Ripple CTO Pokes Fun at Microsoft Edge

David Schwartz, chief technology officer at Ripple, recently poked fun at the Microsoft Edge browser with an ironic roast. 

The joke about Microsoft Edge has its roots in the older Internet Explorer (IE) meme, and it evolved over time as Microsoft updated its browser. 

Classic internet meme 

Internet Explorer had a reputation for being slow, buggy, and insecure. Users often joked that the only use of IE was to download Chrome. This idea became a running gag in tech communities.

IE 5 and 6 were widely used and dominated the browser market. IE 6, in particular, became infamous for security flaws, nonstandard HTML/CSS rendering, and crashes. IE 7 improved security and introduced tabs, but performance was still sluggish compared. Firefox and Chrome ended up upending its dominance. 

Microsoft replaced IE with Edge in Windows 10. Early reactions noted that Edge was faster and more modern, but users still joked that it was primarily useful to download Chrome.

Microsoft Edge holds roughly 5% of the total worldwide browser market — much smaller than Chrome’s dominant 62-68% share.

On desktop specifically, Edge tends to sit around 11–12% market share.

The browser comes preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11, which helps maintain its user base.

Chrome criticism 

Schwartz has also complained about Chrome’s high memory usage. In 2024, he posted a screenshot showing it using 10GB RAM. 

In January 2025, he criticized Google for “user-hostile changes” in both Chrome and Android that remove functionality.

However, it is pretty safe to say that Schwartz is not going to use Microsoft Edge anytime soon.