Writing a browser engine is a lot of unprofitable work just to get to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams. Especially when you already wrote one and couldn't keep even that in pace with standards and the evolving web technologies.

Taking an existing engine and building a malicious frontend to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams has way better returns in comparison.

> why would I use a clone instead of the real thing

Has nothing to do with why people don't use Edge (they still didn't use Edge when it was using a custom engine; same for IE before it).

And it's only the techy minority that even knows Edge is built on top of Chromium.

> I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption.

It’s all about Electron. There may be a Microsoft contingent that thinks it’s the future or maybe they are just hedging, but for now it’s important for stuff like Teams.

Small correction: the new teams client (currently in preview) uses WebView2 (based on Edge/Chromium), not Electron

I'm disappointed that they're still going with a web-based thing, but maybe WebView2 will suck a little less than Electron. I'll take what I can get.

Edge was, initially, Chrome but degoogled and it had (and still has) a lot of great UI innovations, like a vertical tab strip that's just right. Their wide use of hovering menus that can be pinned to become sidebars is honestly good stuff.

Of course, that's UI design, they are worse for privacy than Chrome, and the UI advantages begin to slip by the aggressive introduction of all the bloatware in the world. The browser's never quite been free of dark patterns either (new tab page's search field as one of the more glaring examples).

In a corporate context, it's very different from Chrome.

>It's more memory efficient in general

>It supports the Edge Webview2 framework that MSoffice apps use further cutting memory use

>It supports MDAG https://learn.mecrosoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...

To me Edge is so competitive that I was surprised to see Microsoft getting back up to their old playbook when much of what makes edge profitable for them will be disabled on a corporate network anyways.

Previous Edge was a complete refactor of IE with a brand new js engine. Extremely lightweight and low power compared to Chrome. Their goal was to be 100% compatible with the modern web.

Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS gave up and forked Chrome.

If that was the reason, surely it would have been quicker and easier to change the default user agent string themselves?

Yes and no. It's part of the reasons.

Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.

But well-designed websites don't alter their behavior based on the user agent string. They test for capabilities before using them.

Indeed.

That's the correct thing to do and it's what real software engineers will do. But from the horrors I've seen in offshored websites, that's science-fiction to some coders. They will assume whatever version of Chrome they are running is the only one in existence and will use user-agent string once someone tells them their site is broken in Safari.