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
    943·
    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.

    • Demdaru@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      1 month ago

      Please, please do act on google too. Didn’t knew about YT thing, but god I loved Spartan Edge. It was soo…resource unintensive. It…simply did it job, was quick, low resource, looked good… :( I switched to it from chrome and then it became chrome.

      • Yi K@lemmy.worldEnglish
        251·
        1 month ago

        YT does a lot of sneaky sneaky stuff. My Firefox constantly lagged on YT pages until one day I installed UserAgent-Switcher and pretended I was a Chrome. The lag went away.

        And no it doesn’t work now.

        • Kallioapina@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          9·
          1 month ago

          Its working for me now, I tested it this morning. Even tried swithching the user agent back to Firefox and yep - Youtube gets magically some buffering problems with it.

          Close youtube tab, switch user agent back to chrome, clear cache and restart the browser: no buffering problems. What a bunch of assholes.

          I’ve reported this earlier to EU competition ombudsman, like a about a year ago, and they confirmed then that they were getting reports about the issue, Google of course denying the practice. Hopefully they are working on some punishment for Google in the background.

        • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          21·
          1 month ago

          Don’t have any of the switcher things ony my firefox deskrop and mobile.
          The only modifications I use are uBlock origin.

    • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
      13·
      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
      54·
      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.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
          4·
          1 month ago

          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.

          • sunbeam60@lemmy.oneEnglish
            2·
            1 month ago

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

            • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
              2·
              1 month 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.

      • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        1 month 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
          1·
          1 month 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
            31·
            1 month 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.