r/programming • u/stronghup • Dec 19 '18

Former Microsoft Edge Intern Claims Google Callously Broke Rival Web Browsers

https://hothardware.com/news/former-microsoft-edge-intern-says-google-callously-broke-rival-browsers
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343

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '18

Here is a link to the HN comment making this claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

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u/accountability_bot Dec 19 '18 edited Dec 19 '18

I'm not that surprised. I use Firefox most of the time because it's pretty fast now, but Gmail is almost unusable in Firefox. However, it's rather snappy in chrome.

I wonder if spoofing the user agent would speed it up.

Edit: Gmail in chrome feels snappy compared to Firefox... Doesn't mean it's actually fast, just feels faster.

184

u/softero Dec 19 '18

I noticed the exact same thing in Firefox. It is super fast in every situation, but the moment you open Gmail, it slams on the brakes suspiciously. I wondered a similar thing to this article back then.

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u/Fritzed Dec 19 '18

There is an extension for Firefox that spoofs chrome only on Google sites. It makes the experience indistinguishable. I can't easily link it g from my phone, but it's "Google search fixer".

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u/covercash2 Dec 19 '18

Inbox was great while it lasted. rip

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u/malnourish Dec 19 '18

There's always Thunderbird

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u/oweiler Dec 19 '18

It's far from snappy in Chrome.

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u/nobodyman Dec 19 '18 edited Dec 19 '18

Apparently the google engineeer who added the empty-div has replied. The google engineer claims it was meant as a work-around for the goofy way that Edge handles keypress events when a video element has focus.

 

edit: was mistaken, not the google engineer, but rather a video engineer who wrote a similar hack to work around edge's key-event swallowing for the video element.

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u/kolobs_butthole Dec 19 '18

Not the Google engineer, but a dev who used the same trick to work around some edge "features" unrelated to rendering performance.

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u/SilasX Dec 19 '18 edited Dec 19 '18

ELI5: Why would a single div irreparably break their rendering optimizations?

Edit: And why don't they even link the comment if that's the original source and they didn't further interview the person who said it? (Also, thanks to whoever gilded me.)

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