4 ms·

The only reason this should be on the front page #1 of HN is if there is tangible evidence that intent was malicious.

• BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  The poor way in which YouTube does feature detection (via user agent string) is almost as appalling. There is nothing wrong with outlining it here.
  • tacos 11y ago
    And the unforeseen consequences to the "quick, innocent fix" more important still. They did not handle this properly.
  • timothya 11y ago
    > The poor way in which YouTube does feature detection (via user agent string) is almost as appalling. If you could provide a better alternative, I'm sure they'd be all ears.
    • pas 11y ago
      Put there a little button that lets the user select the format/resolution/implementation.
      • jrowley 11y ago
        What percentage of YouTube users could define the word "format"?
      • BinaryIdiot 11y ago
        The less options you give the user up front the better; I don't think this would be a better option (though allowing advanced users to select this may not be the worst thing).
    • BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      I'd have to look at the code but you can detect just about anything within the browser; do the check once regarding what features you want to use, store and do that. User agent string parsing is a hack that's typically easier to do hence why so many still rely on it. Having said that I don't think they'd be all ears; their code isn't opened source and while I could try to debug through their minified code that hardly seems worth it for me to do.
      • taspeotis 11y ago
        Devil's advocate: Detecting the features available in the browser is potentially two requests: the server sends HTML/JS to the client, the client makes a decision, and then requests more data that's compatible with its feature set. If the server can do feature detection by user agent sniffing, it's potentially one request. The client has to do this for every browser session, too, since browsers are frequently upgraded and the features change week-to-week.
        • BinaryIdiot 11y ago
          > Detecting the features available in the browser is potentially two requests: the server sends HTML/JS to the client, the client makes a decision, and then requests more data that's compatible with its feature set. If the server can do feature detection by user agent sniffing, it's potentially one request. That's not really true though. The code that's going to load the video will be downloaded and then the code will request the video. So those two requests happen no matter what. Cache the feature detection so it's slightly faster after the first time. > The client has to do this for every browser session, too, since browsers are frequently upgraded and the features change week-to-week. Browsers are unlikely to lose the ability to use whatever codec you think is best so I think this is a safe assumption. Bonus points if you can detect its failure and re-run the feature detection in case something odd like that would happen.
• deckar01 11y ago
  YouTube hacked together feature detection that relies on user agent strings. Firefox released an update that hacked around a recent bug in said feature detection. Seems fine to me without needing any conspiracy drama.
• GhotiFish 11y ago
  If your ultimate actions were anti-competitive, even if it was a legitimate mistake, then you can't and shouldn't let it slide. If people started following that philosophy, companies like Microsoft will start causing "innocent little mistakes" every day. This absolutely, positively, would never, ever, happen in Chrome. Never. Yet here we are. "oops!" I absolutely believe it was an accident, but I don't believe it should be fully treated like one.
  • jimmaswell 11y ago
    I somewhat doubt it was an accident. Google products always seemed tailored to work less well in Firefox. YouTube always seemed to be slow on Firefox for me on anything less than an i5 while it worked perfectly in Chrome on even pretty bad PCs, which shouldn't happen because other video sites always worked just fine in Firefox, even when serving much higher-resolution video.
• sylvinus 11y ago
  I don't think it was malicious on Google's side, though it's still definitely interesting enough to be on the homepage, as it's a situation where both parties had to deal with hard technical constraints.