
Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side - joshlittle
https://www.laptopmag.com/news/googles-fear-of-microsoft-edge-is-revealing-its-bad-side
======
AaronFriel
This is just like when Google Maps was blocked on Windows Phone[1] and when
they decided to block YouTube as well[2]. Microsoft now finds themselves in
the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Google is
behaving, if anything, worse, and using its massive reach and user base to
stifle competition.

This is deeply disappointing, and all the more reason Microsoft never should
have adopted Chromium. They will eventually have to maintain a hard fork, the
differences will grow such that they eventually have to increase their
engineering spend on it to keep pace with just managing the rebases and
patches or reimplement features themselves, and despite all the good will they
had for the Chromium team they will see none of it returned by the larger
Google/Alphabet corporation.

They should have based Edge on Gecko and invested money in taking marketshare
away from Chromium so that the W3C/WHATWG can operate as intended with
_multiple implementations_ for a _single specification_. Instead they embraced
the Chrome monoculture _and_ were either treated in bad faith or the Chromium
team mistakenly believed everything would be fine with a reset in relations.
The result will be that Google retains a veto on web technology that competes
with them for the next decade or more.

Use Firefox, everyone.

[1] [https://mashable.com/2013/01/05/google-maps-windows-
phone/](https://mashable.com/2013/01/05/google-maps-windows-phone/)

[2] [https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-
google-...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-google-
battle-over-youtube-windows-phone)

~~~
Hypx
Sadly, I tried Firefox for a while, and it's big enough of a downgrade
compared to Chrome that I went back.

A hard fork of Chromium specifically for Edge might not be the worse thing
ever. Having two independently maintained versions of that engine might be
enough to force more standardization than in a Chrome-only world.

~~~
r00fus
When was this? Recently it's great for me - better than Chrome - with the
exception that some extensions are Chrome-specific (meaning you have to
repackage them for FF).

~~~
lsiebert
Hey, can you point me to a good guide for repackaging extensions?

~~~
shirshak55
actually it may not work for all extension as chrome uses different api than
firefox webextension standard api. I must say firefox extension api is far
better than chrome one.

------
ocdtrekkie
It was incredible to me how aggressively Microsoft came out supportive of the
Chrome team and how loudly they discussed the wonderful amount of
collaboration the two companies had been up to since starting work on the new
Edge.

I've seen Googlers responding to Edge developers about how they'll get some
mishandling of Edge fixed internally at Google. But really, this is just the
same story as before:

The "oops" have begun: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-
google-has...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-
sabotaged-firefox-for-years/)

~~~
callmeal
>The "oops" have begun...

Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds
to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. And I'm not even going to get
into the whole endless captcha on firefox 'feature'.

~~~
andrewmutz
"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by
malice" -Hacker News

~~~
simias
This is a systematic issue with many of Google's services. They have the money
and manpower to test their interface on Firefox. We're talking about a modern,
generally standard-compliant browser here, not IE6. Getting those websites to
perform decently on Firefox shouldn't be a problem for Google.

I can believe that they don't purposefully break Firefox for the sake of it,
but it's clear that they make no effort to make their websites compatible and
they don't appear to consider these issues like bugs. If it works on Chrome
then it's good enough. I suspect that internally compatibility issues with
Firefox are not even considered bugs at all, it's just the way it is and it's
up to Mozilla to fix their browsers to be compatible with Chromium (I have no
insider knowledge, but it's the way it feels from the outside).

~~~
thu2111
It's an artifact of how they develop and test software. And ultimately Firefox
suffered these bugs because their product wasn't compelling.

Googlers push new code to production regularly, with the cycles getting faster
all the time. It used to be biweekly (as the article alludes). Then it was
weekly. Then it was daily. Then it was "push on every green build".

If you push to production literally the moment your test suite passes, then
your browser compatibility is a function of two things:

1\. What the engineers developing a feature use.

2\. What is easiest to build automatic test suites with.

In both cases the answer was Chrome and Chrome. Firefox has never had good
support for API driven embedding. Embedded Gecko never took off. The automated
GUI test drivers that became popular were mostly WebKit/Chrome based, with
some support for IE and using it via RDP to a VM. Nobody forces Googlers to
use any particular browser but Chrome was the best so that's what they used.

Also, Google culturally is always on the bleeding/cutting edge of HTML stuff.
So it's more likely to hit edge cases than others.

Result: occasional glitches where Firefox bugs or Google app bugs intersected.
They always got fixed quickly when reported. Only crazy people would think
this was some conspiracy involving tens of thousands of developers who
mysteriously never leaked their evil plan.

