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This is just like when Google Maps was blocked on Windows Phone[1] and when they decided to block YouTube as well[2]. Microsoft now finds themselves in the same

This is just like when Google Maps was blocked on Windows Phone[1] and when they decided to block YouTube as well[2]. Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Google is behaving, if anything, worse, and using its massive reach and user base to stifle competition. This is deeply disappointing, and all the more reason Microsoft never should have adopted Chromium. They will eventually have to maintain a hard fork, the differences will grow such that they eventually have to increase their engineering spend on it to keep pace with just managing the rebases and patches or reimplement features themselves, and despite all the good will they had for the Chromium team they will see none of it returned by the larger Google/Alphabet corporation. They should have based Edge on Gecko and invested money in taking marketshare away from Chromium so that the W3C/WHATWG can operate as intended with multiple implementations for a single specification. Instead they embraced the Chrome monoculture and were either treated in bad faith or the Chromium team mistakenly believed everything would be fine with a reset in relations. The result will be that Google retains a veto on web technology that competes with them for the next decade or more. Use Firefox, everyone. [1] https://mashable.com/2013/01/05/google-maps-windows-phone/ https://mashable.com/2013/01/05/google-maps-windows-phone/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-google-battle-over-youtube-windows-phone https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-google-...

KorematsuFred 7y ago
> Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Could you please give some examples ? Did windows ever blocked a competitors product ?
- msla 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code > The AARD code was a segment of code in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 that would determine whether Windows was running on MS-DOS or PC DOS, rather than a competing workalike such as DR-DOS, and would result in a cryptic error message in the latter case. This XOR-encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated machine code used a variety of undocumented DOS structures and functions to perform its work, and appeared in the installer, WIN.COM, and several other executables in the OS.[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... > Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows, one incorporated into "Bambi", the code name that Microsoft used for its disk cache utility (SMARTDRV) that detected DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1. The AARD code trickery is well-known, but Caldera is now pursuing four other deliberate incompatibilities. One of them was a version check in XMS in the Windows 3.1 setup program which produced the message: "The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You must remove it before setup can successfully install Windows."
  - aksss 7y ago
    I think question was about ie6 era, which is like 2001.
    - dblohm7 7y ago
      In 2001 US v Microsoft was still ongoing and Microsoft was just about to sign their consent decree with the USDOJ[1]. Those kinds of shenanigans weren't really possible for them until the consent decrees expired. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
    - cmendel 7y ago
      1999 and 2001 are only 2 years apart though...
- AaronFriel 7y ago
  They find themselves in the same position of being a minority with a powerful, majority market share competitor that has the ability to put their products front and center (e.g.: on google.com and other Google properties). I think the IE6 era was bad for the web for a lot of reasons, but fortunately the investigations into Microsoft made it harder for them to abuse their overwhelming marketshare.
msla 7y ago
https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... > "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft isn't the gorilla it used to be, but never forget it is a gorilla, and knows how to play the gorilla game. If Google becomes sufficiently annoying, Microsoft can say "Well, sure, Google's Chrome isn't very fast on Windows, and crashes every so often. Google must be slipping. Here, Edge is just as good, being practically the same technology, and it's from us, your friend, so you know it won't crap out at the worst possible moment."
- jen20 7y ago
  Given the ads in Windows [1] showing a very similar thing, but targeted against Firefox, I’d say it’s inevitable. [1]: https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-gets-cheeky-with-ads-suggesting-firefox-users-switch-to-edge https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-gets-cheeky-with-a...
- SirLotsaLocks 7y ago
  I generally dislike this, and it's still not a great situation but I'd be down to see google to be put in their place to be honest.
- Shorel 7y ago
  Chrome bypassed a lot of security policies by installing itself in the user profile instead of the normal installation in the Program Files folder, because otherwise it would have never been allowed in many corporate environments. Microsoft can manipulate Windows to make Chrome look bad, but while this could have been useful fifteen years ago against other less popular software, now Windows has serious competition in the form of smartphones and tablets. Microsoft can't do anything about Android. And people are using Android instead of Windows to browse the Web more and more every day.
wayneftw 7y ago
