5 ms·
Previous Edge was a complete refactor of IE with a brand new js engine. Extremely lightweight and low power compared to Chrome. Their goal was to be 100% compat
by 908B64B197 3y ago
Previous Edge was a complete refactor of IE with a brand new js engine. Extremely lightweight and low power compared to Chrome. Their goal was to be 100% compatible with the modern web.
Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS gave up and forked Chrome.
- JohnFen 3y agoIf that was the reason, surely it would have been quicker and easier to change the default user agent string themselves?
- 908B64B197 3y agoYes and no. It's part of the reasons. Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.
- JohnFen 3y agoBut well-designed websites don't alter their behavior based on the user agent string. They test for capabilities before using them.
- 908B64B197 3y agoIndeed. That's the correct thing to do and it's what real software engineers will do. But from the horrors I've seen in offshored websites, that's science-fiction to some coders. They will assume whatever version of Chrome they are running is the only one in existence and will use user-agent string once someone tells them their site is broken in Safari.