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

#131

Post by manigandham » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:03 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…

Every single Google consumer app has gotten more bloated and added seconds in load time. What exactly are the metrics being used to measure UX and latency? What Google service loads faster than HN?

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

#132

Post by ha99ja » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:07 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…

All of Google can't come up with a simple way of caching supported features by browser?

``` doesBrowserSupportFeature? = (userAgentString, feature) => boolean ```

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

#133

Post by JohnNorman » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:07 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're quite naive, my friend. I used to work at both Microsoft and Google. A few of the guys that run YouTube now, used to be managers on the Hotmail team. Hotmail used to break in Opera and Firefox every few weeks...

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

#134

Post by BinaryIdiot » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:11 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…

> This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment.

Other than Google Streaming / Stadia and some AMP sites I have never seen a Google site / app load in less than 2 seconds or so (which is kinda slow, all things considered). So I'm a little confused about this latency sensitive environment statement.

Sure, what you say is correct in that using agent strings can provide an optimized bundle to the browser the faster, but isn't there far better optimizations that Google could make first? I've seen and worked on very fast, sub second web apps before so this argument feels more speculative than any good reasoning.

Besides, you shouldn't be gating _so hard_ with agent strings anyway. The non-Chromium version of Edge is probably fine on YouTube as well. You likely want to gate away the obvious offenders, assume the best with the newer browsers but allow a fallback option that detects a few things on load so you can adjust and set cookies for the next time.

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

#135

Post by mattnewton » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #131

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…

Every single Google consumer app has gotten more bloated and added seconds in load time. What exactly are the metrics being used to measure UX and latency? What Google service loads faster than HN?

I mean, HN isn’t an apples to apples comparison at all. I bet Google search (where I work) loads much faster when we serve 10 blue links to an older phone or IE6, and that page is at least an order of magnitude more complex to assemble. When we serve you a live stock ticker, video results and carousel of relevant tweets though it’ll take a few more milliseconds to get that data.

My point isn’t that latency is the only thing worth optimizing for, it’s that you can spend your latency budget on something like feature detection, or, adding new features and better UX for newer browsers.

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

#136

Post by RandomGuyDTB » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

This is really ugly in terms of practice (get MS to use Chromium and then blacklist them from new YouTube) but I specifically disable the polymer (new) YouTube theme. It makes it look bloated. Some features aren't even available in new YouTube. Only downside is no dark theme.

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

#137

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:11 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.

Apart from the excellent reasons other people have given, it's important to realize that there is no entity that is optimizing all of these disparate pieces of software with some common utility function. Chrome and GMail are completely different products with very very different priorities. Just because they are owned by Google means nothing for this particular comparison.

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

#138

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #100

EpicEng wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 go…

> Because the GP said "I work at Google but not on YouTube"

That was a disclosure, not a credential. My reading of it was that GP was speaking of the tradeoffs in their capacity as an engineer, and said they are a Googler for fair disclosure and nothing more.

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

#139

Post by RandomGuyDTB » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #60

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…

You can change email forwarding in Gmail to forward everything to the Protonmail. That's how I initially transferred. A year and still changing email addresses, I have a ton of accounts to go.

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

#140

Post by JohnNorman » Tue, May 28, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

NullPrefix wrote: post #108

willk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They've lost them since the very beginning. Mozilla's agent initially included Netscape and Chrome's still says Mozilla.