[bawolff]

"Forced" is a bit strong. They did the math and realized that being competitive in the browser market was not worth the $$$$ they would have to spend to get there. Given that web browsers aren't really going to make MS money, unless they manage to get full dominance (which isnt really their strategy anymore and would be difficult in modern context), it was probably a smart business decision. If the business calculus was different i am sure they could.

[jfrunyon]

That's how a business gets forced to do something: money.

[josefx]

Google did actively slow and cripple its flagship sites on competing browsers without suffering any consequences. No amount of money will help against that kind of advantage.

[can16358p]

I can confirm. We have a normal Google doc (nothing super fancy) that spans about 10 pages at most, and when I scroll past about 8th page in Safari, scrolling becomes almost unusually sluggish and everything starts lagging.

[jfrunyon]

Honestly... I don't know if that's intentional; Drive 'files' get really laggy really quick in Chrome too.

[michaelt]

There are a lot of claims [1] that Google makes a ~suspicious number of accidental mistakes~ that harm performance on competing browsers.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

[jfrunyon]

I'm aware. However, Hanlon's razor suggests it's not intentional. Moreover, I think Occam's razor suggests the same: it's a lot simpler if we assume they just primarily test in their own browser (just like I'm sure Mozilla primarily uses Firefox) and just don't care enough to fix any performance deficiencies they do identify based on browser market share / amount they think users will care.

(Keep in mind: I'm not saying Google is doing the right thing and trying to ensure an equal experience across browsers; I'm just saying I don't think they're intentionally trying to make their pages break other browsers)

[can16358p]

Don't know, maybe not. It works flawless in mobile Safari, for example. Even though it's not intentional, I'm pretty much sure Google would be more inclined to say "hey use Chrome" instead of fixing it for Safari.