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

250 points by MikusR 7y ago

bovermyer 7y ago
I'm going to assume this is accidental, not intentional.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  Given a comment on the article that user-agent switching seems to fix it, I'm going to assume the same. Just another overly-aggressive user-agent check, instead of using feature checks.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y ago
  Can you explain? To me it looks like YouTube intentionally, not accidentally, updated their browser block list to include Microsoft Edge Preview.
  - Conlectus 7y ago
    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.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      The change in useragent would indicate that if they didn't Add specifically to exclude it, it should detect as Chrome.
      - knd775 7y ago
        It sends 3 different useragents in different circumstances for some reason. Edg, Edge, and Chrome. This case is definitely the Edge team's fault.
        WorldMaker 7y ago
        The circumstances are domain-specific and it's been clear from the beginning that "Edgium" has (consistently) only been sending `Edg` to youtube.com from the beginning of the public release. Since the site in question's behavior changed, it likely wasn't the Edge team's fault.
- acdha 7y ago
  I suspect that's true but also raises an interesting question: how much effort should Google be expected to expend supporting other browsers? Not testing / optimizing in anything other than Chrome has lead to numerous issues in the past which were not deliberate sabotage but it feels like there's something dodgy about negligence which aligns with business goals, too, just as there was when Microsoft didn't support anything but IE or consistently broke things like MSDN on non-IE browsers.
  - sergiosgc 7y ago
    > how much effort should Google be expected to expend supporting other browsers? Given that Chrome is dominant, the answer is "a lot of effort". Anything less, and it looks like abuse of dominant position.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  This is what Google is counting on, former Mozilla exec has a strong take on Google's constant use of "Oops": https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... To me, this story (and the previous ones about all of the other Google apps breaking for new Edge, despite being Chromium, and not an issue for almost any other company on the web), is going to show Microsoft what happens when they get in bed with a scorpion. Switching to Google technologies is almost always a mistake.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    How would continuing to use their own browser engine have helped them in any way? You imply that other options would have better outcomes for Microsoft without having thought through what they would be.
Causality1 7y ago
I hate this, though it is a kind of poetic justice for the way Windows 10 fights tooth and nail to keep you from switching your default browser away from Edge.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  What exactly do you mean by "fights tooth and nail"? I had to reinstall my laptop a few months ago, and the experience was "navigate to Firefox download site, download, install, set default browser"... Same as it has ever been.
  - pluma 7y ago
    Off the top of my head: * when switching default browsers, Windows suggests you give Edge a try instead * at some point I got a Windows notification suggesting that I try Edge instead of the browser I was using IIRC they used to nag users more in the past but I think the notification I got also included an option to not be reminded again.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      Literally every Google website tries to get me to download Chrome whenever I use firefox or ie. Every. Single. Time. 2 attempts from Microsoft... not so bad.
      - pluma 7y ago
        I agree that two attempts isn't so bad. I think most users are upset because the notifications happened a lot more frequently in the past and using notifications from the OS for ads comes across as pretty slimy (because you only expect the OS to tell you when something important happens).
        WorldMaker 7y ago
        iOS, at least, sends just as many "Tips" notifications that also border on being ads for Apple and trusted third party applications, and I've never seen anyone near as harshly complain about "ads in iOS".
tantalor 7y ago
> randomly disabled the modern YouTube experience Sounds like an experiment designed to measure the effect of the new version vs. old version for the new browser. > it’s very odd that Google would prevent users... from using the modern YouTube experience Not odd; experimentation is very common. > This is most likely an error on Google’s part More likely author doesn't understand what they're talking about.
dubcanada 7y ago
Basically Google doesn't allow development build Edge users to browse the preview YouTube? Doesn't seem like someone at Google hates Edge, just looks like they didn't test their brand new YouTube on every browser yet so just limited it to heavy Chrome users. Or am I wrong?
- jsty 7y ago
  Quite possibly they have their whitelist of 'tested with' browsers for the new experience, and Edge Preview wasn't one of those, so got shown the 'use a supported browser' modal.
- sylens 7y ago
  Edge Preview runs on Chromium
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    I thought it was only "based on" and distinct from Chromium?
    - tracker1 7y ago
      It uses the Blink web engine, pages themselves will render exactly the same.
Conlectus 7y ago
Almost certainly unintentional. They're likely confused by a new User-Agent string or some feature detection gone wrong.
- 013a 7y ago
  That's almost definitely the case. But there is such a thing as maliciously unintentional, and this seriously keeps happening with every browser that isn't Chrome. For example; Google is a technically advanced company, so they must have a CI check somewhere in their Youtube release process which confirms that a suite of browser tests pass before a greenlight is given on release. Do you think Chrome is one of the browsers included in this test? Do you think Firefox, Edge, and Safari are as well? Given all of the external evidence we have that they continually break the experience for non-Chrome users, even if they were just oversights. Maybe Edge released an update that changed a UA string, Youtube is too strict, and it had nothing to do with a new release. Now ask yourself: Is there any chance something like this could happen with Chrome? Of course not; they coordinate and ensure the experience is Perfect on Chrome. Is that less evil, given Google's overwhelming control over the internet?
