A former Microsoft intern has revealed details of a YouTube incident that has convinced some Edge browser engineers that Google added code to purposely break compatibility. In a post on Hacker News, Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern at Microsoft, lays out details and claims about an incident earlier this year. Microsoft has since announced the company is moving from the EdgeHTML rendering engine to the open source Chromium project for its Edge browser.
[…]Google disputes Bakita’s claims, and says the YouTube blank div was merely a bug that was fixed after it was reported. “YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when they’re discovered,” says a YouTube spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies, the Web Platform Tests project, the open-source Chromium project and more to improve browser interoperability.”
While we’re unlikely to ever know the real story behind this particular incident, I don’t doubt for a second that Google would do something like this.
This is the same company that, when caught driving down streets and slurping up publicly available wifi data, claimed they did it on accident.
Anybody who still trusts any of these publicly traded tech companies is, quite frankly, an idiot.
And then when stopping to collect it with their cars, instead got most Android phones in the world to collect the data for them by tying it to the GPS function of Android.
The problem was not that they collected WiFi hotspot info – which IMO is public data and very useful to determine locations when there’s no GPS coverage, but rather that they recorded unencrypted packets which contained personal data. Which may or may not have happened by accident.
People are still on about that?
I suppose they thought old-style 900 MHz cordless phones and baby monitors were private too. Anybody with a similar phone or a radio scanner could easily listen in.
If its on public airwaves and not encrypted, it’s fair game for anybody to listen to it.
But dude, “do no evil”is in their motto!!
“You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS?”
Bill Gates in email to Microsoft staff, 1989
That this impulse is built deeply into the culture at Microsoft, and that people have a tendency to project their own thinking on to others – this most accurately explains why this Microsoft engineer would think Google could have done something like this on purpose, even though that literally would make no sense from the perspective of Google’s business intentions – which is to sell ads.
This impulse is built deeply into any company that gets powerful enough to get away with it, so I think this one could easily go either way.
One of the greatest assets Google has, is the data they glean from browsing habits. Forcing people to use their browser gives them more data. They then use use this data to send users targeted ads.
Google very much has a vested interest in getting people to use their browser
Good point
The hidden div can be seen as a business decision, though. It effectively killed a browser optimization in Edge, increasing CPU usage and decreasing battery life. Microsoft had been heavily touting Edge as the less battery hungry browser. Soon after the bug appeared Google started touting that Chrome was now the less power hungry browser. It may all be coincidental, but can be seen in a nefarious light pretty easily.
I was thinking the same thing. It’s funny watching MS try to reinvent themselves as good guys or victims, but it’s hard to forget decades of cutthroat tactics.
Yeah, I’d agree if this were some high level Balmer/Gates holdover exec. But its some summer intern. I’m not sure he was alive back when Bill gates sent that message.
Median age at microsoft is just over 30.
When Bill Gates wrote that memo, the majority of Microsoft Employees were toddlers. It was written before 1/3 of the company was born.
Edited 2018-12-22 00:14 UTC
But the same behavior continues into the 21st century. MS hasn’t really changed at all, and in some ways, are worse now than they were… they’ve gotten sneakier at killing the competition.
The intern might not have; but as an intern probably they don’t have the restraint that regular employees have either.
Further the view espoused by the intern was probably from what they heard from the regular employees as folks complained or cursed as they were diagnosing things.
Wait, is that all there is to the DrDOS controversy? Because I suggest people actually think for a moment what he’s asking here. If you did you’d realize there’s nothing particularly evil, it’s a question I’ve asked myself in regards to Linux and FreeBSD, and stackoverflow is littered with questions like it.
He’s not asking what can we do to create compatibility issues. He’s asking what assumptions by the developer could create a compatibility issue. Now would he use this info the fix the issue? Doubtful, it’d probably be touted as a feature. But that’s not the same is purposely creating them. All I’m saying is this better not be the ‘smoking gun’.
The email was part of a longer exchange involving high level Microsoft managers and presented in court as evidence of Microsoft deliberately working to cause Digital research’s DR-DOS to crash when running Windows 3.1 in order to drive users to MS-DOS (3.1).
