Some of the top browser makers around have issued a letter to the European Commission (EC) alleging that Microsoft gives the Edge browser an unfair advantage and should be subject to EU tech rules.
A letter seen by Reuters, sent by Vivaldi, Waterfox, and Wavebox, and supported by a group of web developers, also supports Opera’s move to take the EC to court over its decision to exclude Microsoft Edge from being subject to the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
As Edge comes pre-installed by default on Windows machines, users must navigate the Microsoft offering in order to download their browser of choice. The letter states that, “No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge’s unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows. Edge is, moreover, the most important gateway for consumers to download an independent browser on Windows PCs.”
so does Microsoft Windows
I guess it could be said that Edge has an unfair…edge?
Take your upvote and gtfo. Lol
It was an edgy comment.
Yikes, all these browser-based puns are a bit much for this little internet explorer. I’m out.
I think youre just going to have to Brave through it.
Netscape.
Ooo what about safari on mac? Isn’t it the same thing but just not as hated?
The issue is with how aggressive Microsoft is about it.
Trying to download chrome? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
Changing default browser? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
Windows update… “We’ve done you a solid, because we know you want to use Edge”.
I’m sure at one point, it was a warning in the security center that you aren’t using Edge.
Also Teams (in sure there are others) will open links in Edge, despite what default browser you have set.
I completely understand where this is coming from, but I’m just a little confused about what the solution would be. For the average consumer and certainly the target users for Windows, shipping with a browser is the expected norm, and none are expected to open a terminal, much less run tools like winget. I guess you could have a setup dialog of major browsers to choose from?
Click ‘browse web’ Microsoft gives a list of popular and mixed browsers that the user can select. Microsoft then installs selected browser. At least this is the only tangible way I can see.
Anyone else remember this badboy?
For the uninitiated, BrowserChoice.eu was a popup and associated website that Microsoft was forced to create by the EU courts becasue of their monopoly in 2010.
Also, an opinion: Edge was a great browser even before they switched to Chromium. I wish they’d kept at it so there was a better variety of rendering engines out there.
I’m not defending Microsoft… but if we’re going to go after a tech company for leveraging their other assets to give themselves an unfair advantage can we also go after Google?
In the first releases of Edge, Microsoft tried to build a new web browser from scratch to compete with Google Chrome. By google kept changing YouTube’s code so that videos would playback janky on Edge. Microsoft eventually gave up trying to fix for YouTubes ongoing changes and now Edge is based on Chromium (the same open source web browser maintained by Google, that chrome os built on). Google leveraged YouTube to prevent completion from Edge.
And now Google is blocking ad blocking extensions so that users are forced to see more google ads in their browser.
Microsoft’s has leveraged their unfair advantage to get a little over 5% market share.
Google’s leveraged their unfair advantage to get 66% of the market.
Both companies need a hard smack down, but I want to see Google taken down too.
The early versions of edge were absolutely terrible and didn’t support modern standards. I fully believe that YouTube didn’t work on Edge but I don’t believe it was anything to do with Google and everything to do with Microsoft not being able to build a web browser.
I’m a web dev, fully disagree with you. I don’t even think this comment is based in any reality, just MS hatred (which, to be fair, I currently hate them for other reasons, but it’s a big company with many parts)
I warned my colleagues against doing all development and testing in Chrome, because they would inevitably code towards “Webkit features” unknowingly, and leave both Edge and Firefox in the dust. I set up Edge as my default because, in an effort to catch up in popularity, they were being very strict and communicative with standards. If I wrote a page to work in Edge, it would work in other browsers. Meanwhile, there were horrific features like linear gradients that needed a full 15 lines of CSS specifically because Webkit would implement it, realize their implementation had gaps, reimplement it, and end up with 14 used-in-release syntaxes that you needed to account for, instead of the Edge/Firefox “Build it right” philosophy.
I sincerely doubt the current YouTube situation is actually because YouTube is a complex site. 90% of the motivation for whatever feature they’re putting in is to push Chrome and fuck over other browsers.
I’m not saying that I like the fact that they’ve gone over to a new render engine, I don’t.
But frankly the alternative wasn’t working and either they couldn’t or were unwilling to put in the effort to develop their own system.
I fully believe Google might have been doing some messing around with YouTube. but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they did and no one was ever able to provide any evidence for the accusation.
With regards to things like linear gradients, kind of get your point but also at the same time who the hell still codes raw CSS? I’ve been out of the industry for probably about 8 years and even back then people were using SASS, so needing a bunch of vendor prefixes is kind of irrelevant really.
Please, please do act on google too. Didn’t knew about YT thing, but god I loved Spartan Edge. It was soo…resource unintensive. It…simply did it job, was quick, low resource, looked good… :( I switched to it from chrome and then it became chrome.
YT does a lot of sneaky sneaky stuff. My Firefox constantly lagged on YT pages until one day I installed UserAgent-Switcher and pretended I was a Chrome. The lag went away.
And no it doesn’t work now.
As it’s based on chromium, I’d call what it has a handicap and just keep on using Firefox.
The issue isn’t how it’s built or based on its that Microsoft can use its control of the os to make it extremely difficult to avoid it.
Good point. That would suck for windows users, and it’s really user-hostile behavior by MS.