This strategy would have been worse for Microsoft and furthermore it would have been ineffective at achieving your own desire. Old Edge was already getting the same treatment from web developers as Firefox. If they picked up Gecko they might as well have just stayed with old Edge for even less effort.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  No rebuttal? I take it as a sign that I’m 100% correct and that my detractors just don’t have a decent counter argument... Thanks for the confirmation! Interesting how, yet again in a conversation about an article that didn't even mention Firefox, an off-topic, Firefox-positive comment rose very quickly to the top of this large thread soon after it appeared isn’t it? I wonder how that happens when they have so few users and so little support from the web dev community at large? Hmmm... I guess when you got that free Google money to burn, you spend it desperately trying to stay relevant.
terminaljunkid 7y ago
Meanwhile your Firefox suffers from really, really bad governance in a suit-dominated organization. The CEO is milking way too much from the sinking ship. The priorities are somewhere else from what people want.
- shirshak55 7y ago
  that's other stuff but the privacy principle is still there and we only care about that right? Its the software we care right not their management stuff?
gentleman11 7y ago
Microsoft literally uses the same strategy against Firefox users in windows. They all play this sketchy game
- yellowapple 7y ago
  And Google, too, uses the same strategy against Firefox users on Google-owned sites.
Barrin92 7y ago
>They will eventually have to maintain a hard fork, the differences will grow such that they eventually have to increase their engineering spend on it to keep pace with just managing the rebases and patches or reimplement features themselves, This sounds dramatic but Microsoft is a company with 150000 employees. Maintaining a fork of Chromium while open source development continues is probably not an insurmountable feat, and I don't see why it is in principle more work than switching to and contributing to Gecko.
- cocoa19 7y ago
  Companies don't throw money at products just because they can.
- imtringued 7y ago
  If it is that easy and obvious why did they stop working on their own engine then?
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    probably because nobody was using their browser any more? (other than people who can't delete it from their work computers I guess) In terms of market share Chromium has essentially won. It's where all the addons are, it's what websites are being optimised for, and so on.
Hypx 7y ago
Sadly, I tried Firefox for a while, and it's big enough of a downgrade compared to Chrome that I went back. A hard fork of Chromium specifically for Edge might not be the worse thing ever. Having two independently maintained versions of that engine might be enough to force more standardization than in a Chrome-only world.
- Shorel 7y ago
  It totally depends on when you did try Firefox. Two years ago Firefox was such a downgrade I concur. One year ago the reverse was true and I switched to Firefox without regrets.
- r00fus 7y ago
  When was this? Recently it's great for me - better than Chrome - with the exception that some extensions are Chrome-specific (meaning you have to repackage them for FF).
  - lsiebert 7y ago
    Hey, can you point me to a good guide for repackaging extensions?
    - shirshak55 7y ago
      actually it may not work for all extension as chrome uses different api than firefox webextension standard api. I must say firefox extension api is far better than chrome one.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  I tried to switch to Firefx once or twice before and failed. Just managed to finally make the switch. As silly as it sounds, feature parity on selecting and moving groups of tabs between windows was a big factor. I still use Chrome at work for development, though.
- shirshak55 7y ago
  i tried firefox and actually it is very better now. Last 6 month ago it was not good but now devtools etc is also good. Still not the best but its better than giving every data to google :D
animalnewbie 7y ago
> is behaving Google has always been this- they use OSS for PR and are bigger enemies of openness than Microsoft. They just had the luxury to pretend otherwise
maremp 7y ago
As a web developer, I just can't buy into firefox. The chrome/chromium dev tools are far superior. I also tried using chrome as a "work" browser and firefox for the rest, but it's all a big mess. Not to mention that a lot of pages are not working well. I am now using Brave to at least mitigate the privacy nightmare of Chrome.
- shirshak55 7y ago
  lot of pages not working already indicates why google is taking advantage right? First make stuff that don't work on firefox and later people complain its firefox issue. Yea brave is good choice for developers :)
em-bee 7y ago
the thing is that having a different rendering engine is no longer an advantage. on the contrary, it gets in the way. as a web developer i'd prefer that there only be one browser i need to support, that is, one rendering engine, that guarantees that my site works everywhere. as a user i want new features to work and be taken up quickly. i don't want to be told that a website doesn't work in my browser, or worse, have it fail silently. different browser are fine for the UI, tab handling, bookmarks, extensions, etc. but rendering a website should work uniformly without fail. the reason why we need multiple rendering engines is because monoculture is bad for security and it's also not a good idea to allow a single company to define how the web works. however, most users or developers don't care to much about that. if that rendering engine would be developed and maintained by an independent consortium like mozilla, then this would actually be sort of acceptable, as it would at least solve the monopoly problem (if a resource is best managed as a monopoly, then that monopoly must be owned by the community at large, and not by a company with selfish commercial interests.) it wouldn't solve the security problem however.

