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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

#51

Post by jsjohnst »

ploxiln wrote: post #34
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…

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

Wishful dreaming. Bad habits never die.

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

#52

Post by ocdtrekkie »

bovermyer wrote: post #2

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

This is what Google is counting on, former Mozilla exec has a strong take on Google's constant use of "Oops": https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

To me, this story (and the previous ones about all of the other Google apps breaking for new Edge, despite being Chromium, and not an issue for almost any other company on the web), is going to show Microsoft what happens when they get in bed with a scorpion.

Switching to Google technologies is almost always a mistake.

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

#53

Post by saagarjha »

Klathmon wrote: post #49
danShumway wrote: post #37

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…

In my experience, while many people don't like to admit it, useragent detection is still one of the best ways to handle many bugs and edge cases in large applications. 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, bu…

Could you try the faulty operation and see if it failed?

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

#54

Post by jchw »

danShumway wrote: post #37

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…

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, speaking in a personal capacity.

Long story short, it doesn’t really work this way.

As an example, go to google.com on Internet Explorer 6. No, I’m serious. You will find that it loads just fine and even functions, over plain HTTP. It’s only a small subset of functionality, but it does actually work.

You can’t do that with feature detection.

YouTube may have crossed the threshold where feature detection should be usable for all of the supported platforms and fallbacks, but feature detection is not a panacea; it does take time to execute feature tests, and it can be difficult to detect certain bugs.

Most web developers are definitely not Google, and shouldn't copy what Google is doing without knowing that they need to. It’s generally ill-advised to copy things without understanding them anyways.

Not assuming malicious intent makes sense to me; the Edge user agent was already very tricky due to the fact that it has long pretended to be Chromium anyways.

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

#55

Post by inlined »

jve wrote: post #45
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…

Technical correction. Edge had its own engine: Spartan > 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 o…

Thank god they forked it. Parts of Trident were older than unit testing was a best practice. The cultural best thing to do was wall off those parts and never touch them because regressions would be impossible to find.

I once did a bug fix for an assertion in the Trident. It’s still one of the hardest bugs I’ve ever solved. It was hundreds of stack frames deep in recursion (DOM layout code) in a function that was several pages long and had bidirectional goto statements. If I didn’t have the amazing features of Windbg it would have been impossible to solve. In the end it was a variant of the C++ slicing problem (if you store a subclass in an array of superclass you’ll chop off the member variables of the subclass).

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

#56

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Causality1 wrote: post #3

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.

As a Chrome user, you might not realize this, but Microsoft's behavior here is no worse than how incessant Google is about trying to get you to switch to Chrome, and this started like a decade before Microsoft got more aggressive about Edge marketing. Microsoft's behavior is arguably only trying to match parity with the competitor who has bullied them behind the dumpster in the schoolyard for too long.

Every single Google page has popups about switching to Chrome. Sometimes Gmail has had both one on the bottom and one on the top at the same time.[1] Besides the general breakage for anyone not using Chrome, as seen in the article, Google's just constant advertising for Chrome in every single one of their products is obscene, and no matter how many times you click "No thanks", it comes back.

I don't want to say "No thanks, Google". I want to say "F--- off, Google".

[1]Actual screenshot of repetitive popup behavior in Gmail: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoEPgo2V4AA4Ql5.jpg:large

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

#57

Post by sorenjan »

danShumway wrote: post #37

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…

Is Youtube still using Polymer 1.0 with the deprecated shadow DOM v0 that's only supported in Chrome without polyfills [0]? I still use the old version because the new version was annoyingly slow in Firefox last time I checked, and I have no reason to switch to the newer one with lower information density and contrast.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17611444/how-to-speed-up-...

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

#58

Post by Someone1234 »

michaelt wrote: post #43
Someone1234 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If by "the most compatible version of the page" you mean they deny access, you have an unusually generous definition of compatibility :)

It doesn't deny access. I just tested it, it just gives you a version of YT with fewer features and a dated UI.

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

#59

Post by noir_lord »

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #46
013a wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I recall correctly, this is actually due to a security restriction that Google has circumvented since it built both the browser and the application. 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…

> Chrome simply has some sort of workaround built in by Google to allow them to make the UX slightly better on their own site.

The optics on that are potentially terrible.

The dominant browser from the dominant search engine company deliberately breaks a standard it enforces elsewhere only on its own sites.

Ouch.

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

#60

Post by rchaud »

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.

On OSX, Firefox and Google Drive work fine, but Gmail is a whole other kettle of fish. I don't know what UI change they implemented last year or so, but it is nearly unusable on Firefox, from absurdly long load times, to a 2-3 second wait for contextual options to appear when you right click.

Switched to ProtonMail's free tier and will gradually migrate everything there aside from newsletter and software beta signups. Those emails are mostly trash anyway.

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