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

Post by sdenton4 » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #105

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…

"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 Chrom…

Post by plorkyeran » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:30 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…

Post by Causality1 » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #56

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 G…

Post by tracker1 » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

Post by danShumway » Tue, May 28, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

apetresc wrote: post #109

danShumway wrote: post #88

Earlier 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.

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.