MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

Re:MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge a... by 908B64B197 on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @03:28PM (#35806605)

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.

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Re:MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge a... by JohnFen on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @06:23PM (#35808613)

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

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Re:MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge a... by 908B64B197 on Thursday May 04, 2023 @10:38AM (#35816065)

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.

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Re:MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge a... by JohnFen on Thursday May 04, 2023 @11:29AM (#35816960)

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

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Re:MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge a... by 908B64B197 on Thursday May 04, 2023 @01:55PM (#35819505)

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.

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