Mozilla would have done themselves a world of benefit if they'd been pushing
hard their own CI/integrated Gecko based test suite and made it the best.

~~~
bzbarsky
> They always got fixed quickly when reported.

Having been involved in a number of these reports, this is flat-out false.
Basic "fix your CSS to not rely on this Chrome bug; here's the exact diff you
want to make it work both in browsers that follow the CSS spec and in Chrome"
things regularly take 2-3 months to apply on the Google side. Basic "your
browser user-agent sniffing is broken _again_ in the same way as three months
ago" things take a month or two to fix.

Disclosure: Mozilla employee, have been cced on far too many of these bug
report threads over the years.

~~~
thu2111
The article where the Mozilla guy complained said two weeks, but, yes. Months
is possible. Maybe we have a different definition of quickly.

Disclosure: former Google employee, I did many pushes and fixed browser
compatibility bugs whilst I was there.

In the timeframe we're talking about most products were on a biweekly push
cycle. In the ideal case where there was no delay at all between you reporting
a bug and it reaching the right person inside the company who could fix it, if
that day happened to be on a branch cut day then that's a minimum of a two
week delay to reach production unless the bug was so severe that the entire
product was hosed for all Firefox users. Minor glitches in rarely used screens
wouldn't count for a rollback or emergency push, for instance.

But sometimes pushes fail. There's a severe bug, attempts to fix it are too
slow and the push window closes so the servers are rolled back. Now the
latency is a month.

That's only software bugs. Now include the time taken for the bug report to be
triaged, mis-directed, pinged, rerouted to the right person. Now include
delays incurred if that person goes on holiday, gets sick or has other higher
priority tasks, as bug handoff works about as well there as anyone else. That
can easily add more time.

Finally, regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of
browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally
mandated. If they weren't testing Firefox well enough before they weren't
testing it well enough after either. If Google had a central rule about which
browsers had to be supported then I didn't know about it. There was just an
assumption you'd try to support the browsers people used as best you could.

I'm not saying it was awesome or right, just that this sort of thing was not
Firefox specific and there were plenty of IE or Safari compatibility bugs too.

~~~
bzbarsky
I think we might in fact have a different definition of "quickly", yes. I
think we may also have different definitions of "entire product is hosed". If
gmail is significantly worse to use (not "doesn't load", just "loads with
obvious visual artefacts"), that's obviously enough to get people to change
browsers, all else being equal.

And just to be clear, there are certainly cases when things got fixed quickly.
But "always" is really stretching it; this was the exception, not the norm.

> regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser
> testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated

Sure. The problem is the environment and corporate policy, not individual
engineers. They're just responding to incentives as best they can, and in my
experience are generally quite helpful within the constraints of the system.

> just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific

Indeed, I don't think it was. It was not-Chrome specific.

Here's a thought experiment. Say someone at Google who did _not_ test in
Chrome committed a change that degraded the visual experience of gmail in
Chrome and it got shipped. How would fixing that be prioritized vs a similar
visual degradation in Firefox or some other non-Chrome browser? Assuming there
is no emergency push involved, if the fix was not ready by the next push
cycle, would it just slide, or would the original commit get rolled back?

~~~
thu2111
In the early days there were quite a lot of bugs that affected Chrome and not
Firefox from what I recall. The problem was Chrome didn't run on Linux or Mac
in the first versions, but Google engineers (by policy) didn't run Windows,
they almost all ran Linux. So there was a huge testing gap. On the other hand
it was helped by the fact that Chrome was basically Safari at that time so Mac
users within the firm tended to notice bugs during dogfood/canary periods.

I can't quite recall the timelines, but I remember it felt like years before
the Chrome team shipped a native Mac/Linux version. They also fixed a lot of
bugs that broke features of the various apps, e.g. lack of printing was a big
one for a while.

I imagine you're talking about later when Chrome got really big. But it's hard
for me to say what would have happened because when the features are
themselves being developed in Chrome there are hardly ever cases like that
when it works in every browser _except_ Chrome and this is somehow not noticed
during the canary period.

