Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by clarry » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

kchoudhu wrote: post #78

mattnewton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

It's Youtube, not high frequency trading.

And subjectively, the latency on most google services (except for the search page) is pretty bad. Maybe Firefox Nightly isn't modern enough?

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

#82

Post by danShumway » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

kchoudhu wrote: post #78

mattnewton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

It's Youtube, not high frequency trading.

The logic is apparently that we can't do progressive enhancement because it would force us to make a second network request, but we can rely on unstandardized APIs that force us to ship polyfills that make our site slow on every other browser that's not Chrome.

Every decision, from progressive enhancement to supporting bleeding-edge features comes with tradeoffs. Youtube is still choosing tradeoffs, it's just choosing them based on what will work best in Chrome specifically.

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

#83

Post by mcny » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #66

danShumway wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a certain extent I feel your pain and get where you're coming from. The problem is -- A) The user agent isn't always specific enough. I've run into rendering bugs that were specific not just to individual browser versions, but individual browser versions on specific platforms. I've seen bugs fixed and introduced that didn't trigger user agent updates. B) Browsers lie about their user agents. Firefox fingerprint pr…

Yeah I don't support gating entire sites behind checks like this outside of some situations (like it's a tech demo using a new browser API, or a public beta where they want to limit it to a few browsers until it's stable enough to open up to the world). But I also absolutely get the allure of whitelisting "known good browsers". I've literally never seen a user hit a bug, and then blame their browser. Hell, I've perso…

> Chrome and Safari

Not that I know anything but that's a weird set of browsers to support. Apple can't update Safari without an OS update from what I know and even then it is just on macOS and iOS. Worksheet it be cheaper and easier to force users to get Chrome?

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

#84

Post by la_barba » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #70

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, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

I think disabling the all the user snooping would help reduce the latency too. Just saying :)

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

#85

Post by dmitriid » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #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.

It shouldn’t be that difficult to understand that stopping a user from using your website based on the browser the user is using is bad.

Just immediately from the top of my mind: a new browser developer testing site compatibility, a search bot indexing the website.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

kchoudhu wrote: post #78

mattnewton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

It's Youtube, not high frequency trading.

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by dmitriid » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

lutoma wrote: post #44

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.

My main annoyance is that all Google apps on iOS will refuse to open links in Firefox, but offer options to set Safari or Chrome as default browser…

And they never retain the choice for those options for long. I’ve lost count of how many times I clicked “use Safari”.

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

#88

Post by danShumway » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #70

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, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

The modern version of Gmail has a loading bar that takes about 3 seconds to complete on every single page refresh.

This is subjective, and it's a bit unfair of me to bring up, but my experience is that whatever Google is optimizing for, it doesn't seem to be latency. At least not on Firefox for any of the products I use.

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

#89

Post by bduerst » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

kchoudhu wrote: post #78

mattnewton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally. This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript…

It's Youtube, not high frequency trading.

You're right, Youtube is the largest content streaming website in history. HFT'ers would not even be able to host it.

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

#90

Post by Analemma_ » Tue, May 28, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

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.

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

The problem is, you can't do this unless every website also "resets" at the same time, because the bad UA detection code will still be out there. The vendors aren't any happier with this situation than we are, but they do it because they have no choice.