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 could say the same about Android and iOS. They are preloaded with a web browser not many people change. In fact I’ve noticed that many users (mostly older) using Android don’t even know what browser they are using, since they just type shit into Google widget on their home screen.
The google widget search bar is the thing I hate the most on default Android ui, alongside stupid bixby. Like the windows search bar, it doesn’t look good, always stays there and isn’t actually useful since you can still search with sometimes one click sometimes two. And the results are horribles with filled MSN-like news
IIRC Samsung devices default to a Samsung web browser labelled “Internet”. You wouldn’t want to disable the “Internet”, right?
iOS seems even more egregious, where it’s internally using Safari no matter what browser you install, giving the illusion of choice.
Fuck, this. My gf doesn’t even know what a “web page” is, she just knows this Google widget.
One might even say it has an… Edge
I guess it could be said that Edge has an unfair…edge?
Take your upvote and gtfo. Lol
It was an edgy comment.
Yikes, all these browser-based puns are a bit much for this little internet explorer. I’m out.
I think youre just going to have to Brave through it.
Netscape.
It’s like the mid 90s all over again. Let’s see if anything happens this time.
I want that Web to die, die, die.
Gemini is a step in the right direction, but the new Web should be both non-extensible by design and transparently allow distributed storage, distributed untrusted computation, and separation of the concepts of a site and a machine that serves it. In other words, serverless, where websites and services and even web applications are identified cryptographically, and anybody can contribute their computing power (or storage) to a site\service\application, out of desire to help or for money. With smart contracts, ghost keys and other buzzwords I have no real idea about.
And fuck Microsoft.
MS is literally back to square one its about damn time.
They’re even worse now and aggressively pressure you to use edge if it’s not the default.
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.
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.
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.
Old Edge was a better browser
more responsive/lower overhead
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dreamweaver is an IDE (a bad and crappy one). SASS is a pre-processing language.
They don’t even remotely do the same thing
It seems that comment went right over your head.
History disagrees with you on this one.
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
webmoroggencoding.I mean that there is several indicators that Google did indeed try to sabotage other browsers on YouTube.
so does Microsoft Windows
I completely understand where this is coming from, but I’m just a little confused about what the solution would be. For the average consumer and certainly the target users for Windows, shipping with a browser is the expected norm, and none are expected to open a terminal, much less run tools like winget. I guess you could have a setup dialog of major browsers to choose from?
One solution could be during PC initial setup, a list of all browsers above a certain user count is given and the person chooses which to install and use as default with the ability to change at a later date.
I can think of some options
Level 1: Allow uninstall of edge. They can have the engine still for store/background processes, but no user icon. You can use edge to install other browsers then remove it.
Level 2: same as level one, but it comes “uninstalled”. OOBE asks you to choose a browser.
Level 3: They rip out the deep integration they knew damn well they shouldn’t have done because their asses were handed to them in the IE days.
Click ‘browse web’ Microsoft gives a list of popular and mixed browsers that the user can select. Microsoft then installs selected browser. At least this is the only tangible way I can see.
Anyone else remember this badboy?
For the uninitiated, BrowserChoice.eu was a popup and associated website that Microsoft was forced to create by the EU courts becasue of their monopoly in 2010.
Also, an opinion: Edge was a great browser even before they switched to Chromium. I wish they’d kept at it so there was a better variety of rendering engines out there.
Yes, I’m really confused about this article - isn’t what you describe still in effect? Why on earth not? (I haven’t used Windows in ages so I personally have never seen that.)
Microsoft and the European Commission agreed to an initial period of five years. That ended in 2014, and the measure was not extended mainly for two reasons:
- Data showed the selection screen had had essentially no effect on browser market share whatsoever.
- This period was basically the height of browser competition, with Chrome, Safari, IE, and Firefox all showing significant market share.
With competition in the browser market seemingly healthy, and the browser ballot not doing much to affect it, it was seen as pointless to keep requiring Microsoft to display it.
Thank you for that information.
One might also say, with the dire current state of browser competition, it won’t make much of a difference.
I’m just privately hopping that Firefox won’t lose its last few percent market share and go the way of the dodo. 🤞🥹
Ooo what about safari on mac? Isn’t it the same thing but just not as hated?
The issue is with how aggressive Microsoft is about it.
Trying to download chrome? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
Changing default browser? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
Windows update… “We’ve done you a solid, because we know you want to use Edge”.
I’m sure at one point, it was a warning in the security center that you aren’t using Edge.
Also Teams (in sure there are others) will open links in Edge, despite what default browser you have set.Forget mac, it’s even worse on iOS/iPadOS, where all third-party browsers must use Safari’s rendering engine too.
An out of the box OS should include a browser. Microsoft takes a ham-fisted approach, however, Apple makes it entirely possible to uninstall Safari. You do have to jump through the hoop of disabling System Integrity Protection to remove it, but it’s simple as trashing the app and deleting the data. I speak from experience. Very easy to do.
Seriously, showing a pop up confirmation if the user tries to uninstall the last browser on the device is all that is needed.
Please submit a second copy of that letter, but replace Windows with Android, PC with Mobile, Microsoft with Google, and Edge with Chrome.
Please submit a third copy of that letter, but replace Windows with iOS, PC with iPhone, Microsoft with Apple, and Edge with Safari.
I mean that already happened
Don’t you tell me what I am isn’t
Can you raise both your arms above your head? Do you smell burnt toast?
🔥🍞
As Edge comes pre-installed by default on Windows machines, users must navigate the Microsoft offering in order to download their browser of choice.
What’s the actual alternative they want here? That users look up download URLs on other devices and download their browser of choice via command line using
cURLInvoke-WebRequest? That ISPs provide browser installers on USB sticks?Also, it’s not like MS is cornering the market on browser share here. Even with this “unfair advantage” they’ve only scraped together a 5% slice of browser usage.
You can get Firefox and Opera on the Windows Store. Ostensibly, this is how every other OS works now, although on Linux it’s usually less of a storefront with Candy Crush pushed up front, and more like a commandline entry to get apps by known name.
I think people are just used to the Windows colloquialism of not having a central store, thus getting every app on the web through an installer file - and then, through meaningful distrust and horrific memories of Windows 8, choosing not to use that store when it was added.
ftfy
Yeah I personally use Brave but that’s what I found.
Edit: wow. I get downvoted for the browser I use… ok I guess.
As it’s based on chromium, I’d call what it has a handicap and just keep on using Firefox.
The issue isn’t how it’s built or based on its that Microsoft can use its control of the os to make it extremely difficult to avoid it.
Good point. That would suck for windows users, and it’s really user-hostile behavior by MS.
