Edge is stifling competition among browsers, rivals say

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.”

  • dgmib@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    I’m not defending Microsoft… but if we’re going to go after a tech company for leveraging their other assets to give themselves an unfair advantage can we also go after Google?

    In the first releases of Edge, Microsoft tried to build a new web browser from scratch to compete with Google Chrome. By google kept changing YouTube’s code so that videos would playback janky on Edge. Microsoft eventually gave up trying to fix for YouTubes ongoing changes and now Edge is based on Chromium (the same open source web browser maintained by Google, that chrome os built on). Google leveraged YouTube to prevent completion from Edge.

    And now Google is blocking ad blocking extensions so that users are forced to see more google ads in their browser.

    Microsoft’s has leveraged their unfair advantage to get a little over 5% market share.

    Google’s leveraged their unfair advantage to get 66% of the market.

    Both companies need a hard smack down, but I want to see Google taken down too.

    • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Any source that YouTube is the reason that Edge switched to chromium?

      I’m betting it’s just cheaper and easier than making their own engine.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      01·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        30 days ago

        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.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
          0·
          30 days ago

          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.

          • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            30 days ago

            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.