Yah looks like both Chrome and Edge render web pages the same on Android.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
If anyone made a browser as useable as IE 9, I'd be on the same train. But as far as I'm concerned, IE9 was the last great usable browser interface for getting work done. It certainly didn't have a great engine, but the UI was second to none, IMO. Especially when it came to doing searches on the internet with the customizable search box (which right click menu inherited), making it easy to search for the same term among various sites (IE - searching Newegg directly, or Amazon directly, or AnandTech directly, different medical databases directly, different research sites directly, Google, Yahoo, etc. and all done easily without having to do anything but a couple clicks to search a different configured site for the search term).
Now we just have a far less useful search using the default search engine. It's really pathetic where browsers are now from a usability standpoint for anything but casual browsing.
Regards,
SB
Last edited:
Silent_Buddha
Legend
With all the attendant typing, assuming Google is allowed to scrape the site for public searches. In IE9 just 2 clicks accomplishes the same thing. Then 2 more clicks and I can be searching the term in a medical database which Google doesn't scrape. And 2 more clicks and I'm searching for the term elsewhere. For my purposes, often in places Google doesn't have access or permission to include in Google search.
For casual users, this isn't a big deal. If you're doing a LOT of searches for research and cross referencing, it's hugely annoying to constantly have to retype things, even with the use of cut and paste.
IE10 and 11 attempted to replicate some of that in the address bar, but it was clunky at best and far less useful compared to the search box, and right click menu (with pop out customized searches) from IE9.
Regards,
SB
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/...n-alleges-google-sabotaged-microsofts-browser
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
Context:
"For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.
For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.
Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced -- and they're the ones who looked into it personally. To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further. And this is only one case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
Context:
"For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.
For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.
Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced -- and they're the ones who looked into it personally. To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further. And this is only one case.
Last edited by a moderator:
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Google isn't only deliberately sabotaging Edge, they are also deliberately doing it to rival browsers as well.
Amusing that the "do no evil" company is relying on evil for their internet browser dominance. Kinda reminds you of MS back when they were pushing IE versus Netscape.
Regards,
SB
Amusing that the "do no evil" company is relying on evil for their internet browser dominance. Kinda reminds you of MS back when they were pushing IE versus Netscape.
Regards,
SB
I don't think many folks consider Google to be some kind of highly ethical company, especially considering the business model is based on exploitation of users for advertising.
TF? haven't they learned anything. Using a monopoly (Youtube) to strengthen a product (Chrome) or inhibit competitors (Edge, Firefox, Safari) in another market is illegal.
Magrethe Vestager, The European Commisioner for Competition, already penalized them twice for anti-competitive behaviour. The EU is going to come down like a tonne of bricks on Google.
Edit: Also this. Adding an empty div on top of the video to defeat Edge's hardware acceleration, penalizing its battery consumptions scores in tests.
Cheers
Youtube is loading pretty fast on Firefox again these days. It was ultra slow last summer though. Of course the old interface is even faster. That's how the computing world works though right? Web pages and browsers want quad core CPUs, gigs of RAM, OpenGL acceleration, and more power than Crysis, etc. 
I'm fascinated by the fact that we apparently live in a world where people go out of their way to use Chrome. It's not like everything ships with it as the default browser. Or even comes with it installed at all. The masses have been programmed well!!!
I'm fascinated by the fact that we apparently live in a world where people go out of their way to use Chrome. It's not like everything ships with it as the default browser. Or even comes with it installed at all. The masses have been programmed well!!!
Last edited:
Chrome was/is bundled with some free software (Flash and some free AV products, if memory server right) . You had to be really, really careful to read everything in those install wizards or else Chrome just appered installed in your system.
That's the main reason I never used it
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Interesting thinking about this. In the 90's MS used it's dominance of Windows in PCs to push IE over Netscape. Backlash ensued.
Fast forward to today, and Google is using it's dominance in many parts of the web (virtual monopoly in pre-recorded video content, YouTube, for example and near monopoly on mapping with Google Maps) to push Chromes dominance over other browsers.
I get that people enjoy MS getting some of their tactics from the 90's thrown in their face. Will those same people also enjoy some other browser coming along and using their dominance in some area to sabotage how Chrome works? Assuming something like that ever happens.
