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Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it? I mean there was this "startup growth hacking" kind of craziness from a corporation and sudden admittance of defeat... It's very confusing.

Edit: We all know why they want everyone to switch don't we, but think about all the now admittedly false marketing! It's not like they stopped the aggressive marketing for a few years and now saying that they can no longer keep up. They probably are doing it now still and implying that Edge is better. Is the marketing really so uninformed about such big decisions?

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Microsoft is trying to drive traffic to Bing (and their other services). The rendering engine doesn't actually matter. Microsoft could just bundle Chrome with Windows but instead they are specifically taking the Chromium engine and putting it in an Edge shell. The only reason for that is to maintain control over the user to drive them to Microsoft properties.

> The rendering engine doesn't actually matter.

It does matter. From the comment above "browser vendors taking the lead over standards committees" means influence on where the technology is heading, specially for rendering engines. Remember how long it took IE to implement canvas? This was a way to avoid a new "OS" over a OS (Windows)

This decision is perfectly in line with Microsoft's shift in focus -- Windows is no longer the hill they want to die on. Microsoft is all about services.

Also I suspect Microsoft will have far more actual influence by driving development of Chromium than with their own rendering engine. It's pretty hard to drive new standards when you are barely achieving the current ones. Microsoft's focus on Electron for cross-platform development kind of informs this move as well.

I get that Microsoft is trying to reinvent itself, but at the core they are (were?) a software development company. It kind of looks bad when you throw your hands up and say “this is just too complicated, we’ll replace it with an OSS component”. Don’t get me wrong, there is no love lost for IE or Edge from me, I’m just baffled at this move.

I think it speaks of a maturity not common to this industry. Pick your battles and battlefields (mutables) after considering resources and the environment (immutables). Conceding Edge will doubtless let them divert focus and resources to areas that are of greater strategic value.

I'm sure they'd also prefer not to give a competitor too much influence and, for example, be able to make Google Docs work better than Office 365.

(Not saying that Google will necessarily do such a thing, but I think Microsoft would prefer them not even having the option.)

Exactly. That's also the reason of bringing Edge to macOS.

Users don't care what's inside. Brand awareness is important. Edge will live on, even if it's just a Chromium skin.

And if Google abandons/closes Blink, MS will be forced to spend a bit on browser development again. (Or they'll just fork Firefox.)

Currently it's a win-win for them. They need the web to deliver their services (outlook, office365, azure), now they can develop those cheaper, as they don't have to spend that much on testing as Edge and Chrome will be likely very close.

Maintaining an independent browser has been of no benefit to Microsoft for very very long time. It has actually been an extremely costly effort with almost no result. That's my opinion.

The CEO Nadella however has no interest in this kind of thing carrying on, hence the Axe.

Pay attention:

With hindsight, perhaps the recent "crazy" efforts of the Edge team to increase usage and prove some kind of value were in-fact a last-ditch effort by sections of Microsoft to maintain a high-level of browser investment.

Big companies have lots of stakeholders. The person whose job it is to grow Edge's user numbers isn't the person whose job it is to make the call on the rendering engine. I don't know if their interests really conflict in this case, but in general it wouldn't be surprising if those two people/orgs sent mixed messages sometimes.

> f Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it?

Because it's not inferior in all ways? Edge has far better support for anything touch (Firefox and Chrome as still awful in this respect) and the battery life using Edge is far better than any of the other browsers.

I'm always forced to use Edge at times because of how much better those aspects are, even though other things are worse.

I also wonder if this is why they're going with Chromium; they can work on getting better touch and battery life on Windows built into the thing.

I agree with this. Edge isn't really inferior in terms of capabilities - the problem is market share, and Microsoft simply has no answer to Chrome on this.

I don't think this is an admission that Edge's engine was inferior, just that it might be easier to convince people to use Edge if it used the same engine as Chrome. Using Chromium is just one less reason to not use Edge.

I mean if Microsoft can somehow shed the "Windows 10 spies on me" sentiment echoed so much around these parts then they might be able to capture some market share from Google who is more and more being perceived as big brother spying on you.

I doubt this move will help them but it will definitely make the justification for Enterprise adoption of Chrome a little harder.

They still want you to switch to Edge - they just are admitting that having a NIH syndrome is from a business use case not useful here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

Isn't that kind of exactly how a "nimble startup" would want to operate? Push push push, and then when it doesn't work "pivot". At least that's what a startup would say in a very grandiose blog post about "strengthening our core and starting a new exciting chapter." It seems to me like the Microsoft Edge team is trying to operate as nimbly as they can inside the giant and were given latitude to do so. I say good on them for regcognizing the situation and having the fortitude to make the decision that is probably best for MS's customers.

If your product is inferior, what do you do until you can make it better? Shut down your company?

Because it is not about edge being worse or too expensive, is in good part about having electron apps run better and with more battery efficiency. so the choice is to either implement the whole v8 API on their engine or use v8.

Remember when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel?

That’s not a correct comparison. They did not make PoeerPC CPUs. But if we will follow this analogy, Apple is expected to switch to their own CPU soon, getting independence and increasing their intellectual investments. Very different from MS who just gave up having a huge advantage of being able to ship anything on a main OS.

That's not what I meant by raising this incident. The top-level reply spoke about marketing something as better than a competitor, then switching to that competitor, and the cognitive dissonance involved. The PowerPC to Intel switch is another example of that pattern: marketing your option as superior to a competitor up until the moment you discard your current path for the competitor.

It's meant to illustrate that this is hardly the only time this has happened, and that one should think carefully about not only whether marketing is accurate but whether it's comprehensively addressing everything you might care about.

> If Microsoft knew that Edge in its current state is inferior, why did they try so hard to make every windows user switch to it?

Because the quality of the product has nothing to do with Microsoft wanting to maintain dominance at all costs. But don't worry, they will continue to try this with the Chromium-based browser, too.

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