Edge is now a Chromium fork, and is headed by an ex-Googler who cheerfully me-toos every Google web agenda. It's sole purpose is to be a Chrome browser that connects to Microsoft accounts and hence can integrate with Microsoft's enterprise tools.
Despite enterprise teams already finding Chrome's six week release cycle tedious, Microsoft immediately followed Chrome to announcing their four week cycle in the last week, and Edge also failed to protect ad blocking by rejecting the Manifest V3 changes for browser extensions designed to cripple ad blockers.
Basically, at any opportunity Microsoft has had to differentiate itself, it has decided to just do what Google does.
The Edge team - first engineering alone, now both eng. and product - has been led for 3 years by Rajesh Sundaram, a Microsoft lifer who has never worked for Google. [1]
And Chromium-based Edge has tracking prevention through filter lists, while Chrome does not. [2]
Microsoft is no one's privacy hero these days, I will concede that. But some of these specific claims are just wrong.
Your [1] is apparently not public or "does not exist". It's possible I was confused by Microsoft's horrible titling scheme, as I would assume a guy who goes by "Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Edge", Eric Lawrence, is well-placed in the org, especially since he's quoted in every major article around every new Edge news: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18527550/microsoft-chromiu...
It is true Microsoft ported some of it's tracking prevention features over to Chromium Edge, but it certainly isn't a step above or beyond Firefox or Safari, and it's frustrating Microsoft continues to follow Google in places reasonable companies should not go.
Hmm maybe I can see Rajesh's LinkedIn when I log in because I'm some number of degrees away from him. Or maybe just logging in is enough. Anyway, you can search the web for him if you want to see that he has indeed been at Microsoft a long time (nearly 25 years now).
As for Eric Lawrence, if Eric gets quoted a lot that's probably because he wrote the first versions of Fiddler, the debugging localhost proxy that many Windows developers use, so tech journalists that specialize in Microsoft have heard of him through their developer acquaintances. Plus his Microsoft email address is easy to guess: [his Twitter username]@microsoft.com
Eric left Microsoft after over 10 years, went through 2 companies including Google, then came back within about 6 years. I consider him closer to Microsoft in outlook than Google, though one could plausibly disagree given how rude he was about his old team's products IE and Edge while he was away.
As for "Principal Program Manager," that being misleading about scope is news to me, and if it is, that's on the journalists to clarify, because this kind of title is commonplace and implies very little. At any tech company "Program/Product Manager" is not necessarily a people leader. "Principal" doesn't change this. "Principal" at Microsoft and other tech companies is just a rank like "Senior," albeit a hard-to-earn and usually well-deserved one. If I say I am a "Principal Product Manager, HotTechCo BlahBlah," I don't think anyone in the industry will assume I run the entirety of that product.
Program managers control products more than than people managers usually. And principal is high enough to run a product.
Several pages say Sundaram's title is Technical Fellow and VP of Engineering. I assume you know what you're talking about. But you can't blame people for thinking it's an engineering role only.
Yes but it doesn’t really matter. If you’re using edge chromium , you’re probably using it on the platform it runs best on anyway, that already would probably do it all anyway.
Despite enterprise teams already finding Chrome's six week release cycle tedious, Microsoft immediately followed Chrome to announcing their four week cycle in the last week, and Edge also failed to protect ad blocking by rejecting the Manifest V3 changes for browser extensions designed to cripple ad blockers.
Basically, at any opportunity Microsoft has had to differentiate itself, it has decided to just do what Google does.