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.”
I agree with going after the Edge Lords and making things more fair…but I’m guessing Chrome is the most used we browser by a long shot even on windows so the “No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge’s unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows." part feels like users are comfortable stepping over Edge’s corpse to download chrome anyway.
If users had a pop-up which allowed them to select more than just Edge or Chrome, other browsers may see an increase in users. Chrome is as much a default as Edge is in that way.
Again I’m in favor of choosing browsers on install, but lots of Chrome installs on Windows is not the same as being the default.
So much so that you even get this annoying popup from Edge when you try to download Chrome with Edge - which should be against the rules imo.
And try to reset edge as the default every single time Windows updates
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. It is the default alternative, most users don’t bother to look for anything else.
And Chrome also does pop-ups not unlike it when you visit Google websites on a non-Google browser.
It’s true, although chrome has gotten a significant boost from Google promoting it in search and every Google app (which I don’t know if they still do).
So chrome beats edge on users, but it’s also likely largely because of the unfair advantage it receives/received from that promotion. Those options are not really available to other browser developers (unless Amazon or meta also decided they want a browser for some reason).
Chrome got popular at introduction because it was much faster at loading and displaying websites. Sure, there was a marketing push by Google, but it succeeded on the products merits and not some unfair business advantage. It still is a great browser.
We do need antitrust protections but not always because consumers are getting a bad product. It’s more about the balance of power. Maybe their products are good now, or their business practices are fair now to other market actors, but you never know when that will change and then it’s too late. It’s like you need safeguards against autocracy also when they’re genuinely doing good job of running the country, because it’s never worth it in the long run when they inevitably start doing nasty shit
Don’t give them any ideas
running “winget install firefox” in an elevated powershell gets you a better browser without ever opening edge. but then you still cannot uninstall it and all the other shit about it still stays active.
so does Microsoft Windows
ftfy
Yeah I personally use Brave but that’s what I found.
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.
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).
OK…
Shouldn’t they be fighting Chrome, more than anything? Surely there’s a legal avenue for that, though I guess there’s a risk of getting deprioritized by Google and basically disappearing.
They’re suing because Microsoft got an exclusion from the Digital Markets Act. Google did not.
Suing? It’s just a letter
Yeah they can’t fight Chrome, they are Chrome.
I mean I really don’t think it’s that big of deal. Edge only makes up 5% of market share, so it’s obviously not helping them that much.
That’s not the problematic metric though. It’s the 70-80% (link) install base of the Windows OS on desktop computers that Edge is installed with that’s the basis of the anti-competitive allegation.
The fact that it still only takes 5% of the browser usage is more of a happy accident.
That makes sense but also they clearly need any edge they can get. Maybe they should even make it more difficult to install other browsers. Like artificially lowering the search results of other browsers. Maybe they could get 6% market share that way.
Yup. Teams ignores default browser and opens URLs in Edge. I have to right click copy and open in Firefox. I refuse to be forced to use Edge
There’s a setting Teams, under “Files and Links” where you can change it from Edge to Default Browser. Scummy that it works that way, but you can work around it at least (for now anyway).
This isn’t exactly true. It just has its own override. If you go into Settings and go to the ‘Files and Links’ section, then ‘Links open preference’ you can toggle it from Edge to Default Browser.
Good to know. Thanks. Still a shady thing to do. Why have it ignore the global setting?
Teams is built on Edge webview. It’s Microsoft’s lighter-weight version of Electron.
That’s why I called it an override. There are only two options in the drop down. Edge and Default Browser. They built an option to override the system default. MS will do everything they can think of to get you onto Edge.
It’s like the mid 90s all over again. Let’s see if anything happens this time.
I want that Web to die, die, die.
Gemini is a step in the right direction, but the new Web should be both non-extensible by design and transparently allow distributed storage, distributed untrusted computation, and separation of the concepts of a site and a machine that serves it. In other words, serverless, where websites and services and even web applications are identified cryptographically, and anybody can contribute their computing power (or storage) to a site\service\application, out of desire to help or for money. With smart contracts, ghost keys and other buzzwords I have no real idea about.
And fuck Microsoft.
Windows is absolutely abusing their position as the dominant OS to push their other products. The number of “no don’t do that” messages and pop ups when trying to install chrome on a windows computer is clearly anti-competitive, and the only reason microsoft has been getting away with it is because Edge/etc hasn’t achieved enough market share.
