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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I misconfiguted it. I’ll check it out another day
I don’t know have any lag on YouTube using Firefox
Don’t have any of the switcher things ony my firefox deskrop and mobile.
The only modifications I use are uBlock origin.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a while when you installed Windows, the first time user setup gave you a choice of popular browsers and it handled the download and install.
Now Microsoft is actively trying to sabotage other browsers with popups and office apps bypassing the default browser setting.
When was that?
They were forced to as the result of an antitrust settlement in 2009, and then the “remedy” expired 5 years later and they ripped it out
https://www.pcworld.com/article/430914/microsoft-kills-eu-browser-choice-screen.html
Oh man, I had no idea this was a thing!
I agree with you completely on their over-pushiness. They could do without that.
But the first time choice thing doesn’t sound tenable long-term to me.
Welcome to SuperOS! What would you like to use as your web browser? E-mail reader? Calendar app? PDF viewer? Image viewer? File explorer? Porn viewer? Weather app? VPN?
I can think of distros/OSes that, depending on the use case, people really appreciate having something pre-installed for them. And yes, other times people would prefer their own. But imagine amateur users making a pick from that constant stream of questions, not to mention having weird incompatibilities if they make bad choices.
IMO edge coming pre-installed isn’t a big deal. But I’d like to be able to uninstall edge and not have Windows periodically try to trick me into setting edge as my default browser again.
Basically either offer users a dialog box asking which browser they’d like to use or offer the browsers in the Microsoft Store.
And stop telling me that “The Internet is better using Edge”, Microsoft.
I’d settle for them being force to offer links to alternatives when you first install Windows.
AND being forced to stop the bullshit every few updates where they force you through choosing options. One of which is “update to recommended browser settings for security?”… Which just defaults the system to use edge.
AND being forced to stop the bullshit every few updates where they force you through choosing options
Just turn it off. Settings → Notifications → Windows Welcome Experience or some such.
Invoke-WebRequest
To comply with the court decision, Microsoft have added a super easy to use PowerShell command to install your favourite browser!
ps> Get-Browser-That-Isnt-Microsoft-Edge -Q -Browser Firefox -NumberOfNags 0 -RevertAfterUpdate False -When Now -Why BecauseTheCourtsToldUsWeNeededTowinget install -e --id Mozilla.Firefox --accept-package-agreementsalready works prefectly.Yes, i’m just making fun of the verbose nature of PowerShell commands.
Require Microsoft to distribute competing browsers in the Microsoft store.
I can install Firefox, Chromium etc. from my distro’s package manager. I don’t open a web browser to install software. You still do that on Windows because Microsoft has a financial incentive to keep competitors out of their store, so their store sucks.
You can install Firefox from Windows’s package manager Winget with the command:
winget install -e --id Mozilla.FirefoxYou don’t have to use the Store or Edge.
And how many people in the world will use that? eight?
Exactly this. The point is not that there is no way to do it, the point is that the alternatives are obscure to limit adoption. It
