Chromium

Recently, reports started coming in that Microsoft’s Edge browser was switching off EdgeHTML to Chromium, which is the Google owned browser engine. This spun off a ton of criticism because it would mean that Google would own 80% of the web-browser space which starts to encroach on monopoly territory. The reason for Microsoft making the switch? Well Microsoft was tired of constantly developing for “new standards” set by Chromium. And in order for Microsoft to be competitive with its browser, it needed to keep up with those standards. Instead, they decided there’s just more value in implementing the skeleton behind the company who pushes those standards. But thanks to an Ex-Microsoft/Edge dev, we have some more input as to exactly why Microsoft made the switch. Someone on HackerNews asks “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?”. JoshuaJB, the ex-edge dev states

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.

So it looks like Chrome was implementing road blocks in its own backend to halt the optimizations of other browsers, Edge and FireFox to name some. What’s infuriating is that this wasn’t done because Chrome found better optimizations to its browser. It was specifically thrown in with malicious intent. Unacceptable.

FireFox

If you’ve been listening to NoLife Tech, you’ll know that we’ve all been doing our best to limit our Google usage. I personally have stopped using Chrome in favor of both Firefox and Safari. This is more for privacy concerns, but as time goes on, more concerns become valid. One thing that I do miss from Chrome is how much quicker YouTube is on its platform. Well thanks to this article from OnMSFT, I was able to find a remedy to my issue.

 

If you click the link embedded in that tweet from Chris Peterson, you’ll be taken to an extension for Firefox. That extension implements the “old” version of YouTube (when you’ll see it, you’ll find it familiar). This was “pre-polymer” which is was before Chrome implemented its “opimization hurdles”. And I’ll tell you – after using it for more than 5 minutes, it’s lightning quick. Much quicker than the “new” YouTube is on Chrome even. That said, you do lose some features. One being the new “Theater” mode, which essentially stretches the video to fit your window. Something I used often. But nonetheless the experience is more fluid. So if you’re like us, and you want to move away from Chrome, make sure to follow us here on NoLife.Digital as well as on Twitter and Instagram to stay updated on more optimization tweaks such as this.