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

https://www.thurrott.com/google/207371/google-now-forces-microsoft-edge-preview-users-to-use-chrome-for-the-modern-youtube-experience

by MikusR • 7 years ago

250 200 7 years ago

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bovermyer• 7 years ago

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

jdmichal2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Can you explain? To me it looks like YouTube intentionally, not accidentally, updated their browser block list to include Microsoft Edge Preview.

Conlectus2• 7 years 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.

acdha• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

ocdtrekkie3• 7 years 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...

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• 7 years 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.

Causality14• 7 years 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.

jdmichal2• 7 years 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.

pluma3• 7 years 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.

Causality14• 7 years ago

The Bing search results beg you not to install it, then on the Default Apps menu Edge gets a "recommended for Windows 10" label unlike the other options, THEN if you try to select something else you get a popup that says "Before you switch, try Microsoft Edge-it's new, it's fast, and it's built for Windows 10." and a "Check it out" button in a bold black box, with "Switch anyway" in light grey-on-grey text underneath.

It's scummy and it's insulting.

iggldiggl• 7 years ago

And some things ignore your default browser and force-launch Edge anyway (see https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/edgedeflector-default-browser.ht... for more details and a workaround).

ocdtrekkie3• 7 years ago

As a Chrome user, you might not realize this, but Microsoft's behavior here is no worse than how incessant Google is about trying to get you to switch to Chrome, and this started like a decade before Microsoft got more aggressive about Edge marketing. Microsoft's behavior is arguably only trying to match parity with the competitor who has bullied them behind the dumpster in the schoolyard for too long.

Every single Google page has popups about switching to Chrome. Sometimes Gmail has had both one on the bottom and one on the top at the same time.[1] Besides the general breakage for anyone not using Chrome, as seen in the article, Google's just constant advertising for Chrome in every single one of their products is obscene, and no matter how many times you click "No thanks", it comes back.

I don't want to say "No thanks, Google". I want to say "F--- off, Google".

[1]Actual screenshot of repetitive popup behavior in Gmail: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoEPgo2V4AA4Ql5.jpg:large

Causality14• 7 years ago

I'm a Firefox user, and I also hate the way Google abuses its power with Chrome. It hits a little closer to home, though, when it's the OS itself telling you how to use your computer and not just a website.

tantalor• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Edge Preview runs on Chromium

diffeomorphism• 7 years ago

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

Conlectus2• 7 years ago

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

013a3• 7 years 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?

tracker16• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

I have no problem at all using Google Drive and Docs on Firefox, what specific issues have you run into?

013a3• 7 years 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.

applecrazy• 7 years ago

What are you talking about? Google Docs works perfectly fine in Firefox. What issues exist?

cknoxrun• 7 years ago

Drive works fine for me in Safari (other than using an unreasonable amount of CPU). It sure beats installing drive sync or whatever it is called.

lutoma• 7 years ago

My main annoyance is that all Google apps on iOS will refuse to open links in Firefox, but offer options to set Safari or Chrome as default browser…

dmitriid2• 7 years ago

And they never retain the choice for those options for long. I’ve lost count of how many times I clicked “use Safari”.

rchaud2• 7 years ago

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.

RandomGuyDTB2• 7 years ago

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.

avierax• 7 years ago

Yet it's easy to just keep a chromium installation for Google docs and Gmail and do everything else in Firefox.

judge20202• 7 years ago

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

Forge362• 7 years ago

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

Someone12342• 7 years 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.

chronogram• 7 years ago

While they advocate against doing just that.

notatoad2• 7 years 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.

dmitriid2• 7 years 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.

tracker16• 7 years ago

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

notatoad2• 7 years 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?

Forge362• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

wlesieutre3• 7 years 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?

judge20202• 7 years 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

emilecantin3• 7 years ago

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.

wlesieutre3• 7 years ago

I was actually suggesting it could be on Microsoft's side, sending the old "Edge" UA instead of the new "Edg" one. But it could easily be a screwup in Google's UA detection treating the new version the same as the old one.

Big question for my idea is whether Edge's "use old UA for streaming sites" is a hardcoded list of a few sites like Netflix, or if it's something that might have flagged YouTube as being a video site that should get Old Edge agent by mistake.

