> Microsoft uses all dirty tricks in the book to keep their users on the default browser (which is of course MS Edge).
Why do they? How do they profit from this?
Why should they not? Their browser market share is munuscule, and I actaully feel good if somebody takes some of it from Chrome, slightly decreasing Google's hold on absolute power in defining the web.
Why should they care to make a competing browser at all?
The answer is simple. The google anti-trust case clearly indicates this is _highly_ profitable. As the browser (chrome) is one of the leading ways of increasing Search Query Volume (SQV). SQV increases ad impressions thus increases ad revenue, thus maximizes shareholder value.
Bing has a similar ad platform and with Edge Microsoft will have many ways to send users to do queries in Bing.
Why leave a big piece of juicy pie like this on the table for google to sweep up?
I don't even understand their value proposition. "Hey here's our knock-off of a product we couldn't make, with a little bit of gloss on it". How does that make me interested as a customer??
Simply a pure Chrome clone with vertical tab bar already is enough to interest me. From my point of view a horizontal tab bar is absurd, making a browser barely usable (I could hardly ever see the tabs captions in Chrome, only comprressed icons, until I've bought a reeeally big display). I feel this way since the days tabs have first been introduced - in Opera on Windows 95 (and it already had vertical tabs bar). Edge has a vertical tabs bar.
Nevertheless I actually use Firefox with a vertical tab extension (there are many) as I find it overall better, also make use of its awesome container tabs (a very nice convenience leap from using multiple browsers for different purposes) and feel nice about using a browser which is kind of (I know it's not really, at least from the financial point of view) independent from privacy&freedom-hostile corporations and actually different from their one technically. Another reason is Edge somehow feels the slowest browser ever to me.
Even if Edge had a bigger slice they're still just a glorified fork. They don't deviate from Blink or Chromium in any ways significant to user freedom or standards independence.
Why do they? How do they profit from this?
Why should they not? Their browser market share is munuscule, and I actaully feel good if somebody takes some of it from Chrome, slightly decreasing Google's hold on absolute power in defining the web.