I came here and signed in just so that I could agree with this.
Here's the thing - I worked for Microsoft - As a web architect. I have always been a Windows user. I love some of their products but for the most part their consumer-grade applications outside of the core Windows OS are absolute garbage (and by "most part" I mean I cannot think of a single consumer product that does not frustrate and alienate their users - maybe the Xbox, but if you think about it, the Xbox OS is actually pretty frustrating to use, and Microsoft doesn't make the games).
Allow me to shed some light on what you clearly already know, which is the fact that Microsoft does not care about you or my or anyone's feelings on this, nor will they anytime soon. This is actually less of a business problem as it is a company culture issue. Microsoft is *incredibly good* at creating enterprise-grade software. The power of their products for large business is pretty much what runs the entirety of the modern world in the enterprise space. They are really good at solving very complex problems in massively scalable ways.
What they are NOT good at is thinking or caring, at all, about user experience (A.K.A. UX). Oh, sure, they have user experience teams at Microsoft- I've worked with several of them - they just do not care about what they output or whether or not what they output is worth using. Serious discussions around concerns involving the users are usually shoved off as unimportant. It's why microsoft's help forums are useless, its why pleas to change how they do things go unanswered. It's not a culture of working collaboratively, its a culture of stab and stomp your way to the top.
I have countless anecdoates about walking into the office to ask a UX designer what some button that was inlcuded in a design I'm supposed to implement is supposed to do, only to have them stare blankly at it and go, "Huh, I didn't even think about that". It's bizarre. They add things into products because it "sounds cool" but spend, and I'm not exagerating, literally zero time thinking about them. They will allocate tens of thousands of dollars of time to implement some feature that nobody will use, yet completely ignore refinement of feautres that could be good, but suck because they haven't been finessed into place.
Back to Edge vs any other browser. Ironically, as somebody who's spent the last 15+ years as a web application engineer, know that I was on the front lines of hating IE and all of its horrible versions that were always a year or two behind the status quo. I've advocated for standards adoption (yes, the internet has a standards body, called the W3C, which has existed for decades, and that every other major browser company actually cares about and pays attention to) at Microsoft in every way I knew how. The IE browsers never quite worked the same as every other browser out there, and literally web software engineering used to have a phase of every project that revolved around "Making the application work for every browser, and then going back to make it work for IE versions" - of which there were usually at least 2 or 3 that we had to support. That's because IE would constantly roll out "upgrades" that didn't fit with the current standards.
Edge, believe it or not, actually DID decide to finally get on the bandwagon. They finally ARE standards compliant, because they finally DID adopt Webkit which is the underlying engine beneath most modern browsers. Turns out that nowadays, we web engineers hate Safari the most for being non-compliant! It turns out (I know, this is heresey to say) that I actually think Edge is a GOOD browser. I just refuse to use it on principle - because Microsoft has broken my trust as a user, and also because of their dirty, dirty tactics in trying to force me into using it. If I felt invited to use it, I'd try it out. Instead, I feel like they point it at me like a gun.
The many, many years of Microsoft trying to force us all to accept browsers that just didn't work, and now constantly telling us to switch to Edge when *we just don't want to because Microsoft has badly hurt its users trust in them* doesn't feel welcoming - it feels alienating and subversive. And, given everything I wrote above about how much they care about UX, this shouldn't be a surprise.
At the end of the day, product decision are made by two groups of people at Microsoft:
- People at the top of the pile - usually C-level or sub-C-level types who have their fingers waaaay down in the weeds where they don't belong, as they completely ignore the experts they pay 6-figure salaries to who are actually good at what they do, and all of their pleas to "please don't make us do it this way".
- People who rank the highest on any given team - when I was there, routinely, feature and user experience decisions were made by cloud team engineers who have no background in design, user experience, or any other form of user-facing products.
Unfortunately, that's the company culture. I keep using the OS because I like it. I put up with (sometimes frustratedly, sometimes disappointedly, and often angrily) the shenanigans of having to use certain Microsoft tools because they simply do not care about their user, because I still prefer Windows to Apple or Linux or whatever other wanna-be OS there is out there.
Hopefully this is insightful and not just a horribly long rant. But it did feel good to write 😂