------
Santosh83
If Google were truly behind open web standards then they would have nothing to
fear and no need to promote one standards conforming browser (Chrome) over
another (Edge, Firefox or whatever). This just shows that the ultimate desire
of all these corporate backed browsers is some degree of vendor lock in, which
is why they feel the need to advertise their browser when their competitor's
is almost 99.9% identical in functionality and a drop-in replacement.

~~~
hknd
These are different teams within Google, and it's kinda not fair to say that
Google is not truly behind open web standards.

Their whole web developer advocate team is behind open web standards, and
pushes it forward everyday. The engineering team actually working on Chrome is
behind those standards, and pushes it forward. They work closely with other
browser vendors. and try to make everything work everywhere.

Then there is the Chrome marketing team which has to goal (OKR) to increase
the reach of Chrome. They might still support the open web, but their goal is
to get more users using chrome.

~~~
Santosh83
Okay, I get it, but in that case the marketing is doing engineering a
disservice when they implement needlessly aggressive and redundant advertising
of Chrome on properties and user agents which ought to be almost 100%
identical functionality in Chromium based (if not web standards compliant)
browsers. To put it plainly I can understand if Google promotes Chrome when
there is a genuine technical feature on one of their properties that _needs_
Chrome to function, but in most cases this is not so, which means the
marketing is not for technical reasons but merely to capture more market-share
for its own ends, which would make sense if they were selling their browser
but that too is not the case, so why? I mean, the ultimate aim of all
companies are to grow and profit, but the playing field is neither infinite
nor the audience stupid, so they should take care not to keep damaging their
reputation.

~~~
scoutt
> marketing is doing engineering a disservice

I've never seen a company where both marketing and engineering agree on
something. Marketing thinks we are a bunch of nerds and we think marketing
floors have a much less density regarding neurons per square meter (so, in way
we are both right).

By the way, marketing always win. They are closer to upper levels, the credit
for success is (supposedly) theirs. They suggest all the bad tactics,
technically and commercially. I can bet that a move like Chrome suggesting to
ditch Edge is purely their idea, approved by upper levels and executed by
engineers that can't say no.

~~~
lallysingh
Do they even know that Edge is Chrome based?

~~~
scoutt
Good question. Probably all they know is that Microsoft released a competing
browser and just asked the engineering team to do them a tool for showing
annoying messages to the users based on the browser. I am sure marketing
doesn't know/care if it was done with Chromium, 1994 Mosaic or matchsticks.

~~~
kunglao
This is Google we are talking about. I would imagine they started working on
competing strategies even well before Microsoft announced officially they are
going to use Chromium.

You people seriously undermine the tech awareness of marketing teams, of
Google no less.

------
fergie
PSA: if you are not already using it, and you care about the future of
humanity, then give Firefox a(nother) go. Its actually quite good these days.

~~~
fizixer
Firefox does 'gah! your tab just crashed' on my amazon tabs at a rate of about
1 in every 4 times. Once it decides to do that on a particular tab, no amount
of refresh or reopen, or restart-firefox fixes it.

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, and this has been happening consistently for the last
5+ years.

Every. single. goshdarn. effing. firefox. release.

(sorry just wanted to vent. I've tried every solution I could find on
askubuntu, stackoverflow, what not. Nothing fixes it. I know I should be
filing a bug report, and/or upgrading my OS, but I don't have the time,
patience to deal with that. I need to finish school first.).

~~~
josteink
> I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, and this has been happening consistently for the
> last 5+ years.

Might help updating to a modern version of Ubuntu with a modern kernel and
modern (and less buggy) GPU drivers?

Browsers are increasingly using GPU-acceleration these days. If your GPU
drivers are buggy, that can probably cause a whole lot of “fun”.

~~~
fizixer
Or I could be a happy camper of Chrome/Chromium for as long as I like.

~~~
Symbiote
Ubuntu 14.04 is no longer supported by Canonical. No security patches etc.

------
kapsteur
Microsoft do the same tricks to push users to switch back from Firefox/Chrome
to Edge :
[https://twitter.com/WindowsLatest/status/1226184938552098817](https://twitter.com/WindowsLatest/status/1226184938552098817)

~~~
user8391
We kind of expect this from Microsoft. But we're still in denial about Google

~~~
Dylan16807
Also the effects are worse when the actor doing those ads has more than 30%,
50%, 70% market share.

------
lowdose
Healthy check and balance Microsoft is performing. Strategically this has been
a master move, not paying for the engineering costs while profiting from labor
fruits. It is admirable for a company to admit the technology of the main
competitor is superior and the only way forward is improving their output.
Sets a great example for everybody.

~~~
robbyt
I don't think engineering costs are an issue for msft.

Empirically, the source of msft's quality issues seem to be managerial /
organizational.

------
Ciantic
Back when Google Chrome came out I switched from Firefox to Google Chrome
because the scrolling felt better and more responsive.

Microsoft Edge with Chromium engine has better scrolling in my opinion: it is
relative to size of window. If I have smaller window it scrolls less. I
switched to Microsoft Edge.

It's about the product for me, although I have turned all the knobs to prevent
trackers etc.