EDIT - MS's useragent overrides are hardcoded to specific domains, so it wouldn't be identifying as Old Edge for YouTube unless someone at Microsoft manually set it to do that. Probably Google's fault for miscategorizing the new UA.

One section of the JSON configuration file is called EdgeDomainActions and is a series of rules that specify what browser Microsoft Edge should impersonate when visiting a particular site. You can see the EdgeDomainActions config section below.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/the-new-micr...

ploxiln• 7 years ago

Surely this is the nail in the user-agent-sniffing coffin

jve• 7 years 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-...

NullPrefix2• 7 years ago

Aren't Mozilla and Chrome registered trademarks? Can you just go around pretending to be Chrome or Mozilla and not face any consequences??

bzbarsky• 7 years ago

Except per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033057 going to the pagee with the "Trident-based edge" UA string gives the "modern YouTube" experience. Doing the same with the "Chromium-based Edge" UA string does not.

berbec• 7 years ago

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

leppr• 7 years 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.

pluma3• 7 years 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.

runarberg3• 7 years 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.

danShumway7• 7 years 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• 7 years 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?

mcny2• 7 years 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.

Klathmon4• 7 years 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.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

Could you try the faulty operation and see if it failed?

danShumway7• 7 years ago

To a certain extent I feel your pain and get where you're coming from. The problem is --

A) The user agent isn't always specific enough. I've run into rendering bugs that were specific not just to individual browser versions, but individual browser versions on specific platforms. I've seen bugs fixed and introduced that didn't trigger user agent updates.

B) Browsers lie about their user agents. Firefox fingerprint protection normalizes the browser version reported in the user-agent to reduce the amount of information leaked.

So yes, agent checks can be useful. I've used user agent checks to reduce CPU-heavy animations on older versions of IE, or target rendering bugs that literally can't be detected any other way. I get it. But when I apply those checks, I'm doing it in the spirit of progressive enhancement -- and recognizing that those checks are error prone and might fail in the future. I never gate an entire application behind a whitelist or blacklist.

Bear in mind, all of the stuff you're talking about falls under the category of "I've found a bug in a weird situation and I just want to try and figure out if I'm in that situation." Not, "I've found the X situations where my site works, and it will only work in those situations." Very different approaches to web development.

sametmax• 7 years ago

Have they already forgotten the dumb "best viewed in IE" banners that magically vanished as soon as the user-agent changed?

They have not. It's just that Google is the top tog now, and doesn't care.

While Microsoft is the underdog, and linux is not a cancer and they love open source.

And in 20 years this may very well reverse again.

The bottom line is to not expect share holders driven multinationals to do what you think is right. They are nor good or bad, just without the need for moral, and only constrain by the market and the law (if enforced).

JohnNorman2• 7 years ago

That's not true, the market and the low are based on common culture and moral. If stuff like this is seen as immoral, companies that do it will have trouble recruiting, raising capital, maintaining social presence, etc.

amelius• 7 years ago

They are nor good or bad, just without the need for moral, and only constrain by the market and the law (if enforced).

What do you mean by "if enforced"? That companies should be allowed to explore and exploit weaknesses in the legal system, and that we should think this is acceptable behavior?

Translated to humans: a person who constantly tries to find the boundaries of the law is most likely an asshole.

jchw3• 7 years ago

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, speaking in a personal capacity.

Long story short, it doesn’t really work this way.

As an example, go to google.com on Internet Explorer 6. No, I’m serious. You will find that it loads just fine and even functions, over plain HTTP. It’s only a small subset of functionality, but it does actually work.

You can’t do that with feature detection.

YouTube may have crossed the threshold where feature detection should be usable for all of the supported platforms and fallbacks, but feature detection is not a panacea; it does take time to execute feature tests, and it can be difficult to detect certain bugs.

Most web developers are definitely not Google, and shouldn't copy what Google is doing without knowing that they need to. It’s generally ill-advised to copy things without understanding them anyways.

Not assuming malicious intent makes sense to me; the Edge user agent was already very tricky due to the fact that it has long pretended to be Chromium anyways.

LocalPCGuy• 7 years ago

You can’t do that with feature detection.

This... is just wrong. If you start from that base feature set that works on all browsers, and then utilize feature detection to progressively enhance the experience, you can definitely do just what this statement says.

