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

#101

Post by mattnewton » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #82

kchoudhu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 choosin…

I agree there are just a bunch of trade offs, and this shows you can’t please everyone. If you ship large bundles of polyfills people are sad they get some slow JavaScript, and if you give them fallback html and JavaScript that renders quick and supports their feature set, they are sad they didn’t get the same feature set as chrome latest. You have to minimize the fallback sadness as well as keep pushing better and better cutting edge experiences. This demanding environment is one thing I do like about the job even if it makes me feel constantly unqualified and doomed to fail :D

Speaking personally from my time before working at Google, the second network request is definitely the worse of the two options if you can’t do anything until it completes for most people- the round trip time kills you in the median US case I am familiar with.

At Apple for my small project we didn’t have these constraints so we just shipped a giant JavaScript bundle with feature detection and browser-side re-rendering that worked alright.

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

#102

Post by konart » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

sorenjan wrote: post #57

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-...

>Is Youtube still using Polymer 1.0

Yes if you are logged in. If you switch to private mode - yt will serve you v3.2

>>Polymer.version >"3.2.0"

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

#103

Post by faxnlogic » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:07 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 detection only needs to be done once on a given browser; only an extremely incompetent engineer would suggest performing that detection on every single page.

As such, I'm unsurprised to learn that a Google engineer thinks that the only possible way to solve this is to perform feature detection, repeatedly, on every single page.

The reality is that Google hires mediocre and lazy engineers, and that they also have a vested interest in pushing people into their proprietary browser. The result is that they do the thing that's best for Google as a business (pushing their invasive browser), and their incompetent staff line up to publicly defend this selfish and immoral decision.

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

#104

Post by willk » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:09 PM UTC

NullPrefix wrote: post #98

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…

Aren't Mozilla and Chrome registered trademarks? Can you just go around pretending to be Chrome or Mozilla and not face any consequences??

> Mozilla/5.0 is the general token that says the browser is Mozilla compatible, and is common to almost every browser today. [0]

[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Us...

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

#105

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #54

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 th…

"malicious intent" is an interesting concept.

I agree it seems unlikely this particular feature/engineering choice was introduced with the conscious intent to penalize non-Chrome browsers or Edge specifically by withholding a UI from them.

However, when this kind of thing happens, it can be taken as indication that supporting all browsers as well as possible is not as high a priority as other things. Supporting Chrome very well may be a higher priority than supporting every/any other browsers as well as possible.

After all, doing it in a "feature detection" way may very well be very difficult and thus expensive/time consuming. But it can surely be done. It just means doing it isn't a high enough to priority to justify what it would take. The sort of decisions anyone developing software needs to make all the time, that's real. And the priorities and values explicitly or implicitly chosen are real too.

Is it "malicious intent" to not be willing to put an arguably inordinate amount of resources into supporting non-Chrome browsers, or to effectively prioritize the Chrome UX more than other browsers? I dunno, but it's a thing.

It's also worth remembering though that the reported issue is in a preview version of the browser (and on a brand new barely-non-preview version of youtube), and I wouldn't be too surprised if it's fixed before it goes out of preview. This is one of the points of having preview releases of course, to find bugs -- both bugs in user-agents and bugs in websites.

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

#106

Post by mtgx » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:20 PM UTC

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…

You don't? And you think the fact that Microsoft also switched to Chromium now after "working together on this" is also a coincidence? Or just an attempt to snuffle out Mozilla and Safari from the market? After all, a duopoly is better than actual competition.

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

#107

Post by OrgNet » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

> I don't assume any ill intent.

You are being a bit naive.

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

#108

Post by NullPrefix » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

willk wrote: post #104

NullPrefix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Mozilla and Chrome registered trademarks? Can you just go around pretending to be Chrome or Mozilla and not face any consequences??

> Mozilla/5.0 is the general token that says the browser is Mozilla compatible, and is common to almost every browser today. [0] [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Us...

My question was not about how they are used. My question was about trademarks. You have to defend them or you end up losing them.

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

#109

Post by apetresc » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #88

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…

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.

That's a very different product. Gmail basically never needs to refresh the page - you go through that loading bar once in the morning and there's no real reason to see it again the rest of the day. Every action in Gmail other than certain preference changes happen in the same page.

YouTube is reloading the page on almost every action you take. Latency is a completely different priority there.

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

#110

Post by onion2k » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #65

jchw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> You can’t do that with feature detection. This... is just wrong. If you start from that base feature set that works on all browsers, and then utilize feature detection to progressively enhance the experience, you can definitely do just what this statement says. Its just easier to rely on UA sniffing, but don't spread misinformation that it isn't possible. It is a LOT more work, particularly to ensure that the exper…

A really annoying case where feature detection doesn't work is WebGL on a machine with a blacklisted GPU. Everything detection method will report that it works but it won't. The "feature detection" ends up being rendering something and seeing if you got an image or not.

There are edges where detection falls over.

Mind you, agent string sniffing won't help you either.