~~~
sf_rob
I agree. While I'm primarily a Firefox user, Edge Beta is the best experience
on my Windows machine. I'm surprised that it seems faster than Chrome when
they're utilizing the same rendering engine (probably the built-in tracker
blocking?).

------
jmisavage
They're probably just user agent sniffing for non-Chrome browsers. I see this
plenty when using Firefox or Safari. That said I wonder if all the State and
DoJ investigations about anti-competitive behavior will force Google to stop
promoting their own browser on their properties.

~~~
scumbert
The sad thing is when Google websites refuse to work on Edge Chromium. Switch
your user agent to match Chrome's, you're all set.

~~~
Santosh83
Out of curiosity, which sites are these? Do they also similarly break with
Firefox or other non-Chrome browsers or only MS Edge?

~~~
scumbert
Non-Chromium derivatives are blocked as well, yes, but neo-Edge is a Chromium
derivative.

------
dcow
I’m honestly surprised people still tolerate Google. Just stop using shitty
software from a shitty company that treats its users like shit. I did and so
can you.

------
Yizahi
Microsoft may experience firsthand what can happen when you build your
business on competitors platform. I'm exaggerating of course but essentially
it may happen. The good news is that MS is probably the only company which can
actually maintain its own browser in a case if Google goes completely hostile
on them. Then this mythical thing called Chromium may materialize as an
independent entity from Google, making different decisions and implementing
different core features (which is not true today).

~~~
freeone3000
They did maintain their own browser. It was called Edge.

~~~
Yizahi
That was my point - they have real experience creating and maintaining
browsers, unlike most other corporations.

------
jmkni
Remember when Google deprecated an API used by uBlock Origin in Chrome, does
anybody know if this same API is deprecated in the new Chromium based Edge as
well?

If it isn't, I'd actually choose Edge over Chrome on Windows as my daily
driver.

~~~
jmnicolas
The author said that the best platform to run ublock origin is Firefox, why
not use it ?

I only use Chrome for Goggle related stuff anyway, all my browsing goes
through Firefox.

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
Microsoft has turned Google's own weapon against them, crazy. Once they bundle
it with W10, it's really going to take off. It's smart they changed the logo
too.

------
hndkeielfl
YouTube and Google Maps are much slower for me in Firefox versus Chrome. Many
times the page basically freezes for half a second, and then suddenly
continues. It looks like they intentionally are doing something to make this
happen, I can't think of any other site where I've seen this obvious
difference.

------
user8391
The hardest part of leaving Google is admitting: I was wrong about Google, but
it's OK, everybody makes mistakes.

------
BLanen
I really really hope Microsoft can push for a sort of Chromium-foundation.

Google owning the chromium development is what is going to make any sort of
protocol-level privacy impossible, while Microsoft doesn't care much about
internet add revenue.

It's really really concerning to have an internet ad company have this much
control over the web.

------
petilon
I switched to the new Edge because of Google's abusive practices such as
logging me into the browser when I log in to Gmail. There is a settings option
to prevent this, but it is FAKE. It doesn't change anything.

------
HendrikR
A comparable behaviour can be seen for years now on iOS. Chrome for iOS is
advertised where possible, even if you would like to open a hyperlink from the
show notes of a YouTube movie: You are offered to open this link with Chrome
("download"), Google App ("download"), or even with Safari ("open"). There's
no real use for the user having Chrome on iOS as long as it has to use WebKit
as a rendering engine, the same engine Safari uses. But there is surely a
usage for Google, monetizing the user's browsing profiles.

------
dmos62
Let's remember that you still can't make Google Hangouts calls from Firefox.

~~~
cpeterso
Google fixed Hangouts to work now in Firefox.

~~~
lilyball
Let's remember that you can't attend Google Meet calls from any browser
besides Chrome.

------
shirshak55
Microsoft is also not cool to be honest their product skype still don't work
on firefox. Both are bad players to me . Slowing down youtube and google
product on firefox, not allowing skype on firefox are cheap strategy used by
both company.

------
bagacrap
I don't see a problem with advertising your product, and clearly laptopmag
doesn't see a problem with advertisements either.

------
Shorel
Right now Microsoft is the lesser evil.