KorematsuFred 7y ago

> Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Could you please give some examples ? Did windows ever blocked a competitors product ?

msla 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code > The AARD code was a segment of code in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 that would determine whether Windows was running on MS-DOS or PC DOS, rather than a competing workalike such as DR-DOS, and would result in a cryptic error message in the latter case. This XOR-encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated machine code used a variety of undocumented DOS structures and functions to perform its work, and appeared in the installer, WIN.COM, and several other executables in the OS.[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... > Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows, one incorporated into "Bambi", the code name that Microsoft used for its disk cache utility (SMARTDRV) that detected DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1. The AARD code trickery is well-known, but Caldera is now pursuing four other deliberate incompatibilities. One of them was a version check in XMS in the Windows 3.1 setup program which produced the message: "The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You must remove it before setup can successfully install Windows."
- aksss 7y ago
  I think question was about ie6 era, which is like 2001.
  - dblohm7 7y ago
    In 2001 US v Microsoft was still ongoing and Microsoft was just about to sign their consent decree with the USDOJ[1]. Those kinds of shenanigans weren't really possible for them until the consent decrees expired. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
  - cmendel 7y ago
    1999 and 2001 are only 2 years apart though...
AaronFriel 7y ago
They find themselves in the same position of being a minority with a powerful, majority market share competitor that has the ability to put their products front and center (e.g.: on google.com and other Google properties). I think the IE6 era was bad for the web for a lot of reasons, but fortunately the investigations into Microsoft made it harder for them to abuse their overwhelming marketshare.

msla 7y ago

https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... > "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft isn't the gorilla it used to be, but never forget it is a gorilla, and knows how to play the gorilla game. If Google becomes sufficiently annoying, Microsoft can say "Well, sure, Google's Chrome isn't very fast on Windows, and crashes every so often. Google must be slipping. Here, Edge is just as good, being practically the same technology, and it's from us, your friend, so you know it won't crap out at the worst possible moment."

jen20 7y ago
Given the ads in Windows [1] showing a very similar thing, but targeted against Firefox, I’d say it’s inevitable. [1]: https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-gets-cheeky-with-ads-suggesting-firefox-users-switch-to-edge https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-gets-cheeky-with-a...
SirLotsaLocks 7y ago
I generally dislike this, and it's still not a great situation but I'd be down to see google to be put in their place to be honest.
Shorel 7y ago
Chrome bypassed a lot of security policies by installing itself in the user profile instead of the normal installation in the Program Files folder, because otherwise it would have never been allowed in many corporate environments. Microsoft can manipulate Windows to make Chrome look bad, but while this could have been useful fifteen years ago against other less popular software, now Windows has serious competition in the form of smartphones and tablets. Microsoft can't do anything about Android. And people are using Android instead of Windows to browse the Web more and more every day.

wayneftw 7y ago

This strategy would have been worse for Microsoft and furthermore it would have been ineffective at achieving your own desire. Old Edge was already getting the same treatment from web developers as Firefox. If they picked up Gecko they might as well have just stayed with old Edge for even less effort.

wayneftw 7y ago
No rebuttal? I take it as a sign that I’m 100% correct and that my detractors just don’t have a decent counter argument... Thanks for the confirmation! Interesting how, yet again in a conversation about an article that didn't even mention Firefox, an off-topic, Firefox-positive comment rose very quickly to the top of this large thread soon after it appeared isn’t it? I wonder how that happens when they have so few users and so little support from the web dev community at large? Hmmm... I guess when you got that free Google money to burn, you spend it desperately trying to stay relevant.

terminaljunkid 7y ago

Meanwhile your Firefox suffers from really, really bad governance in a suit-dominated organization. The CEO is milking way too much from the sinking ship. The priorities are somewhere else from what people want.

shirshak55 7y ago
that's other stuff but the privacy principle is still there and we only care about that right? Its the software we care right not their management stuff?

gentleman11 7y ago

Microsoft literally uses the same strategy against Firefox users in windows. They all play this sketchy game

yellowapple 7y ago
And Google, too, uses the same strategy against Firefox users on Google-owned sites.