  - tracker1 7y ago
    The new useragent has a later Chrome/version, and changed from Edge/version to Edg/version ... in this case Chrome and Edg align. In any case, they'd have had to ADD additional detection to not detect as chrome in this case.
bad_good_guy 7y ago
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.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  I have no problem at all using Google Drive and Docs on Firefox, what specific issues have you run into?
  - 013a 7y ago
    There are a couple minor things. For example: inside of a Doc, in Chrome you can right click -> edit menu -> copy/paste, but in Firefox it tells you that you must use CMD+C/CMD+V. Non-Chrome browsers also used to be unable to upload folders, but this has been fixed for a while. Calling the experience Handicapped is extreme, but there's clear preferential treatment toward Chrome.
    - AlphaWeaver 7y ago
      If I recall correctly, this is actually due to a security restriction that Google has circumvented since it built both the browser and the application. If you could right click to paste, that would mean it would be possible for Javascript to access your clipboard on any site you go to. Firefox enforces the appropriate security setting here, Chrome simply has some sort of workaround built in by Google to allow them to make the UX slightly better on their own site.
      - noir_lord 7y ago
        > Chrome simply has some sort of workaround built in by Google to allow them to make the UX slightly better on their own site. The optics on that are potentially terrible. The dominant browser from the dominant search engine company deliberately breaks a standard it enforces elsewhere only on its own sites. Ouch.
judge2020 7y ago
The polymer UI does seem to work perfectly if you set the user-agent to Chrome Windows in devtools -> network conditions.
- Forge36 7y ago
  I'm surprised Google still uses useragent parsing for browser detection.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    Everyone still uses browser detection. There's no other way to determine a specific rendering engine, feature detection solves a whole different set of problems, it doesn't solve for rendering quirks. In this case the browser is unknown, so they use the most compatible version of the page.
    - michaelt 7y ago
      If by "the most compatible version of the page" you mean they deny access, you have an unusually generous definition of compatibility :)
      - Someone1234 7y ago
        It doesn't deny access. I just tested it, it just gives you a version of YT with fewer features and a dated UI.
  - chronogram 7y ago
    While they advocate against doing just that.
notatoad 7y ago
> Ironically, the same page states “We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge.” it shouldn't be that difficult to understand that the latest version of edge means the latest production version, not the brand new complete overhaul of the browser on a different platform that's currently in preview mode.
- dmitriid 7y ago
  It shouldn’t be that difficult to understand that stopping a user from using your website based on the browser the user is using is bad. Just immediately from the top of my mind: a new browser developer testing site compatibility, a search bot indexing the website.
- tracker1 7y ago
  The completely new overhaul browser should be detected as Chrome, or the new Edg, they had to add code to disable it.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    The edge preview sends a different user agent string depending on the website. Maybe edge has just started sending a new UA that YouTube doesn't recognize?
Forge36 7y ago
I wonder if they are using browser detection instead of feature detection. I don't know when YouTube started feeling so sloppy with it's coding (Gmail has also started feeling this way as it went very JS heavy). I am sightly biased against most JS in the presentation layer
- JeremyBanks 7y ago
  It didn't help that much of Google went all-in on Polymer when it was originally built on standards that nobody else was interested in implementing, ensuring that non-Chrome browsers got a laggy polyfilled experience. It remains an awful framework, and YouTube's tooling has been incredibly slow since migrating.
IloveHN84 7y ago
Looks like a new browser war is beginning.. I wonder if Brave can work with it
wlesieutre 7y ago
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 version. I wonder if YouTube somehow ended triggering legacy Edge user agent on account of being a video site?
- judge2020 7y ago
  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 user-agent in the Chromium version: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3739.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/75.0.109.0
  - jve 7y ago
    Technical correction. Edge had its own engine: Spartan > The Spartan rendering engine (edgehtml.dll) is a new component and separate from Trident (mshtml.dll). The new engine began as a fork of Trident, but has since diverged rapidly over the past many months, similar to how several other browser engines have started as forks prior to diverging. The new rendering engine is also being built with a very different set of principles than Trident - for example: a focus on interoperability and the removal of document modes. https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-explorer-of-course https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-...
    - inlined 7y ago
      Thank god they forked it. Parts of Trident were older than unit testing was a best practice. The cultural best thing to do was wall off those parts and never touch them because regressions would be impossible to find. I once did a bug fix for an assertion in the Trident. It’s still one of the hardest bugs I’ve ever solved. It was hundreds of stack frames deep in recursion (DOM layout code) in a function that was several pages long and had bidirectional goto statements. If I didn’t have the amazing features of Windbg it would have been impossible to solve. In the end it was a variant of the C++ slicing problem (if you store a subclass in an array of superclass you’ll chop off the member variables of the subclass).
