In a claim made by a former Microsoft Intern, Google has been pointed at for allegedly adding codes in order to break compatibility. Joshua Bakita, who was a software engineering intern at Microsoft, has laid out the detailed facts and claims on Hacker News. Microsoft has reportedly announced that it is moving to the open source Chromium project for its Edge Browser from the EdgeHTML rendering engine.
Bakita said - “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.”
He had claimed that Google added a “hidden empty div over YouTube videos,” which has affected Microsoft’s hardware acceleration for videos. He further emphasized that prior to the redesign of the code, Microsoft’s state-of-the-art video acceleration had put them ahead of Chrome on Video Playback time on battery. This changed the moment they made the code changes and advertised Chrome’s dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life, claimed Bakita.
Bakita, although remains skeptical about the intentional change made to YouTube code, says that his colleagues are convinced that the code change was intentional. Microsoft Edge had also requested the video-sharing giant, YouTube to remove the hidden empty div but was only turned down.
These claims come months after Mozilla Manager claimed that a particular YouTube redesign has made the site five times slower in Edge and FireFox. However, in a statement made to the media, Google has said that it fixed only a bug and didn’t add any code redesign to defeat the optimization in the other browsers.
Microsoft remains unavailable to comment on the specific claims made by the former Intern, but it has humbly called Google as a helpful partner and looks forward to working on the future of Microsoft Edge. Microsoft Edge is a web browser that has been included in Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile and Xbox One devices, taking place of the age old Internet Explorer as the default browser. Whether it is Google’s fast-paced tweaking of web standards or Mozilla/Microsoft’s slow acclimatizing to the changes is a debatable question.
