[tolmasky]

> Microsoft decides to use Blink instead of the browser engine they already had.

The stated goal of the EdgeHTML rewrite was to "be fully compatible with the WebKit layout engine used by Safari, Chrome and other browsers. Microsoft has stated that "any Edge–WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing."" [1] It seems the hardest way of doing this is black-boxing WebKit and making a parallel implementation.

What's going on here is that browser rendering is being commoditized. Just like OpenSSL, or Clang, it doesn't necessarily make sense to implement these on your own anymore, there's no clear business reason. There is little to be gained from having a better flex-box implementation, but lots to be lost by having a worse one than the dominant browser. Using Chrome's source disarms this problem.

> "Download Chrome because it's a better and faster browser!" It doesn't have to be true, people believe it anyway.

I mean, maybe... that's not what's won every previous iteration of the browser wars. Its been either through exploiting an existing monopoly (IE, Safari on iOS) or merit (FireFox). Sure, doesn't have to go that way now, but I don't know why we assume that people are going to be moved by "Chrome is faster!" advertising on something that most people prefer not to care about probably.

> "Download Chrome because Edge doesn't support Youtube!" They totally didn't intentionally break Edge.

They can do this regardless of the engine Microsoft chooses to use. If anything, using Chrome makes it more blatant that they're purposely doing it since there's no plausible deniability that its a weird rendering bug in Edge's code. So this seems neither here nor there, if any Edge with any engine got popular then they could choose to go this route and then maybe we'd have an antitrust case on our hands. Unless the argument is "Microsoft should stop making browsers altogether", not sure what the point of this is (maybe that is the thing that is being proposed?).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge#EdgeHTML

[anoncake]

> Unless the argument is "Microsoft should stop making browsers altogether"

Of course MS should keep making browsers. That gives them control over the UX, just not over the rendering engine.

My point is that assuming that Blink Edge means that there is now a variant of Blink not controlled by Google is optimistic.

> Its been either through exploiting an existing monopoly (IE, Safari on iOS) or merit (FireFox).

Yes, but which way is Chrome winning? I don't think it's merit, at least not solely.

[stephenr]

The entire reason they adopted blink was YouTube putting invisible divs over the video and breaking edge’s hardware acceleration for video.

They rewarded googles shitty behaviour by becoming dependent on them for a rendering engine, and any chance of forking is pointless because they’ll be back where they started: using something different than google, and thus ripe for shit code on google properties.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

A browser that can't hardware-accelerate <video> if there's an invisible <div> above it is broken. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do and any other browser can handle that.

[stephenr]

I agree that they should have just fixed the issue but my point was that there’s zero chance they’re going to fork blink because their reason for adopting it was google properties doing weird things in their own engine - after enough time google properties will do weird things in their forked engine too.

[anoncake]

That doesn't excuse Google intentionally exploiting that bug to attack Microsoft.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Why do you think they were intentionally exploiting it? It's a perfectly reasonable thing for YouTube to do for several of its features.