berbec 7y ago
I spoofed my user agent as chrome, and it works fine. I'm using the latest Edge Canary
- leppr 7y ago
  This kind of shenanigan is why everyone should have a user-agent spoofer on their browser. I even think Firefox should ship with it natively. Far too many sites ban non-Chromium (sometimes even non-Chrome) browsers.
pluma 7y ago
Having a whitelist of tested browsers you officially support is understandable. Having a blacklist of tested browsers you know to be so incompatible that the site is unusable for them would be even better. But the optimal course would be that if a browser is not on your whitelist, you show a warning but allow the user to decide to give it a try nevertheless and have an option to go back to the degraded but more compatible legacy version of the site. I understand building your intranet tool to only work in a small range of handpicked browsers or devices. But we're talking about a public video platform by a multi-billion dollar company with billions (well, 1.9 bn last I heard) of monthly active users.
- runarberg 7y ago
  The currently agreed best practice is to detect if a feature is supported and gracefully degrade if it isn’t. Do this on a feature by feature bases so that users gradually get better experience as they upgrade their browsers. However, as other comments have pointed out, feature detection is not always optimal—or even possible—so a whitelist is sometimes needed. This is where YouTube fails. It wrongly doesn’t add the new Chromium based Edge browser to their whitelist. And even then the site doesn’t progressively enhance as it detects supported features.
danShumway 7y ago
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 forgotten the dumb "best viewed in IE" banners that magically vanished as soon as the user-agent changed? Heck, even more recently the original version of Edge had to literally start lying to websites about its user-agent just so they would stop serving alternative IE hacks. Yeah it's easier in the short term to do browser-detection and whitelisting for rendering quirks and bugs -- it's just unreliable and error-prone over the long term, and hurts the overall web browser ecosystem. Google should be setting an example for ordinary developers here, not encouraging hacky shortcuts. If Google isn't going to take the time to think about progressive enhancement from the very start of their experiments, who else is going to?
- maratd 7y ago
  > user-agent check ... don't assume any ill intent. A user-agent check is ill intent for exactly the reasons you state: > we've known for years that feature detection is preferable to user-agent detection Wasn't Google the company that pushed this in the early days of Chrome?
  - mcny 7y ago
    > Wasn't Google the company that pushed this in the early days of Chrome? The official party line had never changed. From what I know, Google still recommends that we mortals use feature detection.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  In my experience, while many people don't like to admit it, useragent detection is still one of the best ways to handle many bugs and edge cases in large applications. Feature detection works well for new features or well documented failures, but it quickly begins to break down in many edge cases. For example, mobile Safari shipped a broken implementation of IndexedDB for a while and detecting that was a big pain, but swapping the known bad versions to use websql or localstorage worked great. Edge (pre chromium) had some really weird bug with the JIT and the javascript `.call` function for a bit, but there was no realistic way that I could detect just that bug, so I fell back to useragent detection. There are tons of bugs that I've found over just the last few years that are due to one bad version, or some specific OS/browser/hardware combo, or are just flakey and hard to trigger with code in the page, therefore they are hard to "feature detect". I have a feeling the amount of those kinds of bugs that you see and their frequency only gets worse when you have monumentally huge amounts of traffic and users as someone like Youtube does, and while I think we should still hold them to a good standard, I can see why they would fallback to UA detection. After all, it's better to have a well working experience for most users (even with a subset of the features) than one which breaks 1% of the time (and every time it breaks, like it or not, the users are going to blame the site not the browser). What we really need (in my opinion anyway) is a way of doing UA detection that is much more scoped to specific versions, and remove the ability for those feature detections to accidentally impact new versions or other browsers (either accidentally or on purpose). Something like setting the browser name/version to a hash of the version number and a secret for each version, and possibly doing the same with other parts of the UA (like hardware/device name and OS name/version). Then people like youtube could block known broken or bad useragents from getting some features to avoid serving code that breaks to those users, and then the onus is on them to update their lists every time a new version comes out. There are obviously ways around it (UA checker as a service?), but it at least makes it harder for lazyness to take over.
nullwasamistake 7y ago
They have been doing this to Firefox and Edge for ages. See https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-microsoft-edge-intern-claims https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-... And check out the embedded links to similar accusations by the Firefox CEO among others. It's hard to believe this isn't intentional. What's hilarious is that the new Edge IS essentially Chrome, making their BS more obvious than before. Chrome is the new IE
addicted 7y ago
This appears to be a simple user agent issue. I doubt this was intentional and/or conspiratorial.
deleted 7y ago
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mugwort13 7y ago
I am using Version 76.0.167.1 (Official build) dev (64-bit). I can watch YouTube videos no problem. Chat does not work. In my opinion: YoueTube, please disable chat for all browsers. It is a useless feature that causes problems. Thank you.
