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

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

#161

Post by stonogo »

mattnewton wrote: post #101
danShumway wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

No, this shows you're not interested in pleasing anyone. There is no universe in which instructing the user to change browser software is preferable to adding milliseconds of latency at pageload. This attitude is so wrong it's almost sinister.

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

#162

Post by amelius »

sametmax wrote: post #50
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…

> Have they already forgotten the dumb "best viewed in IE" banners that magically vanished as soon as the user-agent changed? They have not. It's just that Google is the top tog now, and doesn't care. While Microsoft is the underdog, and linux is not a cancer and they love open source. And in 20 years this may very well reverse again. The bottom line is to not expect share holders driven multinationals to do what you…

> They are nor good or bad, just without the need for moral, and only constrain by the market and the law (if enforced).

What do you mean by "if enforced"? That companies should be allowed to explore and exploit weaknesses in the legal system, and that we should think this is acceptable behavior?

Translated to humans: a person who constantly tries to find the boundaries of the law is most likely an asshole.

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

#163

Post by ajnin »

RL_Quine wrote: post #79

https://files.catbox.moe/8a4psl.jpeg Wonder if they see the irony of blocking adblockers.

They're not blocking adblockers, they're blocking users (or browsers) who use adblockers. I don't see it as irony, they're just trying to protect their revenue stream, which I think is fair game, they're free to decide if they want to serve the data to some client or not.

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

#164

Post by AaronFriel »

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…

They're specifically looking for the string "Edg", not "E", not "Ed", not "Edge", they're specifically detecting Microsoft Edge.

Try it yourself:

Go to https://www.youtube.com/new

with

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3800.0 Safari/537.36 E/76.0.167.1

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3800.0 Safari/537.36 Ed/76.0.167.1

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3800.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/76.0.167.1

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3800.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/76.0.167.1

There should be no doubt this is malicious. They're specifically targeting Microsoft Edge. Varying the string away from the real Edge string (Edg/76.0.167.1) gives you the proper experience. They're badlisting Microsoft Edge (Edgium/Chromium based Edge), not goodlisting Chrome.

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

#165

Post by AaronFriel »

Google employees in these threads: quit Hanlon razoring your own company. Google has done this repeatedly with Microsoft, from blocking Maps and YouTube on Windows Phone to this. The blocking is always specific and based on badlisting Microsoft version strings, and demonstrably has not affected Firefox (even ESR versions!), Safari, etc.

I've posted elsewhere in this topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033057) a way you can test this yourselves. They're badlisting Chromium based Edge, not, as so many seem to assume, using a goodlist of browsers they tested.

I'm sure it's difficult to imagine the "Don't Be Evil" company doing malicious, anti-competitive things, but that's what's happening here, as it's happened many times before. Punishing and deterring Microsoft Edge users is a thing that someone at Google made a conscious decision about. Test it yourselves.

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

#167

Post by forgottenpass »

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…

>and b) you are in a latency sensitive environment where it is unacceptable to degrade performance of the latest browsers

As you don't work at YouTube specifically, you might not know they don't have this constraint. They are perfectly happy to let YouTube run like complete dogshit if the user is on Firefox.

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

#168

Post by knd775 »

mugwort13 wrote: post #75

I am using Version 76.0.167.1 (Official build) dev (64-bit). I can watch YouTube videos no problem. Chat does not work. In my opinion: YoueTube, please disable chat for all browsers. It is a useless feature that causes problems. Thank you.

Chat on YouTube is incredibly important. Maybe you don't see value in it, but it's integral to the community feel of the site.

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

#169

Post by jlokier »

mattnewton wrote: post #160
filoleg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 once we know they will be able to handle it. It might sound naive, but why woul…

>> It might sound naive, but why would fetching more JS later degrade the experience? I thought that bundle splitting was an accepted good practice. For example, you have your main core bundle, then some polyfill bundles (that get downloaded if the feature detector says it is needed), and then you have separate bundles for obscure and not-that-often-used stuff that gets loaded on demand. It is a genuine question, and…

> If the initial bundle isn’t enough to make the page useful, then the user has to wait for two requests to complete serially before they can perform their task.

Since the alternative is just broken, I'm sure users with non-Google browsers would prefer a working page with one round-trip of extra latency.

Meanwhile, it causes Chrome users no harm, they are unaffected.

But anyway, there's no need for extra delay.

You can put a coarse-grain "shall we load part 2" test inline in the HTML, and/or have the server predict from User-Agent (as a performance heuristic - and this can be automated).

The above can provide the same, optimal latency to all different browsers, even when the site is beautifully well-tuned, 0RTT-optimised, TLS/3, QUIC service, with all the PUSH trimmings.

(For even better performance you can select from multiple builds using the same heuristics, optimising out compatibility branches for other browsers on all browsers, not just the favourite. But this is not necessary, just to prevent the delay being discussed. It's an extra boost.)

There is no latency excuse, just engineering deciding not to bother.

Something Google should be criticised for, since they can afford to do better, have a monopoly, and claim to be a thought leader on open web standards.

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

#170

Post by spaceribs »

mattnewton wrote: post #148
spaceribs wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you think about it, that’s kinda what is happening, except instead of a punishing first load that appears broken and slow every time the user loses the cookie or we change our feature detection code, we do that ahead of time and the “cookie” is in a map where the key is the UA

Interesting, so to be clear, the sequence looks like this:

1. User goes to website, UA communicates previously known features for this browser.

2. Browser does feature detection after load

3. Browser communicates any new browser features up to a backend service, crowd analysis determines if new features have been implemented for this UA.

If that's the case, that's a pretty awesome way of keying features, but I'd have to think about the implications in practice.

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