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Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

thurrott.com

11–20 of 207 posts

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#11

The abuse by the Google Chrome team never ceases to amaze me. I feel trapped on chrome simply because of my reliance on Google drive/docs, which are handicapped on browsers like Firefox.

What are you talking about? Google Docs works perfectly fine in Firefox. What issues exist?

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#12
> Ironically, the same page states “We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge.”

it shouldn't be that difficult to understand that the latest version of edge means the latest production version, not the brand new complete overhaul of the browser on a different platform that's currently in preview mode.

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#13
I wonder if they are using browser detection instead of feature detection. I don't know when YouTube started feeling so sloppy with it's coding (Gmail has also started feeling this way as it went very JS heavy). I am sightly biased against most JS in the presentation layer

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#16

I hate this, though it is a kind of poetic justice for the way Windows 10 fights tooth and nail to keep you from switching your default browser away from Edge.

What exactly do you mean by "fights tooth and nail"? I had to reinstall my laptop a few months ago, and the experience was "navigate to Firefox download site, download, install, set default browser"... Same as it has ever been.

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#17
User agent for Edge-Chromium is a bit of a mess. Usually it identifies as "Edg", sometimes as Chrome, and sometimes as Edge (the old one).

Specifically, that old Edge agent comes up for streaming sites because old Edge has different DRM systems and was able to serve 4K streams from Netflix and others, which Chrome did not do. New Edge still has those capabilities, so it doesn't want to be served the Chrome compatible version.

I wonder if YouTube somehow ended triggering legacy Edge user agent on account of being a video site?

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#19

I'm going to assume this is accidental, not intentional.

Can you explain? To me it looks like YouTube intentionally, not accidentally, updated their browser block list to include Microsoft Edge Preview.

They likely have a white list of browsers, not a black list, so new browsers may simply not be supported until they update the list.

Edit: And the new Edge version likely identifies itself differently.

Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube

#20

Basically Google doesn't allow development build Edge users to browse the preview YouTube? Doesn't seem like someone at Google hates Edge, just looks like they didn't test their brand new YouTube on every browser yet so just limited it to heavy Chrome users. Or am I wrong?

Quite possibly they have their whitelist of 'tested with' browsers for the new experience, and Edge Preview wasn't one of those, so got shown the 'use a supported browser' modal.
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