Reducing Chrome market share is something we all should strive to achieve.

I personally use and recommend Firefox to everyone.

------
vxNsr
Couldn’t edge just turn on “ad blocking”?

------
caiobegotti
As an user I am pissed of about these actions from Google but I can't really
switch otherwise I would fall in the same oopses traps.

Is there a way to use Firefox and have some add-on or something that fixes
those oopses? I suppose it's not only a matter of masking up user-agent
strings.

------
JumpCrisscross
How is the default ad blocking on Edge? I imagine that's the leverage Google
fears.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Edge has tracking protection like Firefox and Safari do. Chrome is the only
major browser without it on by default.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Tracking prevention as it is implemented in Safari helps Google. It does not
block first party cookies. If Google implemented that, it would face antitrust
investigations.

Firefox and Edge have tracking prevention that harms Google. Edge implements
the same default ad blocking as Chrome, which helps Google.

------
rk06
Since Edge is using chromium, Googl would be using user agent to sniff the
browser.

As such, wouldn't it be smarter for edge to use impersonate chromium to bypass
the checks?

As shady as it sounds, this approach has tremendous precedent

------
walrus01
For anyone who remembers the IE vs Netscape browser wars, it is funny to think
the positions of Google and Microsoft are now reversed. Google is using some
of MS's own historical tactics against it.

------
meddlepal
I've been using Edge on macOS since Beta and I really like it.

------
baryphonic
I can't imagine this will play well in court in the seemingly inevitable
antitrust case. Microsoft's lawyers will point out that Edge is literally the
same

------
globular-toast
Is this new? Isn't this what they did to get all their users in the first
place? Surely people haven't forgotten?

------
talal7860
As far as I remember, this has always been the case. I don't see anything new
in this story.

------
32gbsd
I am confused with this article. google does this with every browser not just
edge.

------
wkey
Somewhat related but: has anyone heard of/ used the Brave browser?

~~~
jaywalk
I've been using it for a while now. I like it, but they're starting to get a
little too pushy with their Brave Rewards program for my liking. But for now,
it's great.

~~~
ldiracdelta
Batting aside "Brave Rewards" is a minuscule amount of work compared to the
cognitive work that Brave reduces by blocking ads. I've been using Brave for
~6 months and I've only had to bat "Brave Rewards" aside ~4 times.

------
adultSwim
Someone call the Justice Department

------
shirshak55
google has always been disappointing except the source code they give to
opensource lol. Long live firefox .

------
LaineHerron
Do you remember when Google used to have the motto "don't be evil"? Those were
the days.

------
1337n008
FF f'd up when they banned Dissenter extension and with their welcome screen
full of google tracking. Not to mention a ton of "metric" requests FF is doing
in the background.

As we've learnt, Chrome has a ton of google-specific code built into it(most
notably the tracking id on youtube that was exposed few weeks ago) and a ton
of background requests.

MS Edge is not that different. Sure it is cleaner Chrome but MS is the big
daddy of tracking, just like google. they just call it "telemetry" instead of
spying. their edge won't be any different.

Any other web browser out there is essentially derived from chrome. So I put
zero trust in any of them. If mozilla would make FF into OS work that others
could use to build web browsers off of, like chrome, it would be much better
environment because there are no options left. Webkit has been superseded by
chrome these days, gecko is slow and outdated(is it even public?) and so on.
So the only way to sort of safely use your god damn web browser these days is
to filter all the traffic manually(pihole, host file or advanced firewall) and
use a ton of adblocking extensions that allow you to spoof referrer header and
clean up headers and cookies altogether(google cdn, google captcha, google
analytics, goodle dns, google this and google that).... even then google has
so much data that just by ip address they have your persona pinpointed to a
byte.

If you look at how much external resources the websites pull in these days,
most if it has some sort of tracking in it, even if you do not see it
directly(mostly cdn stuff).

tl;dr they are all bad. if it is free, you are the product. it's as simple as
that. and they will make opting out so impossible that you just give up.

~~~
32gbsd
but they can't be ALL bad.

------
excalibur
There are people using Microsoft Edge with Google Docs? What sort of logic
puts one in this position?

~~~
bovermyer
You ARE aware that a world of users outside of tech exists, right?

~~~
slantyyz
I'm a user in tech who uses Edge with Google Docs. I don't use the offline
feature, so to me, the user experience is no different than it was with
Chrome.

~~~
bergie
I'm often using Google Docs with Edge for Android (in DeX), and while
everything works, every tab gets a "your browser is not supported" nag dialog