Or are those people just happy to see their browser of choice being the bully?
Shouldn't people always be skeptical of any company that controls either the platform (MS in the 90's with the OS) or the content (Google in modern day with search, advertising, and content) pushing their own product (IE in the 90's and Chrome in modern day)?
That's like the Cigarette companies in the 40's and 50's being the ones researching and disseminating to the public the health implications of tabacco.
Regards,
SB
Fast forward to today, and Google is using it's dominance in many parts of the web (virtual monopoly in pre-recorded video content, YouTube, for example and near monopoly on mapping with Google Maps) to push Chromes dominance over other browsers.
I get that people enjoy MS getting some of their tactics from the 90's thrown in their face. Will those same people also enjoy some other browser coming along and using their dominance in some area to sabotage how Chrome works? Assuming something like that ever happens.
Or are those people just happy to see their browser of choice being the bully?
Shouldn't people always be skeptical of any company that controls either the platform (MS in the 90's with the OS) or the content (Google in modern day with search, advertising, and content) pushing their own product (IE in the 90's and Chrome in modern day)?
That's like the Cigarette companies in the 40's and 50's being the ones researching and disseminating to the public the health implications of tabacco.
Regards,
SB
DmitryKo
Veteran
Dear Microsoft Edge developers, did I understand it correctly that an arbitrary empty <div/> tag on the web page will somehow turn off hardware video acceleration in your HTML engine? Well, that explains a lot of things about Trident/EdgeHTML...
You can't just abandon your source code and let it dust for 15 years, then restart development with a new team, hoping to catch up with all latest industry standards yet at the same time preserve full backward compatibility with custom extensions that were used at the time. No wonder it did not work for Edge.
Windows 95 and IE9 were top of the edge products for the time, that's the primary reason why they were more popular than the competition. Not because of Microsoft's questionable marketing and minor technical hurdles implemented to harm the competition (which weren't nearly as effective as they hoped and only did harm to Microsoft's public image in the end).
A lot of companies small and large make excellent products. Good engineering is about proper use of science, and has nothing to do with capitalism, socialism and other invented terms from political/economic philosophy (which is not a science).
Last edited:
DmitryKo
Veteran
https://medium.com/@jeremy.noring/did-google-cripple-edges-youtube-performance-ce5169d3e5f4 (via
https://www.thurrott.com/google/195632/no-virginia-google-didnt-undermine-microsoft-edge )
<div class=”ie-idiot-shield noselect” ng-if=”customSkinSupported” ng-click=”togglePlayPause($event)”></div>
…
// IE has these insane keypress handlers that totally steal *everything*, and do hideous things to all of our logic.
// So far I’ve found no way to disable the player when it has focus. So we use this shield to overlay a faux window
// on top of IE to prevent anyone from actually selecting it.
.ie-idiot-shield {
position: absolute;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
background: rgba(0,0,0,0.0);
z-index: 3;
}
Here’s the git commit message (8/2015):
Finally, a fix for IE’s insane keypress logic
By overlaying an unselectable transparent element on top of my video element, I can effectively prevent someone ever from selecting it, and this avoids a huge amount of keypress nightmare logic that currently exists. I’ll clean up the other hacky crap in the html5 lib in a bit, but this should make my life way easier.
...a few things to keep in mind:
1. The statement by the MSFT intern smacks of someone who too quickly attributes malice where no such accusation is appropriate.
2. A “state of the art” rendering engine? Well, apparently it isn’t “state of the art” enough to handle a blatantly obvious test case. It can’t handle something on top of it. That isn’t “state of the art.”
3. I’m sorry, what precisely is wrong with positioning another HTML element on top of a video element? Come on. The whole point of the video element is it’s a legit part of the DOM instead of some mangy <object> tag like we had prior to HTML5, and that comes with all of those considerations. It is 100% legit to put a blank div on top of the video element, or nearly any other element for that matter. Welcome to the web.
