Is Google purposefully breaking Microsoft, Apple browsers on its websites? Some insiders are confident it is

[The AchieVer]

Google's doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to everyone in the 1990s, allegedly

Analysis 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.

Someone claiming to have worked to Microsoft's Edge team has allegedthat 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."

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. According to the intern, that tag caused "our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail" with the result that the browser's speed advantage over Google's Chrome disappeared.

He also claimed that shortly after the appearance of the div tag, Google "started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life" before concluding: "What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower."

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.

Microsoft used its control of pretty much everyone's desktop operating system, Windows, to force its Internet Explorer browser onto everyone's PC, and then, once it had become a big player in the browser market, persistently chose to implement different standards.

That resulted in website designers tailoring their websites for Internet Explorer and in many cases, users were obliged to use Explorer to see a website properly ('best viewed in Netscape' or 'best viewed in Internet Explorer' warnings were common).

The good old days

Microsoft was investigated for antitrust behavior in both the US and Europe while it enjoyed almost complete control of the browser world, until it was out-innovated by Mozilla's Firefox and then by Google's Chrome. Now Chrome dominates the arena, and many suspect Google is following the exact same approach of abusing that dominance in an effort to cement control of the market.

 

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.

Well, the author of the claim that Google added a div tag just to mess with Edge is not exactly a lead engineer – he was an intern at Microsoft. He also questioned his own claim of interference, noting "while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced – and they're the ones who looked into it personally."

It's clear that that is very far from a credible allegation. In order to bolster his case, he wrote that "YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further." But, again, that doesn't prove anything. It was also separately claimed that the Chocolate Factory has been up to shenanigans with Apple's Safari on iPads and its G Suite of applications:

 

Web developers, meanwhile, chimed in, noting that they often add empty div tags in code for a number of reasons. "I can point to hundreds upon hundreds of hidden, invisible, and obscured DOM elements that have no obvious reason to for existing to someone outside the code-base," wrote one in response, on Hacker News.

"We often use empty DIVs for catching mouse events," said another. Others proposed that it could be used as a container for branding and annotations, or for catch out bots attempting to inflate video viewing figures or clicks. In short, there are lots of reasons why an empty div tag may have been added.

Evidence?

The claim that Google started advertising Chrome's superiority over other browsers when it comes to YouTube is also questioned by online commenters, although their credibility is also questionable since no one gave any indication of what efforts they went to in order to discover if the claim was true.

In short, there is precious little evidence that Google is doing anything to disrupt other browsers. And even if there was better evidence, Google would no doubt have a technical explanation or some kind of plausible deniability.

But that doesn't escape the fact that the post, as poorly sourced as it is, has gone the round of the tech community today. And the reason for that is quite clear: with Microsoft announcing it will shift its browser engine to Chromium, Google now has an uncomfortably large degree of control.

Mozilla CEO Chris Beard hit the nail on the head earlier this month, blogging:

Google is a fierce competitor with highly talented employees and a monopolistic hold on unique assets. Google’s dominance across search, advertising, smartphones, and data capture creates a vastly tilted playing field that works against the rest of us.

From a social, civic and individual empowerment perspective ceding control of fundamental online infrastructure to a single company is terrible. This is why Mozilla exists. We compete with Google not because it’s a good business opportunity. We compete with Google because the health of the internet and online life depend on competition and choice. They depend on consumers being able to decide we want something better and to take action.

Making Google more powerful is risky on many fronts. And a big part of the answer depends on what the web developers and businesses who create services and websites do. If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium. That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again.

Despite all the antitrust probing in the 1990s and early 2000s, today's generation of Big Tech has shown itself more than willing to screw over rivals and users, and then lie about it. For Google, the fact that it was willing to develop its censored Dragonfly search product for China and did everything in its power to keep the project secret, and that it secretly paid off executives accused of sexual harassment, points to the fact that its culture is going the way of other massive corporations in the past.

And then there's Facebook, which has shown itself to be a wholly untrustworthy company, and one that is willing to hire political attack firm to plant anti-Semitic smears against its critics. And then lie about it.

If Google is later proved to be messing with its code solely to disrupt rivals, the fact that a Microsoft intern first flagged it will a delicious irony. 

 

source

[steven36]

Google denies altering YouTube code to break Microsoft Edge

 

 

A former Microsoft intern has revealed details of a YouTube incident that has convinced some Edge browser engineers that Google added code to purposely break compatibility. In a post on Hacker News,

Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern at Microsoft, lays out details and claims about an incident earlier this year. Microsoft has since announced the company is moving from the EdgeHTML rendering engine to the open source Chromium project for its Edge browser.

 

Bakita explains that “one of the reasons we [Microsoft] decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up.” Bakita claims that Google added a “hidden empty div over YouTube videos” that affected Microsoft’s hardware acceleration for videos. “Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome’s dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life.”

 

The claims are surprising if they’re genuine, and they come months after a Mozilla program manager claimed a separate YouTube redesign made the site “5x slower in Firefox and Edge.” That incident led Edge, Safari, and Firefox users to revert to scripts to improve the YouTube experience. Google was also at the center of claims it intentionally blocked access to Google Maps for Windows Phone users years ago.

 

“Now while I’m not sure I’m convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced,” says Bakita in his post on the empty element issue. “To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further.”

 

Google disputes Bakita’s claims, and says the YouTube blank div was merely a bug that was fixed after it was reported. “YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when they’re discovered,” says a YouTube spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies, the Web Platform Tests project, the open-source Chromium project and more to improve browser interoperability.”

 

At the heart of these issues is an ongoing battle for the web. It’s clear Microsoft has struggled to keep up with the pace of changes at Google, and many of the search giant’s engineers play important roles in pushing web technologies and standards forwards. Google is often the first to adopt these changes as a result, leaving other web developers to play catch up.

 

It’s an issue that’s resulted in a number of Chrome-only sites from Google, as the company continues to adopt and push web standards forwards. Whether that’s Google’s fault for pushing too fast, or Mozilla / Microsoft’s fault for being too slow is still open for debate.

 

Microsoft isn’t commenting on the specific claims made by a former intern, and the company tells The Verge that “Google has been a helpful partner and we look forward to the journey as we work on the future of Microsoft Edge.”

 

Source