- knd775 7y ago
  Chat on YouTube is incredibly important. Maybe you don't see value in it, but it's integral to the community feel of the site.
RL_Quine 7y ago
https://files.catbox.moe/8a4psl.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/8a4psl.jpeg Wonder if they see the irony of blocking adblockers.
- ajnin 7y ago
  They're not blocking adblockers, they're blocking users (or browsers) who use adblockers. I don't see it as irony, they're just trying to protect their revenue stream, which I think is fair game, they're free to decide if they want to serve the data to some client or not.
clarry 7y ago
Shame I don't have the screenshot anymore, but Facebook used to actually blacklist links2. Changing the user agent to a random sequence of expletives allowed me to view the content...
joaobeno 7y ago
Another example to show why we need to get Firefox at least on the 20% market-share... Google is doing with Chrome exactly what Microsoft did with IE...
deleted 7y ago
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dagaci 7y ago
Google has one of the best QA in the business. As one of the Firefox developers said a few weeks ago, Google will keep "accidentally" introducing lots of pointless little changes to create glitches and irritations into the experience when using rival browsers. It happened savagely to Windows Phone, no one cared. I remember trying to browse Gmail on a Windows Phone it was like going back to the 1993. It happened to EdgeHTML: youtube videos just simply didn't play on Edge. And i'm sure this will happen to EdgeChromium. Why? because EdgeChromium is a small threat. Only a small threat because everyone uses google search and not Bing. And astonishingly in 2019 Google search is still even Microsoft's own sites than Bing... in 2019. So the moment you try EdgeChromium you are confront with that
MikusR 7y ago
From https://twitter.com/gus33000/status/1133402355267977216 https://twitter.com/gus33000/status/1133402355267977216 .js for youtube has html5_vp9_live_blacklist_edge=true Chromium Edge is fully detected and has flags assigned to it https://t.co/9TLibSDHqS https://t.co/9TLibSDHqS
tracker1 7y ago
It's really time for Anti-Trust regulators to start looking into Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter already.
- knd775 7y ago
  Why on earth is Twitter on this list? Including YouTube and Facebook is already questionable, but Twitter? Anti-trust? What?
ravenstine 7y ago
Isn't this obviously anti-competitive?
emptyparadise 7y ago
This is the fifth or so site that Google has broken for Chromium Edge in the past month. It's clearly no coincidence - it's the same constant stream of "oops" that plagues Mozilla, never ending "teehee we don't support beta browsers (while working fine with chrome canary)" or "teehee accidental UA detection mistake (when Microsoft specifically made the new Edge user agent different from the old)" incidents. Microsoft should make the new Edge pretend to be Chrome, full time. Just never mention Edge or Edg or Microsoft in the UA at all. I'm sure they can tell Netflix to detect their fancy 4K DRM differently. Of course that can be used to detect new Edge still, but then at least it's just that much harder to say "oops" when you have to go out of your way to detect a specific feature.
RandomGuyDTB 7y ago
This is really ugly in terms of practice (get MS to use Chromium and then blacklist them from new YouTube) but I specifically disable the polymer (new) YouTube theme. It makes it look bloated. Some features aren't even available in new YouTube. Only downside is no dark theme.
rrix2 7y ago
Good old google https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871237240852480 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871237240852480
zaarn 7y ago
Of course this is all an accident and Google will later promise to change their workflow to ensure it never happens again (until next week).
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  At what point does a company consistently make enough "mistakes" that you just take them at their word that they are incompetent and stop trusting them?
  - zaarn 7y ago
    Obviously not before they have completely taken over the market with no effective recourse remaining!
lousken 7y ago
I am surprised we still rely on browser agent, if HTTP2 is supported on the client side, i'd consider that as a modern browser and the rest can be done in javascript.
AaronFriel 7y ago
Google employees in these threads: quit Hanlon razoring your own company. Google has done this repeatedly with Microsoft, from blocking Maps and YouTube on Windows Phone to this. The blocking is always specific and based on badlisting Microsoft version strings, and demonstrably has not affected Firefox (even ESR versions!), Safari, etc. I've posted elsewhere in this topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033057) a way you can test this yourselves. They're badlisting Chromium based Edge, not, as so many seem to assume, using a goodlist of browsers they tested. I'm sure it's difficult to imagine the "Don't Be Evil" company doing malicious, anti-competitive things, but that's what's happening here, as it's happened many times before. Punishing and deterring Microsoft Edge users is a thing that someone at Google made a conscious decision about. Test it yourselves.
stephenr 7y ago
The irony that Microsoft sold out the web and jumped into bed with Chromium because they didn’t want to fix their video playback, only to have YouTube kick their new browser back to a worse experience is beyond amazing on this.
cryptos 7y ago
Google has a track record of "uuups, it wasn't intentional" issues.
hollerith 7y ago
Many here claim that this is just an innocent mistake by the Youtube team. If it is, it will be corrected. I'm going to set myself a reminder to revisit this story 6 weeks from now. If you send an email address to the email address in my HN profile, I will send you exactly one email 6 weeks from now describing briefly what I found out about the evolution of this story over the next 6 weeks, then delete your email address from my records.
junar 7y ago
Update from YouTube: "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-they-are-committed-to-supporting-youtube-on-edge/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-says-the...