DOS wasn’t really “running” Win3.1, but loading it, similar to what UEFI does nowadays.
Yeah, read it the same way. It didn’t look bad intentioned at all. I’m not saying they didn’t purposefully make things incompatible, but that’s just not the smoking gun ’email’.
It seems like a question I’ve asked all through my developer career when dealing with compatibility.
And just as relevant:
– internal email to Google engineers, 1989
It’s easy to say “Company X thinks Y” – but the truth is, companies are just groups of people with different impulses and desires. It would only have taken one engineer to have desired to break Edge, and it’s easy to imaging that could have happened, although a simple mistake is easier to believe (given that “intentionally broke youtube in Edge” probably won’t look great in your performance review). It may also be true that Google’s overall culture played a part in that decision, but to believe it was some hive mind nefarious decision – that gets pretty squarely into tin-foil hat territory. For their own purposes it would be counter productive in the least, and crazy in the extreme.
Edited 2018-12-20 19:43 UTC
Kinda funny how for MS you think it’s the collective culture (of interns, really?), but with Google it’s individuals…
Not really – Google would have it’s own internal culture which would certainly color of the decisions of individuals there. Google has a scorched earth policy toward any other company that threatens their ads market. They’re standard response is to either buy those kinds of companies, or build something which undermines the value of those competitors (then often throw it away after it is not longer a threat). That’s probably built into the individual’s thought process there too.
Well then Google has a vested interest in making other browsers appear worse, so that users will switch to Chrome and feed browsing histories to Google ad matching engine… (also, didn’t MS have own ad service for sites like MSN or Bing? …acting due to it against MS would be an icing on the cake)
Why would Google do such a thing to make their own website worse. Seriously, what’s in it for them? If anything, the reason Google began the Chrome/Chromium project was to ensure there was a browser that wouldn’t “inadvertently†break their website and drive traffic or users to competing sites.
Chrome didn’t have to be this successful for them to force other browser makers to support their sites properly. There is probably no conspiracy here, just a bug that was found and is most probably already fixed.
Exactly – it would be easy to imagine if the browser landscape was different and Edge was on top of market share that MS would break some competing website (like google search) in favor of its own alternative (bing) – that’s afterall what MS has historically done. But this literally makes no sense from Google’s side. It is easy to see how an MS employee would so easily project the abhorrent behavior onto another though.
Edge doesn’t even work right on MS’s msn website, so I am not surprised it would have trouble with non-microsoft sites, also.
To the untrained eye the change didn’t make the website worse, it did turn the tables on which browser used the most battery. Hence the conspiracy.
The empty page element stopped power management optimisations in Edge and appears to serve no other function.
I don’t feel sorry for Microsoft given the boot being on the other foot in the bad old days of IE6, I do feel sorry for society at large if Chrome becomes the de facto standard for webpages and the masses only realise after it’s too late.
It doesn’t make sense as company policy. Chrome doesn’t exist to make money. It exists as a way to make Google’s other properties (and therefore the ads that run on them) look and run great.
From that perspective, Google (as an organization) has no reason to actively degrade its sites’ performance on other browsers. Eyeballs on Youtube ads are worth as much if they’re going through Chrome or Edge, and if a user suffers poor performance on Edge with Youtube, they’re going to just watch less Youtube, which means less $.
However, I can see an overzealous and overcompetitive engineer/developer or small team doing something like this off their own back.
When Chrome was first released it was ostensively to make sure Google’s services are not hobbled by an arbitrary browser change. That was many years ago and it now enjoys a marketshare that has only been bested by IE6.
I feel like that power is dangerous in the hands of modern day Google, they’re not the type to miss opportunities for extra data gathering. It not directly earning money doesn’t give it a pass as something innocent.
Firefox is the only sheriff left in town.
Edited 2018-12-21 13:41 UTC
I agree with the previous comment.
It doesn’t have to be an intended hatchet-job, or a grand plan.
It could have just been a ‘general understanding’ that Google’s websites should always work best with their own browser. Executives could insist it was just a motivator for the Chrome team.
