Former Microsoft Employee Claims Google Broke Edge

AlphaAtlas

AlphaAtlas

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JoshuaJB, who Neowin says is really former Microsoft employee Joshua Bakita, made a post on Hacker News claiming that the Edge development team is switching to Chromium because Google "broke other browsers." While Joshua claims he isn't convinced Google intentionally sabotaged Edge, he says that many of his former co-workers are. Neowin notes that Microsoft basically shot itself in the foot by tying Edge updates to major Windows updates, and that switching to Chromium may remove that restriction, but that doesn't necessary shift any guilt from Google.

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... 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.
 
So? Google is guilty? Did this guy not know that Google can do no wrong? ;) Hey, they also helped killed the Windows Phone platform by not supporting it with their apps. Hey, I guess some monopolies are good after all, eh? :eek::rolleyes: It is not going to change because Google can do what they want, break whatever they want and the internet has to go along with them, they are now the standard.
 
Vega said:
Edge broke Edge. One of the worst pieces of software ever made.
Click to expand...

So, how is it the worst piece of software ever made? I use it everyday at home without issue at this point. Does not matter though since it is no longer going to be Edge but Chrome with an Edge interface. (Without Chrome, Chromium would not exist.)
 
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I imagine the devs created a pretty awesome browser in Edge, then m$ got its hands on it.
 
Vega said:
Edge broke Edge. One of the worst pieces of software ever made.
Click to expand...

Edge is fine from a practical standpoint. It's fast, it's efficient and it's functional.

It's also not as feature rich as mozilla or chrome and doesn't support extensions as well as either of those two. As the article indicates, it was sabotaged by both microsoft (updates tied to Win 10 releases) and competitors (Alphabet/Youtube/Chrome).
 
So Windows Update broke Edge by not providing timely updates, and there was nothing that could be done. Because that is how badly designed Microsoft's update cadence has become?

Keep that up and Linux may eventually have a shot at the desktop after all.
 
You reap what you sow. Microsoft started with Internet Explorer doing things not according to industry standards, which set the precedent for web sites to optimize for particular browsers that did not adhere to the standards.

Now, if Google intentionally broke YouTube on Edge, to give Chrome the better performance, there could be an anti-trust lawsuit justification there.
 
Whether Edge is fast, slow, saves battery life...etc, it doesn't matter to me, it hurts my eyes using it. There are no borders around the buttons/menu/tabs.
 
Let me get this straight, Google devs are mean because they exploited a bug in Edge to make your browser look artificially worse? So... fix the bug in you browser/rendering engine?
 
What was that saying? DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run? Or something like that? Seem to remember similar claims about Windows and Wordperfect. Still doesn't justify Google continuing their descent into the lower levels of the ethical sewer if they did what is alleged by these folks.
 
jardows said:
You reap what you sow. Microsoft started with Internet Explorer doing things not according to industry standards, which set the precedent for web sites to optimize for particular browsers that did not adhere to the standards.

Now, if Google intentionally broke YouTube on Edge, to give Chrome the better performance, there could be an anti-trust lawsuit justification there.
Click to expand...

That's my impression as well. This sounds like M$'s own previous actions coming full circle to me.
 
SamuelL421 said:
Let me get this straight, Google devs are mean because they exploited a bug in Edge to make your browser look artificially worse? So... fix the bug in you browser/rendering engine?
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they did, they just had to wait for microsoft to unbreak the october update 15 times before users got it, lol. edge as a browser had potential, sadly microsoft went out of their way to make sure that potential was never seen.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
they did, they just had to wait for microsoft to unbreak the october update 15 times before users got it, lol. edge as a browser had potential, sadly microsoft went out of their way to make sure that potential was never seen.
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EDGE had potential.. for what? For dumbing down web browsing?

It always seemed like a complete cludge to me. A lot of pages would not work properly on it. When it first came out, most web pages wouldn't work properly on it. It did get better, but the damage was already done because it was such a steaming pile of poo when it was released.

On top of that, the interface was/is a complete pile of trash.
 
jardows said:
You reap what you sow. Microsoft started with Internet Explorer doing things not according to industry standards, which set the precedent for web sites to optimize for particular browsers that did not adhere to the standards.

Now, if Google intentionally broke YouTube on Edge, to give Chrome the better performance, there could be an anti-trust lawsuit justification there.
Click to expand...
They do that with Youtube. There are some features on YouTube only available in Chrome.

cyclone3d said:
EDGE had potential.. for what? For dumbing down web browsing?

