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One of the biggest fears when Microsoft announced the abandonment of its EdgeHTML rendering engine and its switchover to Chromium, the open source engine that powers Chrome, as well as many other software programs such as Vivaldi, Brave and Opera, is the possibility for web developers to: more and more easily and limit their support and testing to Chrome. This would leave Firefox, Mozilla, Apple, Safari, and any other browser, present or future, out of the fun.
After all, it's basically what we've seen at the pinnacle of Internet Explorer. The Microsoft browser has reached about 95% of the market and large parts of the Web have proudly announced that they were "best seen in Internet Explorer", often to the point of no longer working in any other browser. The hegemony of IE represented a huge challenge for the recent Firefox browser, designed to support Web standards and not to reflect Microsoft's behavior in the field. Although Internet Explorer was eventually moved – by Chrome – it would probably have been much faster if the developers had been less focused on the Microsoft browser.
Last week, Microsoft made a major update to the web version of its Skype client, incorporating HD video calling, recording calls and other features already available on other customers.
And as if to prove a point, the update only works in Edge and Chrome. Firefox, Safari and even Opera are locked. In the past, the Skype team reported that codec issues were the reason for the browser's inconsistent support. But that should not be a problem these days, as H.264 and VP8 video codecs are supported in Edge, Chrome and Firefox. Google Hangouts and Google Meet support video calling without plug-ins in Firefox, for example, as well as other online services. For a long time, Apple has refused to support WebRTC – the underlying browser technology used for real-time audio and video conversations – in Safari. But even that feature gap does not exist anymore and Safari should now support all the requirements.
In addition, users who have tried to switch user agents – the identification string, sent by browsers, telling Web servers which version of which browser they are in – have reported that much of the application worked in both Safari and Firefox, with reports even stating: voice and video calls work in Firefox. It is not clear that all WebRTC is sufficiently convinced that Microsoft should explicitly test and perhaps modify its code to work in Firefox or Safari. But ultimately, none of this seems to be a fundamental technological problem.
It's rather a to be disturbed to do the work problem. Microsoft said its decision to prioritize Edge and Chrome is based on "customer value." In other words, it takes no time to take the time and effort to support browsers with a small audience. This creates a loop of negative comments for these browsers, discouraging their use and pushing developers into a world in which Chrome is the only browser developers think about and target.
It is also perhaps ironic that the Skype application is designed with a framework designed to foster cross-platform development between devices, desktops and the Web. For those who can use the web application, this is very similar to desktop applications, which are also very similar to mobile applications. That's because it's built using ReactXP, the Microsoft layer over React's native infrastructure and React's Facebook. These allow you to use Web technology to create applications not only for the Web, but also for desktop and smartphone platforms. By targeting the web, ReactXP supports Firefox, reinforcing the fact that it's not really a technology issue.
Microsoft is not the first company to treat the web this way, and it will not be the last. At one time, the market was more evenly divided and no browser provider could monopolistically control how the web was developed. This environment has put standardization at the forefront; standardization was the only way to make the variety accessible to developers. But as we fall back into a quasi-monopoly situation, this sort of thing will only become more widespread. Skype for the Web is simply a high-level demonstration of everything that worries people when Microsoft announced its change.
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