Microsoft recently confirmed that they embracing the Open Source Chromium platform for their Edge browser on Windows and other popular operating systems. Most of the internet users have welcomed this move.
Once in the ’90s, Microsoft had the dominance in browser market share with their famous Internet Explorer. But those days are gone with the release of Chromium-based Google Chrome browser and the increasing dominance of Google in the field of web.
An alleged Microsoft’s engineering team intern, Joshua, who reportedly worked in the Edge browser development team, has recently revealed the reason that convinced Microsoft to give up on EdgeHTML rendering engine for Chromium solutions.
In a post on the Ycombinator forum, Joshua Bakita, who says he was an intern on the Microsoft Edge team, shared why Microsoft decided to switch Edge from its original engine to Chromium. He mentioned that Google’s changes to its websites, like YouTube, often broke Edge, and Microsoft struggled to keep up.
For example, Google added something invisible on YouTube that messed up Edge, but Microsoft fixed it later.
Google’s websites and changes were a big reason people stopped using Edge. Bakita noted that Edge used to be great at playing videos without draining the battery, but then YouTube changed, and suddenly Chrome seemed better. He thinks it wasn’t because Chrome was smarter but because of the YouTube issue.
When Microsoft asked YouTube to remove the invisible thing causing problems, YouTube said no and didn’t say why. Bakita isn’t sure if Google did this on purpose to make Edge look bad, but some of his teammates think so because they looked into it.
The report claims that Google made all of these changes intentionally to prove that Edge’s performance is not as good as Chrome. Even when Edge team asked for more information about the changes they made, Google simply refused to provide that.
Now using open source Chromium-based browsing engine for default Windows browser may end the browsers war between Microsoft and Google.
This is not the first time Google is accused of using the market monopoly to stop their competitors. Previously they were fined by EU Court for the illegal restrictions to stop OEMs using third-party services on Android-based smartphones.
