Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.
They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.
I don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I added that the interests of Google and Microsoft coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of Microsoft.
I think Microsoft just doesn't care about ad-blockers. They probably don't have a strong position on it. If they work it's fine for them, if they don't its also fine.
They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily web browsing.
In 2024, Microsoft generated 12.58 billion dollars in revenue from advertising, which is nothing to scoff at.
And we also have to look at future opportunities — the share of the advertising market may be small, but they represent THE alternative to Google's ads, including on all alternative search engines.
If they aren't concerned about ads or ad-blockers, then why are they so aggressive about pushing Edge on Windows users? And in the EU, when people first open up the Edge browser, why do they inform people that Edge will share their data with the entire advertising industry?
> They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.
IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.
I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.
My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
It's hard to tell if they neglected the original Edge or if they just couldn't keep up with Chrome.
IE was a completely different story, it was full of proprietary Microsoft technology (ActiveX) and a lot of Enterprise applications used it heavily.
Microsoft didn't care about browsers maybe 15 years ago, but this changed a lot. A lot of Microsoft software is just available in the browser, they migrated a lot of things to web technology. That's also the reason they switched their browser to Chromium, they needed to ship something that actually works.
> Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together.
Even without (conspiratorial) intent this seems to be happening unintentionally- Andreas is ex-Apple, after all, and that's why he switched development away from his own language to Swift. I wonder if it's analogous to Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza inevitably eventually ending up at Microsoft.
That said,
> Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
Sounds like too good a no-brainer to actually happen, at least under current leadership. Few of these "dream mergers" ever actually happen. Another example, Apple buying DuckDuckGo as a counter against the Google search monopoly, has never come close to happening after years of speculation.
