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 qui...