So the Youtube team works closely with the Chrome team to help them. But through a series of nods, winks, and maybe some Chinese whispers, “always works best with Chrome” becomes “help us out; we can’t beat Edge on battery life, so maybe you could, I don’t know…”
I don’t know if Google did it or not, but corporations, like any organizations aren’t exactly rational singular entities.
More than likely, the Chrome division operates somewhat in its own group. Their executives get judged on the success of Chrome, by whatever metrics they use (usage…). The Chrome group is largely interested in the success of their group.
It would be perfectly reasonable for it to make no sense for Google as a whole, but make perfect sense for the Chrome group.
The MS Edge news in itself is a bit strange. Not being a web developer I cannot comment on the effects maintaining MS Edge compatibility brings. But Edge itself proved a boon for our various departments and after an initial teething period it allowed us to move to a common browser platform, prior to Edge we had some departments running Firefox while others stayed with IE or Chrome. Edge may well have had some bugs but overall we suffered less problems than we suffered trying to IE.
So I don’t understand the MS decision, it feels likely to be a situation filled with vested interests.
I get tired of always writing website code for every browser plus IE/Edge. I think it’s more likely Google just gave up the extra development effort to work on Edge. MS has never tried to make their browsers standards compliant, and maybe the market share dropped too low for it to be cost effective to continue modifying their code for MS updates to Edge. So, MS updated their browser code, and Google just didn’t bother patching to work with the changes.
At least, that is how I feel. I don’t think it’s cost effective to bend over for IE/Edge tweaks. Just make that one person download a better browser if they like your site.
As a web developer, I wholeheartedly agree. However it is misleading to say “MS has never tried to make their browsers standards compliant” – IE11 and to a much greater extent Edge made a lot of progress towards standards compliance. However, MS’s priorities weren’t always aligned with the other browser makers’ and there were indeed plenty of “Edge” cases, to the point where supporting Edge still always required just a bit more effort (although nothing remotely comparable to the nightmare of supporting IE).
problem, is the slowdown issue exists on firefox as well. big difference between “Download a better browser” and “Download OUR browser”
Even PC Mag covered this issue all the way back in August
https://www.pcmag.com/feature/362926/how-to-make-youtube-run-faster-…
or cnet https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-make-youtube-faster-in-non-chrome…
Heck even that rag called “The verge” called it back in july https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17611444/how-to-speed-up-youtube-…
and that using the extensions mentioned in the article do in fact make YouTube work faster.
I earn my life developing web applications. Despite the front-end development is not my specialty – I mostly work in back-end development -, it is hard for me believing that just an empty div element causes a web browser to work bad. To me those words sound like poor excuses.
However, there are two facts. One: despite Microsoft’s muscle behind, Edge was unable to get a significant user base. Second: recent benchmarks show that Edge is frequently surpassed by Chrome, Firefox and Opera, and in some cases by a large margin (https://goo.gl/EEHirP).
Its graphics. The browser is rendering the video stream via gpu, if it thinks there is a div overlayed on the video, I think that means it can’t just have the video use its native h264 decoding and leave it at that. it has to take each frame and merge that with the rendered div.
Here the div was blank so it was basically doing the decoding via cpu, and then merging it with nothing.
Its like you have a standard memcached data access layer, and someone keeps killing your cache by some stupid reason, like a last accessed timestamp is stored inside of your database table being cached and some obscure process is accessing the data causing the cache to be invalidated.
<blockquote>… I don’t doubt for a second that Google would do something like this.</blockquote>
Except that it doesn’t make any sense. Users are impatient these days and will go somewhere else if a site is slow (this is a well known industry fact) and not start up another browser. So the idea that Google did this intentionally to get people to switch to Chrome really makes no sense.
There are other more likely explanations.
* If most traffic comes from the apps or chrome, performance regressions in browsers that only account for a small part of the traffic may not be considered blocking and instead scheduled for future fixes.
* My experience in working with testers is that they often sign off on some feature if it works without considering if the whole experience is good.
* Mistakes done by developers, release managers etc. when they’re eager to get a new release out there after being in development for long.
So why immediately assume malice?
