Microsoft engineer: Google used improper means to damage Microsoft Edge

Microsoft recently announced that it will abandon the EdgeHTML Web rendering engine and switch to Google’s Chromium. Although this move has been widely welcomed, many people still question why Microsoft will switch to another rendering engine that is “slower and consumes more battery power and resources.” Recently, the media quoted an engineer who claimed to have worked in the Edge web browser department as saying: Microsoft has been playing a defeat, and now it has finally chosen to give up.

He wrote,

“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. 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. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.

Now while I’m not sure I’m convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced – and they’re the ones who looked into it personally. To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further.

And this is only one case.”

Via: mspoweruser