250 points by MikusR 7y ago

bovermyer 7y ago

I'm going to assume this is accidental, not intentional.

jdmichal 7y ago
Given a comment on the article that user-agent switching seems to fix it, I'm going to assume the same. Just another overly-aggressive user-agent check, instead of using feature checks.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y ago
Can you explain? To me it looks like YouTube intentionally, not accidentally, updated their browser block list to include Microsoft Edge Preview.
- Conlectus 7y ago
  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.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    The change in useragent would indicate that if they didn't Add specifically to exclude it, it should detect as Chrome.
    - knd775 7y ago
      It sends 3 different useragents in different circumstances for some reason. Edg, Edge, and Chrome. This case is definitely the Edge team's fault.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        The circumstances are domain-specific and it's been clear from the beginning that "Edgium" has (consistently) only been sending `Edg` to youtube.com from the beginning of the public release. Since the site in question's behavior changed, it likely wasn't the Edge team's fault.
acdha 7y ago
I suspect that's true but also raises an interesting question: how much effort should Google be expected to expend supporting other browsers? Not testing / optimizing in anything other than Chrome has lead to numerous issues in the past which were not deliberate sabotage but it feels like there's something dodgy about negligence which aligns with business goals, too, just as there was when Microsoft didn't support anything but IE or consistently broke things like MSDN on non-IE browsers.
- sergiosgc 7y ago
  > how much effort should Google be expected to expend supporting other browsers? Given that Chrome is dominant, the answer is "a lot of effort". Anything less, and it looks like abuse of dominant position.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
This is what Google is counting on, former Mozilla exec has a strong take on Google's constant use of "Oops": https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... To me, this story (and the previous ones about all of the other Google apps breaking for new Edge, despite being Chromium, and not an issue for almost any other company on the web), is going to show Microsoft what happens when they get in bed with a scorpion. Switching to Google technologies is almost always a mistake.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  How would continuing to use their own browser engine have helped them in any way? You imply that other options would have better outcomes for Microsoft without having thought through what they would be.

Causality1 7y ago

I hate this, though it is a kind of poetic justice for the way Windows 10 fights tooth and nail to keep you from switching your default browser away from Edge.

jdmichal 7y ago
What exactly do you mean by "fights tooth and nail"? I had to reinstall my laptop a few months ago, and the experience was "navigate to Firefox download site, download, install, set default browser"... Same as it has ever been.
- pluma 7y ago
  Off the top of my head: * when switching default browsers, Windows suggests you give Edge a try instead * at some point I got a Windows notification suggesting that I try Edge instead of the browser I was using IIRC they used to nag users more in the past but I think the notification I got also included an option to not be reminded again.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    Literally every Google website tries to get me to download Chrome whenever I use firefox or ie. Every. Single. Time. 2 attempts from Microsoft... not so bad.
    - pluma 7y ago
      I agree that two attempts isn't so bad. I think most users are upset because the notifications happened a lot more frequently in the past and using notifications from the OS for ads comes across as pretty slimy (because you only expect the OS to tell you when something important happens).
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        iOS, at least, sends just as many "Tips" notifications that also border on being ads for Apple and trusted third party applications, and I've never seen anyone near as harshly complain about "ads in iOS".

tantalor 7y ago

> randomly disabled the modern YouTube experience Sounds like an experiment designed to measure the effect of the new version vs. old version for the new browser. > it’s very odd that Google would prevent users... from using the modern YouTube experience Not odd; experimentation is very common. > This is most likely an error on Google’s part More likely author doesn't understand what they're talking about.

dubcanada 7y ago

Basically Google doesn't allow development build Edge users to browse the preview YouTube? Doesn't seem like someone at Google hates Edge, just looks like they didn't test their brand new YouTube on every browser yet so just limited it to heavy Chrome users. Or am I wrong?

jsty 7y ago
Quite possibly they have their whitelist of 'tested with' browsers for the new experience, and Edge Preview wasn't one of those, so got shown the 'use a supported browser' modal.
sylens 7y ago
Edge Preview runs on Chromium
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  I thought it was only "based on" and distinct from Chromium?
  - tracker1 7y ago
    It uses the Blink web engine, pages themselves will render exactly the same.

Conlectus 7y ago

Almost certainly unintentional. They're likely confused by a new User-Agent string or some feature detection gone wrong.

013a 7y ago
That's almost definitely the case. But there is such a thing as maliciously unintentional, and this seriously keeps happening with every browser that isn't Chrome. For example; Google is a technically advanced company, so they must have a CI check somewhere in their Youtube release process which confirms that a suite of browser tests pass before a greenlight is given on release. Do you think Chrome is one of the browsers included in this test? Do you think Firefox, Edge, and Safari are as well? Given all of the external evidence we have that they continually break the experience for non-Chrome users, even if they were just oversights. Maybe Edge released an update that changed a UA string, Youtube is too strict, and it had nothing to do with a new release. Now ask yourself: Is there any chance something like this could happen with Chrome? Of course not; they coordinate and ensure the experience is Perfect on Chrome. Is that less evil, given Google's overwhelming control over the internet?
- tracker1 7y ago
  The new useragent has a later Chrome/version, and changed from Edge/version to Edg/version ... in this case Chrome and Edg align. In any case, they'd have had to ADD additional detection to not detect as chrome in this case.

bad_good_guy 7y ago

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.