Please tell us an alternative to Youtube that these impatient users will go to, and why hasn’t this slowdown by Google driven droves of users to these other alternatives.
No idea, how would I know?
Because you said the viewers would go elsewhere. That’s why he’s assuming you might know what alternative you’re talking about.
But there is nowhere else with anything like Youtube’s range of content. By contrast getting frustrated with a browser and switching to a new one incurs virtually no cost to the viewer.
I only said that analytics data show that users typically leave slow sites, hence it’s unlikely to help google chrome if youtube penalizes edge or other browsers.
If they are the in the group of people who are confident with computers they may try a different browser but otherwise people stick with what they feel confident with, which is why so many users are still on IE11. How would they even know chrome would give a better experience anyway.
How about the adverts that say that Chrome runs quicker and uses less battery power?
Come on, Microsoft and Mozilla makes that claim too in their marketing.
Yet when tested against a standard battery of sites. Edge used less battery… Until someone at youtube added an empty page overlay in for seemingly no reason.
Microsoft had publicly shamed Chrome for wasting battery life and that was their biggest selling point for Edge. This goes back years
https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/7/12828488/google-chrome-laptop-batt…
I still find it amazing that “free” browsers have a marketing budget. There must be a lot of value in there somewhere beyond the default homepage.
“So many”? Hm, seems you haven’t followed browser stats for a while…
Last time I checked it was around 9% in the US which is more than edge. That’s a lot of users. And it means you still have to fix your web apps to run on IE11.
Hm, so largely if you look at some atypical (though loud one, I’ll admit) market… And anyways, those IE-holdouts are probably mostly ~corporate users of locked Win7 machines, they aren’t allowed to run other browsers, so are kinda outside consideration here…
Anyways, to get back on main issue, the “bug” didn’t neceserilly made yt “slower” (like Bill says http://www.osnews.com/permalink?666578 and Odwalla http://www.osnews.com/permalink?666604 ), it made it less efficient / nullified battery savings of Edge…
But we’re not talking about any old websites. The claim was that the change was specifically made to Youtube. You claimed that it made no sense. But your argument only applies to any old website, not one on Youtube’s scale and dominance.
Well, I can turn the question around then. Where is the surge of chrome users that switched due to youtube slowness?
Well, no, since the question was that it didn’t make sense. I countered with a reason it could make sense for them to do it.
At the end of the day, only Youtubegoogle has the figures. Would they have known if the changes would affect browser usage beforehand? Probably not. But this would be why they might have tried. You can’t know until you try.
I know other people reported that many other websites don’t work well unless you fake the user agent string to Chrome, so there’s incentive still, for whatever reason, to break conforming browsers.
Ok, sure. It would assume that Google wouldn’t understand how internet users would react to such a change and would be ready to take the risk of a backslash to try it.
I should have written that it didn’t make much sense.
You’re the one not making sense. You keep imagining alternatives to Youtube exist.
Do you know what a monopoly is? A monopoly allows a company to do whatever they want without fear of a backlash. Youtube is a monopoly in effect.
All the browser need an antivirus so that the system can be protected from the virus so use https://antiviruschatsupport.co for the browser.
Edited 2018-12-21 07:49 UTC
The intern specifically complains about not being able to keep up – which fits with my experience of Edge …
Let’s take an example – web components – originally
4 pillars of web components – custom elements, shadow dom, templates and html imports – google engineers in particular pushing it – in the open – collaboratively, but taking a lead.
HTML imports is dead – Google couldn’t get traction with other browser teams – and it looks like it will be pulled.
Templates got very fast traction, custom elements and shadow dom are now being adopted in a standardised version.
What’s interesting is that Edge was significantly behind in terms of implementation – typically it’s google first, firefox, safari with then everybody still waiting on Edge.
The interesting question is *why* is that?
Does MS have a lack of resources or talent? Or is it that the Edge code base is harder to evolve than firefox, chrome or safari – either because of the way it’s structured or perhaps because of the tooling and development processes around it?
