Microsoft says goodbye to Edge because of Google

According to a Microsoft intern, the decision to abandon EdgeHTML in favor of Chromium is dictated by Google's changes to its products. Will it be true?

Microsoft's Edge browser, as announced a few days ago by the Redmond-based company, will soon be retired and will be replaced by a new product based on Google's Chromium technology, already used by Big G for the much more popular Chrome browser.

Edge has never been a great success with the public despite being integrated into Windows 10 as early as 2015 and replacing Internet Explorer, which for many users in past years was the first tool with which they accessed the web. However, at the basis of Microsoft's recent decision there would not be the poor results in terms of public adoption, when of the unsympathetic behavior on the part of Google. But let's proceed in order.

Google messes up other browsers

Joshua Bakita, a former Microsoft intern, explained that constant updates to Google sites, such as YouTube, caused frequent errors in EdgeHTML (the part of Edge's code that "draws" web pages). According to Bakita "We couldn't keep up", that's why in the end Microsoft decided to directly use Google's technology (which is free) for its next browser.

But that's not all: according to the former Microsoft intern, the Google team knew very well that the frequent changes caused errors in the browsers of other software houses but the Mountain View house even refused to provide information about the changes made to the various services. Joshua Bakita cites a specific example: recently Google has inserted a "Div", that is a part of HTML code, above the YouTube videos and this change was causing EdgeHTML to slow down heavily. Bakita says: "I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube has been intentionally modified to slow down Edge, many of my colleagues are quite convinced - and they are the ones who have personally examined it. When we asked for an explanation, YouTube refused our request to remove the hidden empty div without adding anything else."

All a strategy?

If the changes were implemented intentionally by Google to disadvantage Chrome's competing browsers, it certainly wouldn't be an elegant or fair move. Microsoft, in any case, is migrating to Chromium and all these compatibility issues should be gone soon, as Google's changes to its services are digested without any problems by browsers based on Chromium code.