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
I have no problem at all using Google Drive and Docs on Firefox, what specific issues have you run into?
- 013a 7y ago
  There are a couple minor things. For example: inside of a Doc, in Chrome you can right click -> edit menu -> copy/paste, but in Firefox it tells you that you must use CMD+C/CMD+V. Non-Chrome browsers also used to be unable to upload folders, but this has been fixed for a while. Calling the experience Handicapped is extreme, but there's clear preferential treatment toward Chrome.
  - AlphaWeaver 7y ago
    If I recall correctly, this is actually due to a security restriction that Google has circumvented since it built both the browser and the application. If you could right click to paste, that would mean it would be possible for Javascript to access your clipboard on any site you go to. Firefox enforces the appropriate security setting here, Chrome simply has some sort of workaround built in by Google to allow them to make the UX slightly better on their own site.
    - noir_lord 7y ago
      > Chrome simply has some sort of workaround built in by Google to allow them to make the UX slightly better on their own site. The optics on that are potentially terrible. The dominant browser from the dominant search engine company deliberately breaks a standard it enforces elsewhere only on its own sites. Ouch.

judge2020 7y ago

The polymer UI does seem to work perfectly if you set the user-agent to Chrome Windows in devtools -> network conditions.

Forge36 7y ago
I'm surprised Google still uses useragent parsing for browser detection.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Everyone still uses browser detection. There's no other way to determine a specific rendering engine, feature detection solves a whole different set of problems, it doesn't solve for rendering quirks. In this case the browser is unknown, so they use the most compatible version of the page.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    If by "the most compatible version of the page" you mean they deny access, you have an unusually generous definition of compatibility :)
    - Someone1234 7y ago
      It doesn't deny access. I just tested it, it just gives you a version of YT with fewer features and a dated UI.
- chronogram 7y ago
  While they advocate against doing just that.

notatoad 7y ago

> Ironically, the same page states “We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge.” it shouldn't be that difficult to understand that the latest version of edge means the latest production version, not the brand new complete overhaul of the browser on a different platform that's currently in preview mode.

dmitriid 7y ago
It shouldn’t be that difficult to understand that stopping a user from using your website based on the browser the user is using is bad. Just immediately from the top of my mind: a new browser developer testing site compatibility, a search bot indexing the website.
tracker1 7y ago
The completely new overhaul browser should be detected as Chrome, or the new Edg, they had to add code to disable it.
- notatoad 7y ago
  The edge preview sends a different user agent string depending on the website. Maybe edge has just started sending a new UA that YouTube doesn't recognize?

Forge36 7y ago

I wonder if they are using browser detection instead of feature detection. I don't know when YouTube started feeling so sloppy with it's coding (Gmail has also started feeling this way as it went very JS heavy). I am sightly biased against most JS in the presentation layer

JeremyBanks 7y ago
It didn't help that much of Google went all-in on Polymer when it was originally built on standards that nobody else was interested in implementing, ensuring that non-Chrome browsers got a laggy polyfilled experience. It remains an awful framework, and YouTube's tooling has been incredibly slow since migrating.

IloveHN84 7y ago

Looks like a new browser war is beginning.. I wonder if Brave can work with it

wlesieutre 7y ago

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 version. I wonder if YouTube somehow ended triggering legacy Edge user agent on account of being a video site?

judge2020 7y ago
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 user-agent in the Chromium version: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3739.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/75.0.109.0
- jve 7y ago
  Technical correction. Edge had its own engine: Spartan > The Spartan rendering engine (edgehtml.dll) is a new component and separate from Trident (mshtml.dll). The new engine began as a fork of Trident, but has since diverged rapidly over the past many months, similar to how several other browser engines have started as forks prior to diverging. The new rendering engine is also being built with a very different set of principles than Trident - for example: a focus on interoperability and the removal of document modes. https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-explorer-of-course https://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-...
  - inlined 7y ago
    Thank god they forked it. Parts of Trident were older than unit testing was a best practice. The cultural best thing to do was wall off those parts and never touch them because regressions would be impossible to find. I once did a bug fix for an assertion in the Trident. It’s still one of the hardest bugs I’ve ever solved. It was hundreds of stack frames deep in recursion (DOM layout code) in a function that was several pages long and had bidirectional goto statements. If I didn’t have the amazing features of Windbg it would have been impossible to solve. In the end it was a variant of the C++ slicing problem (if you store a subclass in an array of superclass you’ll chop off the member variables of the subclass).

