4 ms·

Google has coincidentally made their products not work on Microsoft's Chromium based browser...and it's not even out of beta.

UncleMeat 8y ago
"Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result. Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  Considering it uses the same rendering engine as the most popular browser in the world?
- 8ytecoder 8y ago
  Microsoft Chrome is essentially Chrome slapped with a new, pardon the pun, chrome. If a website works on Chrome it should work on the MS version as well - assuming they haven't made many breaking changes - and from what I have read so far they have only replaced auxiliary services and haven't altered the rendering engine.
  - j_koreth 8y ago
    Presumably they're still loading a version of the website which Trident/Edgekit which used to make up for the discrepancies between the other browsers.
    - kevingadd 8y ago
      The Edge devs went out of their way to craft a useragent that doesn't trigger Edge UA sniffing, which is why the pages used to work until Google intentionally broke them in Edge.
      - hackily 8y ago
        Do you have any sources that talk about these breaking issues? I wouldn't be entirely shocked that Google would be doing this, but I do want to see more than just one anecdote that it's ill intent rather than incompetence.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Except if you change the user agent it works.
  - spankalee 8y ago
    Which easily explains the warning that was shown on docs. A misparsing of a new, never-before-seen user-agent string (especially one with an apparent typo) could lead the code to assume that the browser is indeed an older, no longer supported version.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Nadya 8y ago
Who would expect the browser user-agent to actually call itself "EDG" and not "EDGE" though? If you edit the user-agent to include "EDGE" in place of "EDG" everything works, someone thought "EDG" was surely a typo. Malice and stupidity and all that. Now why they're still sniffing user agents instead of doing feature detection is a good question for Google, who themselves, to the best of my knowledge, push for feature detection instead of sniffing user agents as best practice. Do as we say - not as we do?
- spankalee 8y ago
  Google is not a single entity. Chrome DevRel and Docs web front end are not even remotely related teams, and DevRel cannot dictate practices to other teams.
- taf2 8y ago
  In some cases feature detection is not enough because while the browser may define the method you need it’s implementation is broken. A good example of this was indexeddb was horribly broken in safari and even doing feature detection was tricky so you had to check the user agent to see that it probably had a bad indexeddb and work around it. It’s never ideal and there is always possibly and more clever work around but sometimes you have a tight timeline and need a site to work in a specific browser. Note: I think safari has since fixed indexeddb?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Goddamn the web is such a mess.

UncleMeat 8y ago

"Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result. Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?

ChrisSD 8y ago
Considering it uses the same rendering engine as the most popular browser in the world?
8ytecoder 8y ago
Microsoft Chrome is essentially Chrome slapped with a new, pardon the pun, chrome. If a website works on Chrome it should work on the MS version as well - assuming they haven't made many breaking changes - and from what I have read so far they have only replaced auxiliary services and haven't altered the rendering engine.
- j_koreth 8y ago
  Presumably they're still loading a version of the website which Trident/Edgekit which used to make up for the discrepancies between the other browsers.
  - kevingadd 8y ago
    The Edge devs went out of their way to craft a useragent that doesn't trigger Edge UA sniffing, which is why the pages used to work until Google intentionally broke them in Edge.
    - hackily 8y ago
      Do you have any sources that talk about these breaking issues? I wouldn't be entirely shocked that Google would be doing this, but I do want to see more than just one anecdote that it's ill intent rather than incompetence.
partiallypro 8y ago
Except if you change the user agent it works.
- spankalee 8y ago
  Which easily explains the warning that was shown on docs. A misparsing of a new, never-before-seen user-agent string (especially one with an apparent typo) could lead the code to assume that the browser is indeed an older, no longer supported version.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Nadya 8y ago

Who would expect the browser user-agent to actually call itself "EDG" and not "EDGE" though? If you edit the user-agent to include "EDGE" in place of "EDG" everything works, someone thought "EDG" was surely a typo. Malice and stupidity and all that. Now why they're still sniffing user agents instead of doing feature detection is a good question for Google, who themselves, to the best of my knowledge, push for feature detection instead of sniffing user agents as best practice. Do as we say - not as we do?

spankalee 8y ago
Google is not a single entity. Chrome DevRel and Docs web front end are not even remotely related teams, and DevRel cannot dictate practices to other teams.
taf2 8y ago
In some cases feature detection is not enough because while the browser may define the method you need it’s implementation is broken. A good example of this was indexeddb was horribly broken in safari and even doing feature detection was tricky so you had to check the user agent to see that it probably had a bad indexeddb and work around it. It’s never ideal and there is always possibly and more clever work around but sometimes you have a tight timeline and need a site to work in a specific browser. Note: I think safari has since fixed indexeddb?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Goddamn the web is such a mess.