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Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their a
by bad_user 2y ago
Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense, Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's.
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
- andix 2y agoMicrosoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.
- bad_user 2y ago> Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?
- andix 2y agoThey gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough. If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.
- bad_user 2y agoI don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I added that the interests of Google and Microsoft coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of Microsoft.
- andix 2y agoI think Microsoft just doesn't care about ad-blockers. They probably don't have a strong position on it. If they work it's fine for them, if they don't its also fine. They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily web browsing.
- bad_user 2y agoI don't think we should guess. In 2024, Microsoft generated 12.58 billion dollars in revenue from advertising, which is nothing to scoff at. And we also have to look at future opportunities — the share of the advertising market may be small, but they represent THE alternative to Google's ads, including on all alternative search engines. If they aren't concerned about ads or ad-blockers, then why are they so aggressive about pushing Edge on Windows users? And in the EU, when people first open up the Edge browser, why do they inform people that Edge will share their data with the entire advertising industry?
- andix 2y agoThanks for those insights. So they might have good reasons to support Google‘s position.