Technology

58480 readers

4139 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

490

Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim (www.techradar.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

126 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

History disagrees with you on this one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour 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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

They’re was never any evidence of google’s wrongdoing, the accusation came from former MS edge developers:

https://www.developer-tech.com/news/edge-developer-google-youtube-chrome-browsers/

Officially Google denied it:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-microsoft-edge-intern-claims

You may be right, this could have been MS couldn’t make a better browser and pulled the plug, and the devs just blamed google.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 20 hours ago

Old Edge was a better browser

more responsive/lower overhead

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I don't know have any lag on YouTube using Firefox