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

Post by finchisko » Wed, May 29, 2019, 7:07 AM UTC

spaceribs wrote: post #170

mattnewton wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by emilecantin » Wed, May 29, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

emilecantin wrote: post #129

Analemma_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I think it might be time for a big "reset", and for browsers to stop lying about who they are The problem is, you can't do this unless every website also "resets" at the same time, because the bad UA detection code will still be out there. The vendors aren't any happier with this situation than we are, but they do it because they have no choice.

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.

Post by AaronFriel » Wed, May 29, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

pandres95 wrote: post #204

AaronFriel wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/5…

Not really. Tried myself using Edge and didn't work either. Looks more like a whitelisting of "supported" browsers (such as Safari or Firefox), more than a blacklisting of Edge. https://postimg.cc/GTwV1P79 https://postimg.cc/r0F3yFM2 However, it's still suspicious they aren't adding the proper support for Edge Chromium. Also tried using the Brave user-agent. Also failed. https://postimg.cc/V0qTsSpg

Post by avierax » Thu, May 30, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

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.