berbec 7y ago

I spoofed my user agent as chrome, and it works fine. I'm using the latest Edge Canary

leppr 7y ago
This kind of shenanigan is why everyone should have a user-agent spoofer on their browser. I even think Firefox should ship with it natively. Far too many sites ban non-Chromium (sometimes even non-Chrome) browsers.

pluma 7y ago

Having a whitelist of tested browsers you officially support is understandable. Having a blacklist of tested browsers you know to be so incompatible that the site is unusable for them would be even better. But the optimal course would be that if a browser is not on your whitelist, you show a warning but allow the user to decide to give it a try nevertheless and have an option to go back to the degraded but more compatible legacy version of the site. I understand building your intranet tool to only work in a small range of handpicked browsers or devices. But we're talking about a public video platform by a multi-billion dollar company with billions (well, 1.9 bn last I heard) of monthly active users.

runarberg 7y ago
The currently agreed best practice is to detect if a feature is supported and gracefully degrade if it isn’t. Do this on a feature by feature bases so that users gradually get better experience as they upgrade their browsers. However, as other comments have pointed out, feature detection is not always optimal—or even possible—so a whitelist is sometimes needed. This is where YouTube fails. It wrongly doesn’t add the new Chromium based Edge browser to their whitelist. And even then the site doesn’t progressively enhance as it detects supported features.

danShumway 7y ago

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 forgotten the dumb "best viewed in IE" banners that magically vanished as soon as the user-agent changed? Heck, even more recently the original version of Edge had to literally start lying to websites about its user-agent just so they would stop serving alternative IE hacks. Yeah it's easier in the short term to do browser-detection and whitelisting for rendering quirks and bugs -- it's just unreliable and error-prone over the long term, and hurts the overall web browser ecosystem. Google should be setting an example for ordinary developers here, not encouraging hacky shortcuts. If Google isn't going to take the time to think about progressive enhancement from the very start of their experiments, who else is going to?

maratd 7y ago
> user-agent check ... don't assume any ill intent. A user-agent check is ill intent for exactly the reasons you state: > we've known for years that feature detection is preferable to user-agent detection Wasn't Google the company that pushed this in the early days of Chrome?
- mcny 7y ago
  > Wasn't Google the company that pushed this in the early days of Chrome? The official party line had never changed. From what I know, Google still recommends that we mortals use feature detection.
Klathmon 7y ago
In my experience, while many people don't like to admit it, useragent detection is still one of the best ways to handle many bugs and edge cases in large applications. Feature detection works well for new features or well documented failures, but it quickly begins to break down in many edge cases. For example, mobile Safari shipped a broken implementation of IndexedDB for a while and detecting that was a big pain, but swapping the known bad versions to use websql or localstorage worked great. Edge (pre chromium) had some really weird bug with the JIT and the javascript `.call` function for a bit, but there was no realistic way that I could detect just that bug, so I fell back to useragent detection. There are tons of bugs that I've found over just the last few years that are due to one bad version, or some specific OS/browser/hardware combo, or are just flakey and hard to trigger with code in the page, therefore they are hard to "feature detect". I have a feeling the amount of those kinds of bugs that you see and their frequency only gets worse when you have monumentally huge amounts of traffic and users as someone like Youtube does, and while I think we should still hold them to a good standard, I can see why they would fallback to UA detection. After all, it's better to have a well working experience for most users (even with a subset of the features) than one which breaks 1% of the time (and every time it breaks, like it or not, the users are going to blame the site not the browser). What we really need (in my opinion anyway) is a way of doing UA detection that is much more scoped to specific versions, and remove the ability for those feature detections to accidentally impact new versions or other browsers (either accidentally or on purpose). Something like setting the browser name/version to a hash of the version number and a secret for each version, and possibly doing the same with other parts of the UA (like hardware/device name and OS name/version). Then people like youtube could block known broken or bad useragents from getting some features to avoid serving code that breaks to those users, and then the onus is on them to update their lists every time a new version comes out. There are obviously ways around it (UA checker as a service?), but it at least makes it harder for lazyness to take over.

nullwasamistake 7y ago

They have been doing this to Firefox and Edge for ages. See https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-microsoft-edge-intern-claims https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-... And check out the embedded links to similar accusations by the Firefox CEO among others. It's hard to believe this isn't intentional. What's hilarious is that the new Edge IS essentially Chrome, making their BS more obvious than before. Chrome is the new IE

addicted 7y ago

This appears to be a simple user agent issue. I doubt this was intentional and/or conspiratorial.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mugwort13 7y ago

I am using Version 76.0.167.1 (Official build) dev (64-bit). I can watch YouTube videos no problem. Chat does not work. In my opinion: YoueTube, please disable chat for all browsers. It is a useless feature that causes problems. Thank you.

knd775 7y ago
Chat on YouTube is incredibly important. Maybe you don't see value in it, but it's integral to the community feel of the site.