Not to forget than when using bing, if you look for words like Firefox or Chrome, you get a large banner saying to use Edge instead. Super shady stuff
This doesn’t make that behavior any less scummy, but have you tried using any Google website on a browser that isn’t chrome?
Is this blocked by ublock origin coz I’ve never gotten that at all on Firefox.
Not to mention that Microsoft forces you to use a Microsoft account when you create your account on your home computer which is then automatically logged in to edge and being so that they can track and quantize more of every single thing you do on the internet to monetize you
No it doesn’t. I just reinstalled Windows 11 pro and I’m running without a Microsoft account.
Oh yeah?
Open edge and search for something. Check in the top right corner and tell me you’re not signed into some sort of pseudo-created Microsoft account.
You win.
Home versions, which most home users have, force the use of MS accounts. They’ve patched the bypass tricks that people used before.
I do a workaround when installing/setting up Windows on others PCs. Use my dummy MS account -> create local user -> change to admin -> delete out the MS account. Boom, then only the local account is on the PC.
I’m willing to bet you’re still ending up in their database. Unless you are using some sort of VPN to first obfuscate your location and then a brand new account that has been used before, then there’s going to be some record of similarity.
When I’m installing Windows 10 or 11, I use the Rufus installer to create a pre-built admin account that I can sign in with.
That’s a good point, and a good idea about modifying the installer. I will give this a shot next time I have to do a reinstall. Thanks!
Ah. Did not realize this was an issue with home. I can not say I experienced that. Hell, I still use Windows 7 pro keys to activate Windows 11.
Do you know if you could use audit mode to bypass OOBE and get around it? Simply curious.
Well, it is impossible to install W11 Pro without MS account for normal person. Sure tech people can do it after couple seconds of web search, but your average PC user? Nope. No way.
neiiigh, its dead.
Ooo what about safari on mac? Isn’t it the same thing but just not as hated?
Yes, but they’ve got the advantage of having done it for longer, and not stirred the pot.
I honestly don’t think it would have been an issue for Microsoft if they just decided to sit on Internet Explorer instead of trying to push everyone into using Edge.
Forget mac, it’s even worse on iOS/iPadOS, where all third-party browsers must use Safari’s rendering engine too.
Haven’t they been told they’ve got to stop doing that now?
I thought the European commission had forced them to allow other browsers to actually use their own render engines
I’m not 100% but I do vaguely seem to recall reading something about that being the case.
It would be if Mac’s held the dominant market position for computers, yes.
They should make second dominant subject to such laws too.
Would not be Linux then? I’m pretty certain Mac OS isn’t even in the top three mostly because their os is tied to computers and their computers are stupidly expensive and only westerners can really afford them with any degree of regularity.
Not by market share on desktops in particular Western countries, no.
In the world - yes, I’d expect there to be more Linux desktops really existing than MacOS desktops.
Apple is the West in a nutshell, though. When a real need or a problem is mentioned, it’s mentioned only rarely as some selling point - like Jobs saying MacOSX is “very Linux-like” (sic). When a solution reaches reality, it’s done in a neutered way - like Apple still regularly releasing sources. When a real need is fulfilled, you can expect twice the effort to have been covertly spent on negating its effect - like with Apple’s “just works” and sterility and even privacy selling points, which come with walled gardens, closed APIs, short and bad support, and them actually still spying on you. A declaration of effort to tackle any problem existing in the wild is always aimed at portrayal of said effort to be persuasive enough to sell the product and the more efficient, the better, where efficiency means that actually doing anything other than persuasion is against the goal.
See, the difference between market mechanisms and geopolitics is not in people deciding that there’ll be this set of rules here and that set of rules there. It’s due to structure. The bigger that structure makes companies, the more similar market dynamic and scientific&technical progress will be to geopolitics.
Which is why I genuinely don’t understand people who frown at “techno-luddites” like me dreaming of going back to decentralized, even if with worse compatibility, hardware production and simpler software and formats. I would even say that some degree of protectionism from less developed countries would help, where hardware can be imported only if there’s domestic alternative production to match.
I’m more on the libertarian side, but if in XIX century weapons ownership was widespread, and in XX century it stopped being such, because of one’s ability to kill much more people quickly, then the same with electronics would make sense by the same principle. Only the qualitative difference in power comes not with the device, but with the centralized production line it comes from.
Of course, that’s not my proposition. It wouldn’t work.
