Earlier this week, a former intern at Microsoft's Edge team accused Google of sabotaging the browser by designing its own websites to work poorly on it. The accusations followed Microsoft's announcement that it would be moving on from the EdgeHTML rendering engine and build a new browser based on Chromium.
Specifically, the accusation mentioned a change made to the YouTube website, which added an empty div at the top of the video player. This made Microsoft's browser unable to use its video acceleration and lose out on battery life.
Now, a YouTube spokesperson has told The Verge that this is not the case, and that the company does not try to undo optimizations made by other browsers:
“YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when they’re discovered. (...) 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.”
Microsoft's decision to give up on EdgeHTML may ultimately be its own fault. In maintaining browser updates tied to the semi-annual Windows 10 updates, the company made it much harder to keep up with changes made to websites.
Since its inception, many fans have asked for the browser to be updated through the Microsoft Store, and at one point Microsoft seemed to be considering it, but that never came to be. Building Edge on the Chromium project will most likely help the Redmond giant address this problem, though not everyone agrees that's a good thing.
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