Barrin92 7y ago

>They will eventually have to maintain a hard fork, the differences will grow such that they eventually have to increase their engineering spend on it to keep pace with just managing the rebases and patches or reimplement features themselves, This sounds dramatic but Microsoft is a company with 150000 employees. Maintaining a fork of Chromium while open source development continues is probably not an insurmountable feat, and I don't see why it is in principle more work than switching to and contributing to Gecko.

cocoa19 7y ago
Companies don't throw money at products just because they can.
imtringued 7y ago
If it is that easy and obvious why did they stop working on their own engine then?
- Barrin92 7y ago
  probably because nobody was using their browser any more? (other than people who can't delete it from their work computers I guess) In terms of market share Chromium has essentially won. It's where all the addons are, it's what websites are being optimised for, and so on.

Hypx 7y ago

Sadly, I tried Firefox for a while, and it's big enough of a downgrade compared to Chrome that I went back. A hard fork of Chromium specifically for Edge might not be the worse thing ever. Having two independently maintained versions of that engine might be enough to force more standardization than in a Chrome-only world.

Shorel 7y ago
It totally depends on when you did try Firefox. Two years ago Firefox was such a downgrade I concur. One year ago the reverse was true and I switched to Firefox without regrets.
r00fus 7y ago
When was this? Recently it's great for me - better than Chrome - with the exception that some extensions are Chrome-specific (meaning you have to repackage them for FF).
- lsiebert 7y ago
  Hey, can you point me to a good guide for repackaging extensions?
  - shirshak55 7y ago
    actually it may not work for all extension as chrome uses different api than firefox webextension standard api. I must say firefox extension api is far better than chrome one.
dwaltrip 7y ago
I tried to switch to Firefx once or twice before and failed. Just managed to finally make the switch. As silly as it sounds, feature parity on selecting and moving groups of tabs between windows was a big factor. I still use Chrome at work for development, though.
shirshak55 7y ago
i tried firefox and actually it is very better now. Last 6 month ago it was not good but now devtools etc is also good. Still not the best but its better than giving every data to google :D

animalnewbie 7y ago

> is behaving Google has always been this- they use OSS for PR and are bigger enemies of openness than Microsoft. They just had the luxury to pretend otherwise

maremp 7y ago

As a web developer, I just can't buy into firefox. The chrome/chromium dev tools are far superior. I also tried using chrome as a "work" browser and firefox for the rest, but it's all a big mess. Not to mention that a lot of pages are not working well. I am now using Brave to at least mitigate the privacy nightmare of Chrome.

shirshak55 7y ago
lot of pages not working already indicates why google is taking advantage right? First make stuff that don't work on firefox and later people complain its firefox issue. Yea brave is good choice for developers :)

em-bee 7y ago

the thing is that having a different rendering engine is no longer an advantage. on the contrary, it gets in the way. as a web developer i'd prefer that there only be one browser i need to support, that is, one rendering engine, that guarantees that my site works everywhere. as a user i want new features to work and be taken up quickly. i don't want to be told that a website doesn't work in my browser, or worse, have it fail silently. different browser are fine for the UI, tab handling, bookmarks, extensions, etc. but rendering a website should work uniformly without fail. the reason why we need multiple rendering engines is because monoculture is bad for security and it's also not a good idea to allow a single company to define how the web works. however, most users or developers don't care to much about that. if that rendering engine would be developed and maintained by an independent consortium like mozilla, then this would actually be sort of acceptable, as it would at least solve the monopoly problem (if a resource is best managed as a monopoly, then that monopoly must be owned by the community at large, and not by a company with selfish commercial interests.) it wouldn't solve the security problem however.