My proposition would be to try to design some “civilization minimized”, where sufficiently usable computers can be produced in an area of 100k people, with society, industry, communications and warfare approaches optimized for that limitation. That kind of limitation for a self-contained unit of civilization, so to say.
So - one can buy a reasonably good laptop for 500$ today.
What kind of laptop can one produce for that sum in a 100k people settlement? Is that even possible to make it close to 500$ in relative value?
I’d expect we’d need to solve all heavy problems with specialized boards. I think lithography is actually applicable here - we don’t need it very precise, it’s far above our possibilities in such a hypothetical unit, and it would improve resource usage efficiency. And I think a more compact machine of PDP-11 level is possible, with specialized boards in Amiga ideology. I also think we can even have some kind of machine learning, but with analog storage of coefficients to reach anything close to sufficient efficiency. It would be a Fallout-kind computer, nothing fancy, but - possibly usable. For dedicated boards (some of which can, again, solve problems with analog approaches) there is a possibility of optronic elements being more accessible and energy-efficient.
There’s a question of portability - one can expect lithium to just not be realistically available in any random area of the world populated by 100k people. I mean, trying to imagine some autarky …
So maybe not a laptop, LOL.
Nah. That’s bullshit. That won’t work. At least not every 100k people. Maybe every 10mln.
An out of the box OS should include a browser. Microsoft takes a ham-fisted approach, however, Apple makes it entirely possible to uninstall Safari. You do have to jump through the hoop of disabling System Integrity Protection to remove it, but it’s simple as trashing the app and deleting the data. I speak from experience. Very easy to do.
Seriously, showing a pop up confirmation if the user tries to uninstall the last browser on the device is all that is needed.
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’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.
Citing SASS feels like “Who codes HTML when we have Dreamweaver” type of comment.
SASS just translates your styles to CSS, so even if you write one simple line, it’s polyfilling 13 - and for various technical reasons it’s better if one line polyfills one line for consistency. Just to give one example, an app might bloat its page load by inadvertently having 1MB-large CSS files post SASS translation.
I’ve heard the comment about “not keeping up, wasn’t working” in regards to Edge several times, but I haven’t heard any concrete examples of that that didn’t relate to Chrome flexing its position or jumping the gun on standards. It’s even realistic a large percent of that was people, web devs included, having trailing feelings of “Ugh, IE - I mean Edge” long after that stopped making sense.
Dreamweaver is an IDE (a bad and crappy one). SASS is a pre-processing language.
They don’t even remotely do the same thing
History disagrees with you on this one.
What do you mean history disagrees with me? If you look at reviews of Microsoft edge when it released pretty much all of them talk about how it lacked compatibility with modern standards and was nowhere close to feature complete. Large parts of the HTML5 spec were missing, including any support for
webmoroggencoding.I mean that there is several indicators that Google did indeed try to sabotage other browsers on YouTube.
That was a claim that was made yes, but never proven.
Meanwhile what I said is demonstrably verifiable. Early versions of Microsoft edge that they put out were an absolute travesty, and all of the criticism leveled at it was 100% earned, it had nothing to do with any machinations from Google. Microsoft made a terrible browser put it out to the general public and were rightfully criticized for it. They couldn’t fix it so they switched to chromium.
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.
Don’t have any of the switcher things ony my firefox deskrop and mobile.
The only modifications I use are uBlock origin.Its working for me now, I tested it this morning. Even tried swithching the user agent back to Firefox and yep - Youtube gets magically some buffering problems with it.
Close youtube tab, switch user agent back to chrome, clear cache and restart the browser: no buffering problems. What a bunch of assholes.
I’ve reported this earlier to EU competition ombudsman, like a about a year ago, and they confirmed then that they were getting reports about the issue, Google of course denying the practice. Hopefully they are working on some punishment for Google in the background.
Maybe I misconfiguted it. I’ll check it out another day
Any source that YouTube is the reason that Edge switched to chromium?
I’m betting it’s just cheaper and easier than making their own engine.
They’re was never any evidence of google’s wrongdoing, the accusation came from former MS edge developers:
https://www.developer-tech.com/news/edge-developer-google-youtube-chrome-browsers/
Officially Google denied it:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-microsoft-edge-intern-claims
You may be right, this could have been MS couldn’t make a better browser and pulled the plug, and the devs just blamed google.
Old Edge was a better browser
more responsive/lower overhead
