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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?
Edge Preview runs on Chromium
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.
I have no problem at all using Google Drive and Docs on Firefox, what specific issues have you run into?
Calling the experience Handicapped is extreme, but there's clear preferential treatment toward Chrome.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised Google still uses useragent parsing for browser detection.
Everyone still uses browser detection. There's no other way to determine a specific rendering engine, feature detection solves a whole different set of problems, it doesn't solve for rendering quirks. In this case the browser is unknown, so they use the most compatible version of the page.
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.
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…
> The Spartan rendering engine (edgehtml.dll) is a new component and separate from Trident (mshtml.dll). The new engine began as a fork of Trident, but has since diverged rapidly over the past many months, similar to how several other browser engines have started as forks prior to diverging. The new rendering engine is also being built with a very different set of principles than Trident - for example: a focus on interoperability and the removal of document modes.
https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no problem at all using Google Drive and Docs on Firefox, what specific issues have you run into?
There are a couple minor things. For example: inside of a Doc, in Chrome you can right click -> edit menu -> copy/paste, but in Firefox it tells you that you must use CMD+C/CMD+V. Non-Chrome browsers also used to be unable to upload folders, but this has been fixed for a while. Calling the experience Handicapped is extreme, but there's clear preferential treatment toward Chrome.
If you could right click to paste, that would mean it would be possible for Javascript to access your clipboard on any site you go to. Firefox enforces the appropriate security setting here, Chrome simply has some sort of workaround built in by Google to allow them to make the UX slightly better on their own site.
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 f…
A user-agent check is ill intent for exactly the reasons you state:
> we've known for years that feature detection is preferable to user-agent detection
Wasn't Google the company that pushed this in the early days of Chrome?
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 an…
Given that Chrome is dominant, the answer is "a lot of effort". Anything less, and it looks like abuse of dominant position.
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 f…
Feature detection works well for new features or well documented failures, but it quickly begins to break down in many edge cases.
For example, mobile Safari shipped a broken implementation of IndexedDB for a while and detecting that was a big pain, but swapping the known bad versions to use websql or localstorage worked great. Edge (pre chromium) had some really weird bug with the JIT and the javascript `.call` function for a bit, but there was no realistic way that I could detect just that bug, so I fell back to useragent detection.
There are tons of bugs that I've found over just the last few years that are due to one bad version, or some specific OS/browser/hardware combo, or are just flakey and hard to trigger with code in the page, therefore they are hard to "feature detect".
I have a feeling the amount of those kinds of bugs that you see and their frequency only gets worse when you have monumentally huge amounts of traffic and users as someone like Youtube does, and while I think we should still hold them to a good standard, I can see why they would fallback to UA detection.
After all, it's better to have a well working experience for most users (even with a subset of the features) than one which breaks 1% of the time (and every time it breaks, like it or not, the users are going to blame the site not the browser).
What we really need (in my opinion anyway) is a way of doing UA detection that is much more scoped to specific versions, and remove the ability for those feature detections to accidentally impact new versions or other browsers (either accidentally or on purpose).
Something like setting the browser name/version to a hash of the version number and a secret for each version, and possibly doing the same with other parts of the UA (like hardware/device name and OS name/version).
Then people like youtube could block known broken or bad useragents from getting some features to avoid serving code that breaks to those users, and then the onus is on them to update their lists every time a new version comes out. There are obviously ways around it (UA checker as a service?), but it at least makes it harder for lazyness to take over.
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 f…
They have not. It's just that Google is the top tog now, and doesn't care.
While Microsoft is the underdog, and linux is not a cancer and they love open source.
And in 20 years this may very well reverse again.
The bottom line is to not expect share holders driven multinationals to do what you think is right. They are nor good or bad, just without the need for moral, and only constrain by the market and the law (if enforced).