Its just easier to rely on UA sniffing, but don't spread misinformation that it isn't possible. It is a LOT more work, particularly to ensure that the experience is a good as possible on both ends of the spectrum.

It's possible that there is better performance using UA sniffing, as the server can decide what code subset to send. So I don't discount it as a potentially valid solution, but just not as "the only way". Thinking like that is how we end up in situations where "best viewed in ... browser" happens.

jrochkind13• 7 years ago

"malicious intent" is an interesting concept.

I agree it seems unlikely this particular feature/engineering choice was introduced with the conscious intent to penalize non-Chrome browsers or Edge specifically by withholding a UI from them.

However, when this kind of thing happens, it can be taken as indication that supporting all browsers as well as possible is not as high a priority as other things. Supporting Chrome very well may be a higher priority than supporting every/any other browsers as well as possible.

After all, doing it in a "feature detection" way may very well be very difficult and thus expensive/time consuming. But it can surely be done. It just means doing it isn't a high enough to priority to justify what it would take. The sort of decisions anyone developing software needs to make all the time, that's real. And the priorities and values explicitly or implicitly chosen are real too.

Is it "malicious intent" to not be willing to put an arguably inordinate amount of resources into supporting non-Chrome browsers, or to effectively prioritize the Chrome UX more than other browsers? I dunno, but it's a thing.

It's also worth remembering though that the reported issue is in a preview version of the browser (and on a brand new barely-non-preview version of youtube), and I wouldn't be too surprised if it's fixed before it goes out of preview. This is one of the points of having preview releases of course, to find bugs -- both bugs in user-agents and bugs in websites.

tracker16• 7 years ago

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) 
    AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) 
    Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36 Edge/17.17134

Hmm... looks like it's entirely practical to look at the Chrome/version for feature detection. And that they are specifically adding Edge/* detection to disable Edge instead of detecting as chrome compatible.

Edit, sorry, wrong/old edge above.. new Edge below.

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) 
    AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) 
    Chrome/76.0.3800.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/76.0.173.0

And the new "Edg" instead of "Edge" means they likely had to ADD detection to disable it.

vokep2• 7 years ago

As an example, go to google.com on Internet Explorer 6. No, I’m serious. You will find that it loads just fine and even functions, over plain HTTP. It’s only a small subset of functionality, but it does actually work.

Why should this be surprising?

What at all about google.com requires all the modern fancy javascript? Theres the search bar, which only need be a basic html text input box, and thats 98% of the reason I'll ever be at google.com.

I can guess that there are all sorts of little features crammed in that I don't know or care about, and that without the most up to date everything, some of those features may not be possible or may not be as efficient or whatever. Except there's a key phrase as part of that "I don't know or care about" which means its not why I'm at google.com whatsoever.

There's an attitude that seems to be common in SV, especially Google, that seems to put way way too much focus on using the latest things and having everything be automated and as low latency as possible....for what? Why? Its cool you can cut so many ms off some request that it pushes the physical limits of the metal, but I don't really care at all, in fact I'll be prompted to get angry, if that request is part of some feature I'm not interested in, and the one I am, is clearly neglected.

I know everyone isn't me, but I find often that my peers have similar feelings. Just look at Android Auto for a myriad of examples of significant buggy behavior that Google certainly has the manpower to fix, but chooses not to.

sorenjan• 7 years ago

Is Youtube still using Polymer 1.0 with the deprecated shadow DOM v0 that's only supported in Chrome without polyfills [0]? I still use the old version because the new version was annoyingly slow in Firefox last time I checked, and I have no reason to switch to the newer one with lower information density and contrast.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17611444/how-to-speed-up-...

konart• 7 years ago

Is Youtube still using Polymer 1.0

Yes if you are logged in. If you switch to private mode - yt will serve you v3.2

>Polymer.version "3.2.0"

mattnewton9• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

It's Youtube, not high frequency trading.

la_barba2• 7 years ago

I think disabling the all the user snooping would help reduce the latency too. Just saying :)

danShumway7• 7 years ago

The modern version of Gmail has a loading bar that takes about 3 seconds to complete on every single page refresh.