It always seemed like a complete cludge to me. A lot of pages would not work properly on it. When it first came out, most web pages wouldn't work properly on it. It did get better, but the damage was already done because it was such a steaming pile of poo when it was released.

On top of that, the interface was/is a complete pile of trash.
Click to expand...
I couldn’t hate Edge more if I tried. I still don’t understand why anyone would use it over the alternatives.
 
Edge just isn't any better than anything else, that's what killed it.

I use edge every day, because I have too many accounts and I have IE11, Edge, Chrome, Chrome unstable, Firefox, Opera and I use them all every day (Life of a sys admin nowadays)
One account for main office, one for O365 admin in one company, one in another, and a 3rd, one account to run as one of my domain admin users and one for another and so on.

Edge is not working well in many non google apps (ServiceNow is just one example where you get javascript errors), it hogs memory like crazy and is no better than anything else out there and I see absolutely 0 reasons to chose it over anything else, I use it because it's another browser with another icon so I can easily differentiate my different accounts but it also gives me tons of experience with it and it does fail in quite a few web sites, even O365 works better in Chrome.
 
It was Micro$oft that taught the world how to degrade other software companies in the 1980's. I distinctly remember Borland's Turbo Pascal coming out with their latest and greatest compiler - only to be followed up by "yet another" release of a Micro$soft O.S. that broke that compiler. Now, they are the one that's complaining? If only Edge was any good ! !?!?!
 
Microsoft announced a while back that they were supposed to make Edge update through Store. But that was over a year ago. Maybe the switch to Chromium was being planned that far back.

But in this case it sounds like Microsoft could have issued a fix to Edge had they provided updates through Store instead.
 
Maybe this will encourage MS to write better code and do a better job with timely updates. They should thank Google for doing the beta testing for them in that case, not that they're not doing so already with every consumer copy they sell, guinea pigs out the wazoo lol.
 
If you can use the custom themes for Chromium I hope Microsoft doesn't switch it up too much.
 
Vega said:
Edge broke Edge. One of the worst pieces of software ever made.
Click to expand...

Definitely not a web dev..... I've heard from multiple teams that edge is by FAR the easiest browser to develop for. Chrome is pretty bad and safari is the worst.

jardows said:
You reap what you sow. Microsoft started with Internet Explorer doing things not according to industry standards, which set the precedent for web sites to optimize for particular browsers that did not adhere to the standards.

Now, if Google intentionally broke YouTube on Edge, to give Chrome the better performance, there could be an anti-trust lawsuit justification there.
Click to expand...

Yup IE 9 was trash, and a web devs worst nightmare. 11 pretty close to industry standards, and edge is supposed to be closer than any other browser. I still couldn't use it as I hate the GUI/style, and how app store apps run.
 
Interesting responses.

Plain and simple. Google added an empty div tag over the video playback which every other browser, incorrectly, ignored as it was empty. Edge did not ignore it, which was actually correct and it got burned for it.

I am pretty sure ignoring tags on a WEB page is not consistent with HTML standards and browsers should not be doing that.

This is not a defense of Edge, nor a slam of Google. Just an observation.

Now, my opinion. If there is any truth to this, then Microsoft should take advantage of the target Google painted on itself and drag them through the court system. I'd buy tickets to watch that one.
 
Microsoft could make a competitor to YouTube and fight back. God knows YouTube needs a competitor.
 
jeffj7 said:
while i don't doubt that google wood do what they claim. its kinda the pot calling the kettle black
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Sure, but it doesn't justify it. Anti-competitive and monopolistic practices hurt the consumer in the end. Google's attitude to web standards and video standards is garbage and I hate supporting them for pretty much all the same reasons IE6 was bad. But firefox hangs for me sometimes and edge just isn't as good so I'm using chrome....
 
BSmith said:
Interesting responses.

Plain and simple. Google added an empty div tag over the video playback which every other browser, incorrectly, ignored as it was empty. Edge did not ignore it, which was actually correct and it got burned for it.

I am pretty sure ignoring tags on a WEB page is not consistent with HTML standards and browsers should not be doing that.

This is not a defense of Edge, nor a slam of Google. Just an observation.

Now, my opinion. If there is any truth to this, then Microsoft should take advantage of the target Google painted on itself and drag them through the court system. I'd buy tickets to watch that one.
Click to expand...

Not really MS knew about the problem MS knew about which domains it is being used on, a fix based on those 2 things would suffice.
MS is king of reinventing the wheel now there not doing that any more means a win for everyone.
Not having to update your own browser for security purposes saves a lot of work as well makes your system safer as well. Really bad deal that they dropped Edge , I don't think so ....
 
