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

So you're correct that there is some room for nuance and you're right to point that nuance out.

But Youtube isn't doing either of those things -- it's assuming that a user agent it doesn't recognize by default isn't supported, and rather than serve a feature-detecting version of the page, it's serving users a message to use a different browser. I still maintain that this is basically never the right thing to do (or at least it's so close to "never" that doing so should require some very good, app-specific justifications).

People are debating whether or not you can use JS to feature-detect every single specific bug, and whether or not you need to go the long path on feature-detection and do everything up front, or whether you can skip some steps for performance optimization, and they're missing the entire point of progressive enhancement. If you can detect Chrome or IE 6 and speed things up or avoid a bug, fine. But it's bad practice to rely on that detection.

It's bad practice to have a single list of browsers you support and to turn everything off everywhere else. Partially because it's bad for the web in general, and partially because from a more practical perspective it's not always safe to assume that just because you see a user agent every feature you want will be supported -- extensions exist, custom-compiled browsers exist, and sometimes user agents are just reported wrong for fringe browsers. It's also just plain bad for the user because falling back on feature detection and adding a few seconds to page load is nearly always preferable to being told to download and install a new program.

My original comment wasn't that user agent strings should be universally ignored, it was that it's unfortunate to see a company as respected as Google so fundamentally misunderstand something that's been widely taught as best-practice on the web for over a decade. I kind of feel like some of the people objecting are missing the forest for the trees -- talking about whether there's ever any valid reason at all to ever try to detect a specific browser instead of the underlying idea that the web uses a living standard and that it was designed to be client agnostic.

"We're aware that users of a preview version of Chromium-based Edge are being redirected to the old version of YouTube. We’re working to address this issue. We're committed to supporting YouTube on Edge and apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing"

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-says-the...

Why should this be surprising?

What at all about google.com requires all the modern fancy javascript? Theres the search bar, which only need be a basic html text input box, and thats 98% of the reason I'll ever be at google.com.

I can guess that there are all sorts of little features crammed in that I don't know or care about, and that without the most up to date everything, some of those features may not be possible or may not be as efficient or whatever. Except there's a key phrase as part of that "I don't know or care about" which means its not why I'm at google.com whatsoever.

There's an attitude that seems to be common in SV, especially Google, that seems to put way way too much focus on using the latest things and having everything be automated and as low latency as possible....for what? Why? Its cool you can cut so many ms off some request that it pushes the physical limits of the metal, but I don't really care at all, in fact I'll be prompted to get angry, if that request is part of some feature I'm not interested in, and the one I am, is clearly neglected.

I know everyone isn't me, but I find often that my peers have similar feelings. Just look at Android Auto for a myriad of examples of significant buggy behavior that Google certainly has the manpower to fix, but chooses not to.

But, differently from YouTube, it's possible to serve a latency-optimised, user agent-optimised response in such a way that it's just a performance heuristic, without changing the actual functionality, which is still determined by traditional feature detection to the extent that is possible to do.

When it's implemented that way, it's quite safe to serve the "wrong" response sometimes.

Because it's safe to serve the wrong response, that allows automatic latency optimsiation, instead of brittle, hard-coded rules that will be wrong sometimes.

Inputs are user-agent, client IP, client cookie state, and feedback about whether other resource bundles were fetched as well, or other kinds of feedback such as detected features. Output is which bundle to serve.

This may improve performance over a hard-coded approach, because it adapts continually to new user-agents out there. Yet it is still coded as traditional feature detection (for features where that's possible), and works the way feature detection has always worked.