We continue our annual tradition of looking back at Microsoft's wins, fails, and WTF moments: its victories, failures, and things that left you shaking your head. There's no other way to say it: Microsoft had a bad 2025.
“fake” diversity with an obviously proprietary option is substantially better than a fake “open” environment where the only web browser options are either made by a single for-profit company, a reskinned derivative of that for-profit company’s work, or a semi-not-for-profit whose main funding source is that same for-profit company.
In a very real way, web standards beyond “whatever chrome does” died when Microsoft tossed edge’s HTML engine for chromium.
Except that isn’t what we have, we still have proprietary crap that is just open core now and that open core is dominated by a single corp that can dictate what standards it wants just like when IE was on top.
Less diversity isn’t good, the argument wasn’t in favour of proprietary software, it was against platform monoculture.
Less proprietary crap is good. Free software is always preferable to fake diversity through proprietary Microsoft products.
“fake” diversity with an obviously proprietary option is substantially better than a fake “open” environment where the only web browser options are either made by a single for-profit company, a reskinned derivative of that for-profit company’s work, or a semi-not-for-profit whose main funding source is that same for-profit company.
In a very real way, web standards beyond “whatever chrome does” died when Microsoft tossed edge’s HTML engine for chromium.
Except that isn’t what we have, we still have proprietary crap that is just open core now and that open core is dominated by a single corp that can dictate what standards it wants just like when IE was on top.