GT98 said:
:LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL:

man I've been working in IT for 20 years now and I'd be rich with the amount of times I've heard someone say that over the years
Click to expand...

Me too. Can't fault people for dreaming though. It's a nice thought in some ways. The reality though is that you just trade one set of issues for another set.
 
The fact that Hotmail/Outlook doesn't work properly on Edge, but fine on Chrome, makes me think Google had less to do with it sucking than this guy is claiming.
 
BSmith said:
Interesting responses.

Plain and simple. Google added an empty div tag over the video playback which every other browser, incorrectly, ignored as it was empty. Edge did not ignore it, which was actually correct and it got burned for it.

I am pretty sure ignoring tags on a WEB page is not consistent with HTML standards and browsers should not be doing that.

This is not a defense of Edge, nor a slam of Google. Just an observation.

Now, my opinion. If there is any truth to this, then Microsoft should take advantage of the target Google painted on itself and drag them through the court system. I'd buy tickets to watch that one.
Click to expand...

But what is the purpose of processing an empty DIV in the first place.. even if it is "standard" to do so? Not sure it would matter either way performance-wise... but if I was the one writing the code parser, I would probably skip over anything that was empty as processing it should not change the layout of the page at all compared to not processing it.

The other browsers may ignore empty DIVs in order to try to reduce RAM usage as if you have a ton of empty structures, it could possibly increase RAM usage depending on how it is stored in RAM.
 
After getting tired of Firefox being a flaming pile of shit that crashed the computer due to you being out of memory every 20 minutes if you didn't do a full reboot I decided to avoid that dumpster fire and have stuck to IE/Edge. Personally I don't ever see the issues that other seem to. All my pages have always loaded, including business applications that have only ever worked or worked correctly in IE / Edge.
 
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cyclone3d said:
But what is the purpose of processing an empty DIV in the first place.. even if it is "standard" to do so? Not sure it would matter either way performance-wise... but if I was the one writing the code parser, I would probably skip over anything that was empty as processing it should not change the layout of the page at all compared to not processing it.

The other browsers may ignore empty DIVs in order to try to reduce RAM usage as if you have a ton of empty structures, it could possibly increase RAM usage depending on how it is stored in RAM.
Click to expand...

How exactly do you decide an element is empty? No children, no dimensions, opacity, visibility, no styles? Also at which point do you start processing the element?
 
dgz said:
How exactly do you decide an element is empty? No children, no dimensions, opacity, visibility, no styles? Also at which point do you start processing the element?
Click to expand...

If the element has nothing in between the opening and closing tags then it is empty. Doesn't matter it there are styles or anything else in the opening tag.

And then if you go inside the element and it has other empty elements inside it and nothing else, then those probably shouldn't be processed either.

Now if you are dealing with a table, it might be different depending on how the opening tag is set up. You could end up with a table that has not data in it if I remember correctly... which may be intentional.

Thinking about it.. a web page breaking a browser with an empty invisible element is just a silly oversight on the part of the person/people responsible for writing the code parser. It is really, really funny.
 
cyclone3d said:
If the element has nothing in between the opening and closing tags then it is empty. Doesn't matter it there are styles or anything else in the opening tag.

And then if you go inside the element and it has other empty elements inside it and nothing else, then those probably shouldn't be processed either.

Now if you are dealing with a table, it might be different depending on how the opening tag is set up. You could end up with a table that has not data in it if I remember correctly... which may be intentional.

Thinking about it.. a web page breaking a browser with an empty invisible element is just a silly oversight on the part of the person/people responsible for writing the code parser. It is really, really funny.
Click to expand...


There are set HTML standards that browsers are supposed to follow. MS was rightfully bashed for IE9 because it wasn't even close to following the standards, while other browsers were. Now edge is the closest, and chrome is starting to ignore standards to fake faster speeds, while also using that shit to make browsers that follow them slow down. Now, this probably means the standards need to be revised for these new cases, then we can go back to bashing the browsers that doesn't follow them.
 
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Google literally made daily to weekly changes to You Tube to keep it from working on WIndows Phone (as a windows phone user it was a daily question of "will it work today?" when someone sent me a video link). No surprise they did the same thing here to Edge after they got crushed in battery consumption.

The company is properly evil and deserves a few anti-trust cases.

This is all my opinion formed as a user seeing this shit happen and not representative of the company I work for.
 
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