Dunno – it would be interesting to know the real reason they couldn’t keep up – because let’s be clear – that’s the reason it was ditched – not competitive – recently Google and Firefox have been putting the foot to the pedal – MS and to a lesser extent Apple were getting left behind.
Mod parent up. MS really dragged their feet on web components, and I wonder if it ultimately was the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came time to implement it and they realized “shit, Trident isn’t made for this crap”.
My guess based on trying to develop things in VS and .NET over the years is their development tools, practices and patterns are an impediment, rather than a help. They also don’t have multiple teams working on the same code base in the open the way Chrome does – it’s just the one MS team.
It really didn’t make sense for them to even try and build Edge – they should have bailed on it when the intern girl asked Steve Balmer why they don’t just use webkit. He called her cheeky. What a bone head.
Edited 2018-12-22 05:58 UTC
You don’t think google chooses winners and losers. Chromium doesn’t even run on most operating systems and they’ve had no desire to make it so. They support a few operating systems, windows, mac, linux (and derivatives chromeos/android). They don’t support *BSD, Solaris, ReactOS, Haiku, etc.
DRM is turned off if you use a different OS user agent on many sites. You can’t stream netflix on many BSDs. If you lie and say it’s linux suddenly it’s ok.
From the configure script or build system to the user agent checks, the web is all about brands and not about what the code/engine/browser can actually do. It’s not just google doing this either.
Any of those companies would do the same thing
Doing this on purpose? Not exactly..
Not testing all the changes on other browsers except Chrome? More likely.
It’s not only Edge here, but Firefox as well.
If larger banks started forced migration to Google Chrome (despite previous migration towards Firefox or Chromium builds), this is what most platforms are testing and releasing their products on (I’d like to say even Microsoft’s ones but they already made the decision to move boats)..
If Google did alter YouTube to break Edge then they were too late. Edge already had more issues than National Geographic. Glad it’s moving to a Chrome base and good riddance.
“I don’t doubt for a second that Google would do something like this.”
It’s easy to say such a BS when you know no one from Google. No one in their right mind at Google would ever order to do that and no one would ever implement this. It’a a PR fiasco at the very least.
Google is not Microsoft/Facebook.
This topic has really hit a nerve, I guess the concept of inventing something and making it globally available for the betterment of all doesn’t fit the profit model!
Seems way to funny to me that the same week that google says it’s not true. YouTube on mobile edge gets horribly broken…. It was working fine until last week, now if you try to go full screen on windows mobile it reloads the whole page. Even on an embedded video, then they also remove autoplay feature. Very nice of google to redesign youtube just for mobile users…
Then google voice is now just a link to the android app store, it won’t let you login directly at the voice site. No matter if you request the desktop site.
Google is pissing me off, I am already already moved out of google drive after the stupid auto update stopped sincying 4 months ago, dropped YouTube premium this month, porting my number Google is probably next…
I suppose it’s the same for all enterprise sized companies or even charities. Once they get that big the end user is no longer the focus, they have to strip wealth just to make the payroll!
They keep telling end users their stuff is better, but they never even finish the job.
How about Google get Glass right and finished before they try to make a new Google version of Alexa or Surface.
Perhaps MS should try to make a 1st class software before they flood the market with phones!
Apple might give us something actually “New” and not just deliver the adjective in a fresh font!
Edited 2018-12-24 01:23 UTC
Microsoft in a historical context is no better.
Talk about living in a Glass house and throwing rocks.
One of Microsoft’s mottos in the 1990’s was “Don’t ship it till it breaks the Novell client on NT”.
That company has done more to set back the information technology industry in the United States, than any other company I can think of.
So far LINUX has kicked their ass out of the server room, and now with the advent of Open Compute and fully compliant OpenGL 4.6 drivers within our grasp…
We will kick them off the desktop.
The best Christmas present the US Tech Industry could get would be a Microsoft Stock Price of $1.
Yes, dream on (and hate on…) that the next year will be that of the Linux desktop… (also, it seems you are quick to forget for example the shaeningans of IBM when they owned computer market… oh, and largely MS did bring inexpensive and powerful computers to us all, you know, the machines on which we can run Linux… also, Linux replaced mostly other Unixes in the server room)