Shame I don't have the screenshot anymore, but Facebook used to actually blacklist links2. Changing the user agent to a random sequence of expletives allowed me to view the content...
Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
91–100 of 207 posts
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#92Most 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…
> user-agent check ... don't assume any ill intent. 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?
> Wasn't Google the company that pushed this in the early days of Chrome?
The official party line had never changed. From what I know, Google still recommends that we mortals use feature detection.
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#93Another example to show why we need to get Firefox at least on the 20% market-share... Google is doing with Chrome exactly what Microsoft did with IE...
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#94Earlier 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…
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.
"Google" encompasses many different projects and teams. What does Gmail loading time have to do with what the GP said?
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#95[deleted]
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#96Earlier 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.
Most of the big tech companies (amazon, google, facebook most notably) have discovered an extremely strong correlation between latency and $$$. Every saved millisecond of average load time tends to generate an incredible amount of money (like, 10s of millions of dollars a year per millisecond).
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#97Google has one of the best QA in the business.
As one of the Firefox developers said a few weeks ago, Google will keep "accidentally" introducing lots of pointless little changes to create glitches and irritations into the experience when using rival browsers.
It happened savagely to Windows Phone, no one cared. I remember trying to browse Gmail on a Windows Phone it was like going back to the 1993.
It happened to EdgeHTML: youtube videos just simply didn't play on Edge.
And i'm sure this will happen to EdgeChromium. Why? because EdgeChromium is a small threat.
Only a small threat because everyone uses google search and not Bing. And astonishingly in 2019 Google search is still even Microsoft's own sites than Bing... in 2019. So the moment you try EdgeChromium you are confront with that
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#98User 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…
Aren't Mozilla and Chrome registered trademarks? Can you just go around pretending to be Chrome or Mozilla and not face any consequences??
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#99Most 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…
It's unreasonable if you feature detect on every load. why not store feature detected capabilities within a cookie that's passed on additional requests?
Re: Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"Google" encompasses many different projects and teams. What does Gmail loading time have to do with what the GP said?
Because the GP said "I work at Google but not on YouTube", and was speaking of Google and the sorts of technical challenges Google has in general, not any specific product.
So danShumway pointed out that in one flagship product, they didn't seem worried about latency, so it could be argued that avoiding user-agent detection is more important than latency on youtube too.
But yeah, there are lots of competing things going on, I found both comments helpful.