head.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

History disagrees with you on this one.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

What do you mean history disagrees with me? If you look at reviews of Microsoft edge when it released pretty much all of them talk about how it lacked compatibility with modern standards and was nowhere close to feature complete. Large parts of the HTML5 spec were missing, including any support for webm or ogg encoding.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean that there is several indicators that Google did indeed try to sabotage other browsers on YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That was a claim that was made yes, but never proven.

Meanwhile what I said is demonstrably verifiable. Early versions of Microsoft edge that they put out were an absolute travesty, and all of the criticism leveled at it was 100% earned, it had nothing to do with any machinations from Google. Microsoft made a terrible browser put it out to the general public and were rightfully criticized for it. They couldn't fix it so they switched to chromium.