
Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube - MikusR
https://www.thurrott.com/google/207371/google-now-forces-microsoft-edge-preview-users-to-use-chrome-for-the-modern-youtube-experience
======
danShumway
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?

~~~
mattnewton
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just
personally.

This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature
detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either
have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we
have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features
and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript once we know they will be able to handle
it.

Feature detection absolutely is used for some things, but it’s unreasonable
from a latency perspective to serve the bundle of all possible sites and make
all these decisions on the client. We aren’t talking about polyfills here- A
lot of these features mean we are shipping a totally differently lay out
because this webkit uses flex box 2009, or mobile safari 8 has a layout bug,
or IE has a quirk around event bubbling in video elements, etc.

Feature detection stops being better when a) your supported browser list
stretches into the early 2000s around the world and b) you are in a latency
sensitive environment where it is unacceptable to degrade performance of the
latest browsers. If you aren’t bound by those constraints, or the detection
has a cheap fallback so it isn’t meaningfully impacting latency, I agree with
feature detection.

~~~
kchoudhu
It's Youtube, not high frequency trading.

~~~
danShumway
The logic is apparently that we can't do progressive enhancement because it
would force us to make a second network request, but we can rely on
unstandardized APIs that force us to ship polyfills that make our site slow on
every other browser that's not Chrome.

Every decision, from progressive enhancement to supporting bleeding-edge
features comes with tradeoffs. Youtube is still choosing tradeoffs, it's just
choosing them based on what will work best in Chrome specifically.

~~~
mattnewton
I agree there are just a bunch of trade offs, and this shows you can’t please
everyone. If you ship large bundles of polyfills people are sad they get some
slow JavaScript, and if you give them fallback html and JavaScript that
renders quick and supports their feature set, they are sad they didn’t get the
same feature set as chrome latest. You have to minimize the fallback sadness
as well as keep pushing better and better cutting edge experiences. This
demanding environment is one thing I do like about the job even if it makes me
feel constantly unqualified and doomed to fail :D

Speaking personally from my time before working at Google, the second network
request is definitely the worse of the two options if you can’t do anything
until it completes for most people- the round trip time kills you in the
median US case I am familiar with.

At Apple for my small project we didn’t have these constraints so we just
shipped a giant JavaScript bundle with feature detection and browser-side re-
rendering that worked alright.

~~~
stonogo
No, this shows you're not interested in pleasing _anyone_. There is no
universe in which instructing the user to _change browser software_ is
preferable to adding milliseconds of latency at pageload. This attitude is so
wrong it's almost sinister.

~~~
mattnewton
I am not defending YouTube redirecting a UA it hadn’t seen to download chrome
when that UA explicitly went to /new for the new experience. I don’t know what
happened there, and if I did I probably couldn’t say.

I am defending using the UA to tier responses based on the principle that it
lowers the latency before the page is useful to the user, and I don’t see how
that is a sinister practice.

------
wlesieutre
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
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

~~~
emilecantin
Oh man, what a mess! The UA string mentions almost every browser except the
one it actually is...

I understand the reasons, but I think it might be time for a big "reset", and
for browsers to stop lying about who they are.

~~~
Analemma_
> 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.

~~~
emilecantin
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.

~~~
jefftk
I was working on a product that did user-agent sniffing to figure out which
image formats were supported (when to serve WebP). A feature-detection based
approach is substantially slower because it breaks the preload scanner:
[https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-parse-the-user-
agent](https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-parse-the-user-agent)

~~~
Dylan16807
That was true in 2014! But since 2015 we've had the <picture> element to pick
different versions of an image based on screen or capability.

------
AaronFriel
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.

------
dagaci
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

------
notatoad
> 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.

~~~
tracker1
The completely new overhaul browser should be detected as Chrome, or the new
Edg, they had to add code to disable it.

~~~
notatoad
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?

------
MikusR
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)

------
joaobeno
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...

------
bad_good_guy
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.

~~~
rchaud
On OSX, Firefox and Google Drive work fine, but Gmail is a whole other kettle
of fish. I don't know what UI change they implemented last year or so, but it
is nearly unusable on Firefox, from absurdly long load times, to a 2-3 second
wait for contextual options to appear when you right click.

Switched to ProtonMail's free tier and will gradually migrate everything there
aside from newsletter and software beta signups. Those emails are mostly trash
anyway.

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
You can change email forwarding in Gmail to forward everything to the
Protonmail. That's how I initially transferred. A year and still changing
email addresses, I have a ton of accounts to go.

~~~
rchaud
The free tier has 500MB storage, so this gives me a chance to think about
what's worth migrating and what's not.

------
dubcanada
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?

~~~
sylens
Edge Preview runs on Chromium

~~~
diffeomorphism
I thought it was only "based on" and distinct from Chromium?

~~~
tracker1
It uses the Blink web engine, pages themselves will render exactly the same.

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

~~~
013a
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
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.

------
pluma
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
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.

------
rrix2
Good old google
[https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871237240852480](https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871237240852480)

------
RL_Quine
[https://files.catbox.moe/8a4psl.jpeg](https://files.catbox.moe/8a4psl.jpeg)

Wonder if they see the irony of blocking adblockers.

~~~
ajnin
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.

------
tantalor
> 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.

------
tracker1
It's really time for Anti-Trust regulators to start looking into Google,
YouTube, Facebook and Twitter already.

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

------
emptyparadise
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
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.

------
mugwort13
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
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.

------
junar
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-
the...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-says-they-are-
committed-to-supporting-youtube-on-edge/)

------
clarry
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...

------
hollerith
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.

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

~~~
ocdtrekkie
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...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-
google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/)

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
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.

------
zaarn
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
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
Obviously not before they have completely taken over the market with no
effective recourse remaining!

------
judge2020
The polymer UI does seem to work perfectly if you set the user-agent to Chrome
Windows in devtools -> network conditions.

~~~
Forge36
I'm surprised Google still uses useragent parsing for browser detection.

~~~
Someone1234
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
If by "the most compatible version of the page" you mean they deny access, you
have an unusually generous definition of compatibility :)

~~~
Someone1234
It doesn't deny access. I just tested it, it just gives you a version of YT
with fewer features and a dated UI.

------
Forge36
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
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.

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

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

~~~
leppr
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.

------
stephenr
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.

------
lousken
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.

------
ravenstine
Isn't this obviously anti-competitive?

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

------
IloveHN84
Looks like a new browser war is beginning.. I wonder if Brave can work with it

------
Causality1
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
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
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
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
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
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".

------
nullwasamistake
They have been doing this to Firefox and Edge for ages. See
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-
youtube-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148736/google-youtube-
microsoft-edge-intern-claims)

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

