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

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

#31

Post by acdha »

bovermyer wrote: post #2

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

I suspect that's true but also raises an interesting question: how much effort should Google be expected to expend supporting other browsers? Not testing / optimizing in anything other than Chrome has lead to numerous issues in the past which were not deliberate sabotage but it feels like there's something dodgy about negligence which aligns with business goals, too, just as there was when Microsoft didn't support anything but IE or consistently broke things like MSDN on non-IE browsers.

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

#32

Post by emilecantin »

judge2020 wrote: post #24
wlesieutre wrote: post #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…

This is probably it, the user agent detection library likely got updated to include the new Edge chromium build as "Edge browser" and so YT doesn't know the difference between Chromium-based and Trident-based edge. For reference: Automatic user-agent in Edge (Trident engine): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.18362 Automatic use…

Oh man, what a mess! The UA string mentions almost every browser except the one it actually is...

I understand the reasons, but I think it might be time for a big "reset", and for browsers to stop lying about who they are.

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

#33

Post by wlesieutre »

judge2020 wrote: post #24
wlesieutre wrote: post #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…

This is probably it, the user agent detection library likely got updated to include the new Edge chromium build as "Edge browser" and so YT doesn't know the difference between Chromium-based and Trident-based edge. For reference: Automatic user-agent in Edge (Trident engine): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.18362 Automatic use…

I was actually suggesting it could be on Microsoft's side, sending the old "Edge" UA instead of the new "Edg" one. But it could easily be a screwup in Google's UA detection treating the new version the same as the old one.

Big question for my idea is whether Edge's "use old UA for streaming sites" is a hardcoded list of a few sites like Netflix, or if it's something that might have flagged YouTube as being a video site that should get Old Edge agent by mistake.

EDIT - MS's useragent overrides are hardcoded to specific domains, so it wouldn't be identifying as Old Edge for YouTube unless someone at Microsoft manually set it to do that. Probably Google's fault for miscategorizing the new UA.

>One section of the JSON configuration file is called EdgeDomainActions and is a series of rules that specify what browser Microsoft Edge should impersonate when visiting a particular site. You can see the EdgeDomainActions config section below.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/the-new-micr...

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

#34

Post by ploxiln »

judge2020 wrote: post #24
wlesieutre wrote: post #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…

This is probably it, the user agent detection library likely got updated to include the new Edge chromium build as "Edge browser" and so YT doesn't know the difference between Chromium-based and Trident-based edge. For reference: Automatic user-agent in Edge (Trident engine): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.18362 Automatic use…

Surely this is the nail in the user-agent-sniffing coffin

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

#35

Post by pluma »

gamblor956 wrote: post #29
pluma wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head: * when switching default browsers, Windows suggests you give Edge a try instead * at some point I got a Windows notification suggesting that I try Edge instead of the browser I was using IIRC they used to nag users more in the past but I think the notification I got also included an option to not be reminded again.

Literally every Google website tries to get me to download Chrome whenever I use firefox or ie. Every. Single. Time. 2 attempts from Microsoft... not so bad.

I agree that two attempts isn't so bad. I think most users are upset because the notifications happened a lot more frequently in the past and using notifications from the OS for ads comes across as pretty slimy (because you only expect the OS to tell you when something important happens).

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

#36

Post by cknoxrun »

bad_good_guy wrote: post #7

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.

Drive works fine for me in Safari (other than using an unreasonable amount of CPU). It sure beats installing drive sync or whatever it is called.

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

#37

Post by danShumway »

Most likely a user-agent check to ensure compatibility. I don't assume any ill intent.

That being said, what does annoy me is that we've known for years that feature detection is preferable to user-agent detection, and I would kind of expect one of the biggest web development companies in the world to be following best practices.

This isn't my local pizza shop, Google engineers should know better. Have they already forgotten the dumb "best viewed in IE" banners that magically vanished as soon as the user-agent changed? Heck, even more recently the original version of Edge had to literally start lying to websites about its user-agent just so they would stop serving alternative IE hacks. Yeah it's easier in the short term to do browser-detection and whitelisting for rendering quirks and bugs -- it's just unreliable and error-prone over the long term, and hurts the overall web browser ecosystem.

Google should be setting an example for ordinary developers here, not encouraging hacky shortcuts. If Google isn't going to take the time to think about progressive enhancement from the very start of their experiments, who else is going to?

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

#38

Post by wlesieutre »

emilecantin wrote: post #32
judge2020 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably it, the user agent detection library likely got updated to include the new Edge chromium build as "Edge browser" and so YT doesn't know the difference between Chromium-based and Trident-based edge. For reference: Automatic user-agent in Edge (Trident engine): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.18362 Automatic use…

Oh man, what a mess! The UA string mentions almost every browser except the one it actually is... I understand the reasons, but I think it might be time for a big "reset", and for browsers to stop lying about who they are.

It does mention it at the very end. Either "Edge/18.18362" or "Edg/75.0.109.0"

But yes, user agents are terrible.

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

#39

Post by nullwasamistake »

They have been doing this to Firefox and Edge for ages. See https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-...

And check out the embedded links to similar accusations by the Firefox CEO among others. It's hard to believe this isn't intentional.

What's hilarious is that the new Edge IS essentially Chrome, making their BS more obvious than before. Chrome is the new IE

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

#40

Post by 013a »

Conlectus wrote: post #6

Almost certainly unintentional. They're likely confused by a new User-Agent string or some feature detection gone wrong.

That's almost definitely the case. But there is such a thing as maliciously unintentional, and this seriously keeps happening with every browser that isn't Chrome.

For example; Google is a technically advanced company, so they must have a CI check somewhere in their Youtube release process which confirms that a suite of browser tests pass before a greenlight is given on release. Do you think Chrome is one of the browsers included in this test? Do you think Firefox, Edge, and Safari are as well? Given all of the external evidence we have that they continually break the experience for non-Chrome users, even if they were just oversights.

Maybe Edge released an update that changed a UA string, Youtube is too strict, and it had nothing to do with a new release. Now ask yourself: Is there any chance something like this could happen with Chrome? Of course not; they coordinate and ensure the experience is Perfect on Chrome. Is that less evil, given Google's overwhelming control over the internet?

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