Hacker News Reader

Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

Google killed the Edge browser with the same tricks MS used.

The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition.

Not really less anti-competitive.

Anecdotal, but I wanted to give Edge a chance. I found out that it is quite possibly the most feature-creep rich browser on the market. Its sole purpose seems to be “let Microsoft monitor your entire browsing experience”.

I also feel like Microsoft’s heavy handed dark patterns trick less computer savvy people into using it, and those people probably aren’t aware of how much info Microsoft is collecting about them. As a result, I seriously question that Edge’s market share is organic because people actually like it.

Chrome has become that for google.

If you believe that, you are mistaken. If you're making the assertion on false pretenses, then it is tantamount to trolling.

Google didn't kill the Edge browser, Microsoft gave up. If Mozilla can have an independent from scratch browser, Microsoft of all companies could have one too. It's just easier and cheaper for them to rebrand Chromium and call it a day.

And I'm not buying the argument that progress on the Web (tech stack) should stop so that it's easier to make/maintain a browser.

Some of us would have preferred for "progress" on the web stack to have stopped about 20 years ago.

I grew up in the dial-up era but personally think it's incredibly cool how I am able to use a full featured IDE, flash an ESP-32 or my phone via USB, make low latency Zoom/Teams calls with screen sharing, run language agnostic bytecode and utilize low level GPU access, all in a highly secure sandbox on my Macbook, Linux/Windows Thinkpad, $100 Chromebook, tablet and phone.

By one measure, Edge has 5% market share, twice that of Firefox.

On Desktop it’s 13%, which is second place.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Does that chart differentiate between before and after edge internals became chromium though?

Does it matter? It seems like distribution is more important than the internals.

When people say that Google killed the Edge browser they generally mean that MS gave up on maintaining their own browser engine and the world moved that much closer to a web monoculture. To put this in historical perspective, a reskinned IE would not have been a meaningful or useful competitor to IE.

I don’t think it’s a meaningful comparison because Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if they need to. But since it works pretty well, there’s little incentive to do that. It would be like Electron forking V8 for no reason.

Corporate is a huge, huge part of this.

Lots of people working just use whatever browser is preloaded. In addition, you can't even download another browser in a lot of environments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com