“In what can only be described as painfully ironic, Microsoft engineers are seemingly convinced that Google is making changes to its websites in order to break rival browsers,” Kieren McCarthy writes for The Register.
“Someone claiming to have worked to Microsoft’s Edge team has alleged that Redmond ditched its own browser engine, EdgeHTML, in favor of Google’s Chromium was mainly because ‘Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up,'” McCarthy writes. “The netizen, Joshua Bakita, gave as ‘just one example’ the appearance of a seemingly useless empty HTML div tag in YouTube videos that had the effect of slowing down the Edge browser.”
“If true, the deliberate slowdown of a rival browser would be especially ironic given Microsoft’s role in the ‘browser wars’ in the late 1990s, when the software giant used its market dominance to repeatedly screw over main browser rival Netscape Navigator,” McCarthy writes. “But is it? Or are we all just fed up with Google and Facebook abusing their power to avoid accountability, sell personal data, screw around with always-on location tracking, distort the markets in their favor, lobby lawmakers to get what they want, and then fail to notice things like Kremlin-masterminded propaganda campaigns on their platforms? Oh, and secretly push for censored versions of their products for the Chinese market, and then pretend they haven’t when discovered.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Maybe. Maybe not. One thing’s for sure, though:
This ‘don’t be evil’ mantra: It’s bullshit. — Steve Jobs, 2010
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How Google is secretly recording Android settlers, monitoring millions of conversations every day and storing the creepy audio files – August 22, 2017
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Edward Snowden: Apple is a privacy pioneer – June 5, 2015
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Apple CEO Tim Cook ups privacy to new level, takes direct swipe at Google – September 18, 2014
Apple slams Google in Safari 7.1 release notes: ‘Adds DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track users’ – September 18, 2014
A message from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy – September 18, 2014
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Google to pay $17 million to settle U.S. states’ Safari user tracking probe – November 20, 2013
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Obama’s privacy plan puts pinch on Google – February 24, 2012
Obama administration outlines online privacy guidelines – February 23, 2012
Google sued by Apple Safari-user for bypassing browser privacy – February 21, 2012
Google responds to Microsoft over privacy issues, calls IE’s cookie policy ‘widely non-operational’ – February 21, 2012
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WSJ: Google tracked iPhone, iPad users, bypassing Apple’s Safari browser privacy settings; Microsoft denounces – February 17, 2012
Google removed its “don’t be evil” mantra from its code of conduct earlier this year.
It’s easy to assume they didn’t want to operate within constant contradiction…so, change the code.
All I know is that Street View on Google Maps is impossible to use today.
We are in the blind and naive ages of internet.. and if we are not careful with likes of Google, fackbook .. ..imo, balance of power and order will be all but things of the past.
Why would it be strange at this point for a company’s webpage to work best with their own browser? The question is how does Chrome work on every other 3rd party website in contrast to its competition.
Pipeline should have made a better browser – Steve was right! Don’t be pipEVILine – it’s Bs.
Its not ‘ironic’, it’s hypercritical — please learn the difference journalists.
Seems ironic that ironic was ironically used incorrectly.
It’s not ‘hypercritical’ it’s ‘hypocritical.” Please learn the difference pendants.
Oh, the humanity. It’s pedant not pendant.
Jess kaim heer two cey eye lub diz thred.
Far Kin hell, Far Queue too
Microsoft should know something about breaking rival apps.
After misleading WordPerfect Corporation into thinking they were going to continue to support DOS co-equally with Windows for at least longer than they did, when WP began a crash effort to belatedly get on Windows to compete with Word there (when it still led the PC word processing market), there was a strongly rumored slogan among Windows team programmers:
“The coding’s not done until WordPerfect won’t run.”
Which is how we ended up with (the much inferior) Word’s hegemony.