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

Post by Causality1 » Tue, May 28, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #118

Causality1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Firefox user, and I also hate the way Google abuses its power with Chrome. It hits a little closer to home, though, when it's the OS itself telling you how to use your computer and not just a website.

I just see that as each company operating from their respective positions of strength. Or in antitrust terms, using the market they're dominant in to improve their standing in another market. I also would argue that the difference between operating system, web browser, application, and website has increasingly blurred, as we have browsers that are the whole OS, apps that actually are embedded websites, websites that…

Post by knd775 » Tue, May 28, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #127

Conlectus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They likely have a white list of browsers, not a black list, so new browsers may simply not be supported until they update the list. Edit: And the new Edge version likely identifies itself differently.

The change in useragent would indicate that if they didn't Add specifically to exclude it, it should detect as Chrome.

Post by bzbarsky » Tue, May 28, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #24

wlesieutre wrote: post #17

User 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…

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, May 28, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #141

emilecantin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who still does user-agent sniffing? I can't remember the last time I saw UA-detection code. Feature-detection and polyfills have been a thing for more than a decade at this point. EDIT: Just for kicks, I'll try it. I just downloaded a User-Agent extension, and I'll set my UA to "Chrome 74", and see if anything breaks.

I was working on a product that did user-agent sniffing to figure out which image formats were supported (when to serve WebP). A feature-detection based approach is substantially slower because it breaks the preload scanner: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-parse-the-user-agent

Post by 013a » Tue, May 28, 2019, 8:15 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…