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

[AaronFriel]

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/537.36 Ed/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/537.36 Edg/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/537.36 Edge/76.0.167.1

There should be no doubt this is malicious. They're specifically targeting Microsoft Edge. Varying the string away from the real Edge string (Edg/76.0.167.1) gives you the proper experience. They're badlisting Microsoft Edge (Edgium/Chromium based Edge), not goodlisting Chrome.

[pandres95 → AaronFriel]

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

[AaronFriel → pandres95]

I suspect you didn't try out the user agent strings. Only one of those 4 is blocked.