4. Why would the already dominant browser in the market go out of their way to cripple some minor player in the field? And to cripple them on a single video streaming site (what about netflix, hulu, prime, etc.)? And knowing full well that 95% of web users honestly don’t give a shit? It’s not like Joe Sixpack is busting out a stopwatch while he’s watching reruns of Full House.
https://www.thurrott.com/google/195632/no-virginia-google-didnt-undermine-microsoft-edge )
I’m a video engineer who has written a video player from scratch, and I have independently positioned a blank div on top of our video element. Here’s source code for disbelievers (apologies in advance for the Angular):
<div class=”ie-idiot-shield noselect” ng-if=”customSkinSupported” ng-click=”togglePlayPause($event)”></div>
…
// IE has these insane keypress handlers that totally steal *everything*, and do hideous things to all of our logic.
// So far I’ve found no way to disable the player when it has focus. So we use this shield to overlay a faux window
// on top of IE to prevent anyone from actually selecting it.
.ie-idiot-shield {
position: absolute;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
background: rgba(0,0,0,0.0);
z-index: 3;
}
Here’s the git commit message (8/2015):
Finally, a fix for IE’s insane keypress logic
By overlaying an unselectable transparent element on top of my video element, I can effectively prevent someone ever from selecting it, and this avoids a huge amount of keypress nightmare logic that currently exists. I’ll clean up the other hacky crap in the html5 lib in a bit, but this should make my life way easier.
...a few things to keep in mind:
1. The statement by the MSFT intern smacks of someone who too quickly attributes malice where no such accusation is appropriate.
2. A “state of the art” rendering engine? Well, apparently it isn’t “state of the art” enough to handle a blatantly obvious test case. It can’t handle something on top of it. That isn’t “state of the art.”
3. I’m sorry, what precisely is wrong with positioning another HTML element on top of a video element? Come on. The whole point of the video element is it’s a legit part of the DOM instead of some mangy <object> tag like we had prior to HTML5, and that comes with all of those considerations. It is 100% legit to put a blank div on top of the video element, or nearly any other element for that matter. Welcome to the web.
4. Why would the already dominant browser in the market go out of their way to cripple some minor player in the field? And to cripple them on a single video streaming site (what about netflix, hulu, prime, etc.)? And knowing full well that 95% of web users honestly don’t give a shit? It’s not like Joe Sixpack is busting out a stopwatch while he’s watching reruns of Full House.
Last edited:
DmitryKo
Veteran
Hardware compositing has been available for ages, and Edge should have supported GPU acceleration right from the start - so it was apparently a trivial issue to fix, which they did.
As for comparisons, they say this was an elaborate conspiracy which involved Chrome team reaching YouTube team and asking them to "slow down the Web" for some browsers that have a total market share of less than 10%, in order to claim... a minor 10% improvement... in battery life? Well, whatever. The blog post I cite has a different assesment of why Google employed that empty div tag.
Still, as I said above, Edge could have offered 1000% better batterry life (though the gap is not as big now as it used to be), but EdgeHTML rendering engine is so unstable it does not even matter.
As for FireFox, it's simply in the development hell for the last 5 or so years - so many things are broken, it's easly the 2nd worst browsing engine after EdgeHTML...
As for comparisons, they say this was an elaborate conspiracy which involved Chrome team reaching YouTube team and asking them to "slow down the Web" for some browsers that have a total market share of less than 10%, in order to claim... a minor 10% improvement... in battery life? Well, whatever. The blog post I cite has a different assesment of why Google employed that empty div tag.
Still, as I said above, Edge could have offered 1000% better batterry life (though the gap is not as big now as it used to be), but EdgeHTML rendering engine is so unstable it does not even matter.
As for FireFox, it's simply in the development hell for the last 5 or so years - so many things are broken, it's easly the 2nd worst browsing engine after EdgeHTML...
Last edited:
With all due respect but Chromium is and has been an open source rendering engine for ages? It is not owned by Google but has been adopted by google, as it has been by many other companies. If I remember correctly it started gaining traction as a great browser on Linux systems and got really good and fast already then. It just makes a lot of sense that this engine is used for lots of things now.
Code:
Chromium is an open-source browser project that forms the basis for the Chrome web browser. ... The biggest difference between the two browsers is that, while Chrome is based on Chromium, Google also adds a number of proprietary features to Chrome like automatic updates and support for additional video formats.Feb 24, 2017Who are you correcting?
Similar threads
- Deleted member 2197
- PC Hardware, Software and Displays