No Virginia, Google Didn’t Undermine Microsoft Edge (Premium)

Like any special interest group, the Microsoft community is far too easily swayed by bias-confirming conspiracy theories.

This is a great example.

You may have seen the news: A person identified only as a Microsoft intern complained on Reddit that the software giant was forced to forced to “end” EdgeHTML and embrace its enemy’s web technology because Google was purposefully working to undermine Microsoft Edge.

“I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up,” the intern explains. “For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome’s dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life.”

I didn’t write about this at the time because this charge is spurious nonsense.

There is little chance that anyone on the Microsoft Edge team—even people in a position of authority—can know that Google has institutionally and strategically decided to “make the web slower,” as this intern puts it, in order to harm Microsoft’s web browser. Which, by the way, has never commanded more than low single-digit usage share.

Worse, there is absolutely no chance that a Microsoft intern could be aware of such a strategy. All he’s done is fall for the same kind of conspiracy theory that I mentioned above. But by publishing this conspiracy theory, he’s just made us all dumber.

Third, I will also point out that Microsoft Edge’s “state-of-the-art” battery life advantages had disappeared over time, and it’s highly likely that Google Chrome now provides better battery life than Edge in Windows 10. Edge’s battery life advantage over Chrome fell from 47 percent in 2016 to 35 percent in 2017 to just 14 percent in early 2018. That Microsoft hasn’t published a similar set of findings for the October 2018 Update is, perhaps, a conspiracy theory in its own right. But it hasn’t.

So that’s my own take on these claims. Yesterday, I received two confirmations about this complaint.

First, a web developer named Jeremy Noring evaluated the intern’s claims with a dubious eye because he, too, had run into problems with Microsoft Edge and had to implement a workaround for the browser that was almost identical to what Google had supposedly done to YouTube.

“I’m a video engineer who has written a video player from scratch, and I have independently positioned a blank div on top of our video element [which is what the intern claimed YouTube had done too],” he writes. “Here’s what I suspect happened at Google: They wanted to add standard keypress logic to their video player … [but] they quickly realized some browsers are heinous and you want to block their keypress handlers entirely. Some programmer found a workaround. The same one I did.”

He also addresses the battery life bit, and this is where the conspiracy theory bit comes in. From JFK’s assassination to mysterious black helicopters, we have a very human need to attribute deep meaning to incidents whether they warrant it or not.

To believe that Google, a gigantic corporation that is roughly as big, rich, and business-diverse as Microsoft, would for some reason institutionally decide to harm a web browser with ~4 percent usage share just doesn’t make sense. But Google must have started talking about Chrome’s improved battery life for some reason. Right? RIGHT?!

No.

“Some completely separate arm of the [Google] business decided to discuss battery life,” Noring writes, echoing my own thoughts. “We’re talking about a company with 85,000 employees here, so this is hardly far-fetched. The statement by the … intern smacks of someone who too quickly attributes malice where no such accusation is appropriate.”

Bingo. Exactly right.

Noring also tears Edge a new one, which is probably warranted. You should read it, but I feel like that topic—how terrible Edge still is—is beyond the scope of what I’m trying to explain.

Noring’s opinions are educated but they are, like mine, just opinions. I give them weight because he’s arguing from a rational place, and from a position of deep experience. I give the intern’s claims much less weight because of the reasons cited above. But they’re both out there for your own evaluation.

I mentioned a second confirmation. This one is, perhaps, more definitive. Google has publicly stated that it did not change YouTube to harm Microsoft Edge.

“YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and [it] works quickly to fix bugs when they’re discovered,” the Google statement explains. “We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies, the Web Platform Tests project, the open-source Chromium project and more to improve browser interoperability.”

With the understanding that some will simply scoff at this statement because they just cannot believe a single word this company says … whatever. That’s the statement and it makes a lot more sense than believing that Google would ever hurt the web for everyone in order to make Microsoft Edge, a browser that probably doesn’t even appear in its own usage data all that often, work more slowly.

Still don’t believe it? That’s fine. Here’s something that even diehard Microsoft Edge fans and Microsoft fanboys can agree with: Whatever you think of Microsoft Edge, Microsoft made two key strategic mistakes when it launched this browser in 2015: It tied the application to Windows 10, ignoring the hundreds of millions of potential users still on Windows 7 and 8.x. And it tied the application to the Windows 10 development cycle, ensuring that it could only be updated twice per year; other browsers are updated every 6 weeks or so.

Given this, how on earth was Edge ever going to catch up, functionally or from a usage perspective? It was impossible from day one. So we can all at least give Microsoft some credit for realizing this mistake, if belatedly, and trying to fix it in a way that can happen relatively quickly and benefit web developers, users, and IT departments alike. But we should also afix the blame for Edge’s failure where it belongs. Not with a Google cabal that worked secretly to undermine the browser. But with Microsoft, which killed it from within with bad decisions.

And seriously, folks, while I don’t feel that I have much to offer anyone in the life skills department, I do worry about the way we think, and that we’re not critical enough of the information we receive, especially if it simply confirms deep-seated biases. This is something all of us need to work on, myself included. And this issue is a great example of a community collectively losing its shit over absolutely nothing.