RL_Quine 7y ago

https://files.catbox.moe/8a4psl.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/8a4psl.jpeg Wonder if they see the irony of blocking adblockers.

ajnin 7y ago
They're not blocking adblockers, they're blocking users (or browsers) who use adblockers. I don't see it as irony, they're just trying to protect their revenue stream, which I think is fair game, they're free to decide if they want to serve the data to some client or not.

clarry 7y ago

Shame I don't have the screenshot anymore, but Facebook used to actually blacklist links2. Changing the user agent to a random sequence of expletives allowed me to view the content...

joaobeno 7y ago

Another example to show why we need to get Firefox at least on the 20% market-share... Google is doing with Chrome exactly what Microsoft did with IE...

deleted 7y ago

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dagaci 7y ago

Google has one of the best QA in the business. As one of the Firefox developers said a few weeks ago, Google will keep "accidentally" introducing lots of pointless little changes to create glitches and irritations into the experience when using rival browsers. It happened savagely to Windows Phone, no one cared. I remember trying to browse Gmail on a Windows Phone it was like going back to the 1993. It happened to EdgeHTML: youtube videos just simply didn't play on Edge. And i'm sure this will happen to EdgeChromium. Why? because EdgeChromium is a small threat. Only a small threat because everyone uses google search and not Bing. And astonishingly in 2019 Google search is still even Microsoft's own sites than Bing... in 2019. So the moment you try EdgeChromium you are confront with that

MikusR 7y ago

From https://twitter.com/gus33000/status/1133402355267977216 https://twitter.com/gus33000/status/1133402355267977216 .js for youtube has html5_vp9_live_blacklist_edge=true Chromium Edge is fully detected and has flags assigned to it https://t.co/9TLibSDHqS https://t.co/9TLibSDHqS

tracker1 7y ago

It's really time for Anti-Trust regulators to start looking into Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter already.

knd775 7y ago
Why on earth is Twitter on this list? Including YouTube and Facebook is already questionable, but Twitter? Anti-trust? What?

ravenstine 7y ago

Isn't this obviously anti-competitive?

emptyparadise 7y ago

This is the fifth or so site that Google has broken for Chromium Edge in the past month. It's clearly no coincidence - it's the same constant stream of "oops" that plagues Mozilla, never ending "teehee we don't support beta browsers (while working fine with chrome canary)" or "teehee accidental UA detection mistake (when Microsoft specifically made the new Edge user agent different from the old)" incidents. Microsoft should make the new Edge pretend to be Chrome, full time. Just never mention Edge or Edg or Microsoft in the UA at all. I'm sure they can tell Netflix to detect their fancy 4K DRM differently. Of course that can be used to detect new Edge still, but then at least it's just that much harder to say "oops" when you have to go out of your way to detect a specific feature.

RandomGuyDTB 7y ago

This is really ugly in terms of practice (get MS to use Chromium and then blacklist them from new YouTube) but I specifically disable the polymer (new) YouTube theme. It makes it look bloated. Some features aren't even available in new YouTube. Only downside is no dark theme.

rrix2 7y ago

Good old google https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871237240852480 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871237240852480

zaarn 7y ago

Of course this is all an accident and Google will later promise to change their workflow to ensure it never happens again (until next week).

WorldMaker 7y ago
At what point does a company consistently make enough "mistakes" that you just take them at their word that they are incompetent and stop trusting them?
- zaarn 7y ago
  Obviously not before they have completely taken over the market with no effective recourse remaining!

lousken 7y ago

I am surprised we still rely on browser agent, if HTTP2 is supported on the client side, i'd consider that as a modern browser and the rest can be done in javascript.

AaronFriel 7y ago

Google employees in these threads: quit Hanlon razoring your own company. Google has done this repeatedly with Microsoft, from blocking Maps and YouTube on Windows Phone to this. The blocking is always specific and based on badlisting Microsoft version strings, and demonstrably has not affected Firefox (even ESR versions!), Safari, etc. I've posted elsewhere in this topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033057) a way you can test this yourselves. They're badlisting Chromium based Edge, not, as so many seem to assume, using a goodlist of browsers they tested. I'm sure it's difficult to imagine the "Don't Be Evil" company doing malicious, anti-competitive things, but that's what's happening here, as it's happened many times before. Punishing and deterring Microsoft Edge users is a thing that someone at Google made a conscious decision about. Test it yourselves.

stephenr 7y ago

The irony that Microsoft sold out the web and jumped into bed with Chromium because they didn’t want to fix their video playback, only to have YouTube kick their new browser back to a worse experience is beyond amazing on this.

cryptos 7y ago

Google has a track record of "uuups, it wasn't intentional" issues.

hollerith 7y ago

Many here claim that this is just an innocent mistake by the Youtube team. If it is, it will be corrected. I'm going to set myself a reminder to revisit this story 6 weeks from now. If you send an email address to the email address in my HN profile, I will send you exactly one email 6 weeks from now describing briefly what I found out about the evolution of this story over the next 6 weeks, then delete your email address from my records.

junar 7y ago

Update from YouTube: "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-they-are-committed-to-supporting-youtube-on-edge/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-says-the...