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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

>"hire a full development team that can hopefully catch up and overtake Chrome?"

In an ideal world the best browser would win but marketshare doesn't work that way.

Microsoft has full time development teams working on Edge and it is just barely chipping away at chrome's dominance. And, in no small part because they pester Windows users to make Edge the default at every opportunity.

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Edge is a chrome skin. They don't have engineers working on a browser, they have engineers working on a _theme_.

Really? So every time you bring in a dependency on a library written by someone else, your software is just a theme or wrapper? I guess that's one way to look at it.

If you're making a browser and your dependency is a browser...yes.

Yeah, that's why it's called Linux and not Gnu/Linux.

if your python assignment is solved by

import solution

and some additional fluff (tracking,telemetry and other anti features in Edge's case) did you really do your homework?

Depends who you are turning your homework in to. :- )

Oh, if the GP meant Chromium the engine, rather than Chrome the browser, that changes things a bit.

That’s the case now but they had their own browser until 2018 backed by considerable resources and still had to put up the white flag.

1. It doesn't really matter. Most users don't even know what a browser engine is much less care, so whether it's a fully independent browser or not is irrelevant to their adoption in the marketplace.

2. The story was no different even when they were still using Trident as their engine.

Having two large user bases using different engines meant that standards mattered.

When 85% of people use the same browser stack we're back in the bad old days of IE6.

It's more than a skin. Microsoft put some effort into optimization, like using a segmented heap allocator.

They actually contribute to chromium. Almost a year old tweet: https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1329200077517295618?ref_s...

The EU should take over Firefox, because the impartial web is a crucial part of everyday life.

Being taken over by the EU would make it very far from being a part of an "impartial" web.

EU sells user data?

No thanks. They would lose even more users if that were to happen.

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