This is subjective, and it's a bit unfair of me to bring up, but my experience is that whatever Google is optimizing for, it doesn't seem to be latency. At least not on Firefox for any of the products I use.

spaceribs2• 7 years ago

It's unreasonable if you feature detect on every load. why not store feature detected capabilities within a cookie that's passed on additional requests?

faxnlogic• 7 years ago

The detection only needs to be done once on a given browser; only an extremely incompetent engineer would suggest performing that detection on every single page.

As such, I'm unsurprised to learn that a Google engineer thinks that the only possible way to solve this is to perform feature detection, repeatedly, on every single page.

The reality is that Google hires mediocre and lazy engineers, and that they also have a vested interest in pushing people into their proprietary browser. The result is that they do the thing that's best for Google as a business (pushing their invasive browser), and their incompetent staff line up to publicly defend this selfish and immoral decision.

plorkyeran• 7 years ago

youtube.com takes a bit over 3 seconds to load for me in Chrome with a warm cache. Minimizing latency is clearly not a top priority.

taf2• 7 years ago

It's also true that many browsers appear to have features but they are actually broken features so sometimes in order to get the application to work 100% you have to do browser user agent sniffing... think Indexeddb and safari

manigandham3• 7 years ago

Every single Google consumer app has gotten more bloated and added seconds in load time. What exactly are the metrics being used to measure UX and latency? What Google service loads faster than HN?

BinaryIdiot2• 7 years ago

This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment.

Other than Google Streaming / Stadia and some AMP sites I have never seen a Google site / app load in less than 2 seconds or so (which is kinda slow, all things considered). So I'm a little confused about this latency sensitive environment statement.

Sure, what you say is correct in that using agent strings can provide an optimized bundle to the browser the faster, but isn't there far better optimizations that Google could make first? I've seen and worked on very fast, sub second web apps before so this argument feels more speculative than any good reasoning.

Besides, you shouldn't be gating _so hard_ with agent strings anyway. The non-Chromium version of Edge is probably fine on YouTube as well. You likely want to gate away the obvious offenders, assume the best with the newer browsers but allow a fallback option that detects a few things on load so you can adjust and set cookies for the next time.

OrgNet2• 7 years ago

This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment.

Google doesn't really care that much about latency, they only care about it so that they can hide from you that they are loading all that extra javascript that spies on you.

And btw, watching videos is not really latency sensitive, it is more bandwidth sensitive... (I don't really care if I have to wait 1 second to start watching a 2hour video, but I will be mad if it is buffering every 30 seconds)

runarberg3• 7 years ago

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.

So whitelist “safe browsers” with server side user-agent sniffing and send the rest a bigger bundle with feature detection. There is no reason not to serve users of modern browsers the latest feature just because you fail to detect them in on the server.

filoleg• 7 years ago

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.

It might sound naive, but why would fetching more JS later degrade the experience? I thought that bundle splitting was an accepted good practice. For example, you have your main core bundle, then some polyfill bundles (that get downloaded if the feature detector says it is needed), and then you have separate bundles for obscure and not-that-often-used stuff that gets loaded on demand. It is a genuine question, and I would like to learn what's wrong with this approach, because that's something I work with on a day-to-day basis.

P.S. Please don't go into the negatives of bundle splitting every little thing into its own bundle that gets loaded on demand, I am aware of downsides of that. I was talking about more sensible approach to bundle splitting (which I described in a somewhat oversimplified way).

forgottenpass• 7 years ago

and b) you are in a latency sensitive environment where it is unacceptable to degrade performance of the latest browsers

As you don't work at YouTube specifically, you might not know they don't have this constraint. They are perfectly happy to let YouTube run like complete dogshit if the user is on Firefox.

013a3• 7 years ago

That's all fine, but at the same time these conclusions seriously sound like an excuse that leads to cherry-picked metrics optimization. In other words: "we consider low latency across browsers we support an SLO, and to maximize that we just don't support that many browsers."

mtgx• 7 years ago

You don't? And you think the fact that Microsoft also switched to Chromium now after "working together on this" is also a coincidence? Or just an attempt to snuffle out Mozilla and Safari from the market? After all, a duopoly is better than actual competition.

OrgNet2• 7 years ago

I don't assume any ill intent.

You are being a bit naive.

stcredzero• 7 years ago

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?

Google engineers are now subject to the same forces that IE engineers faced in the IE 6 days. This also includes competition with other browsers and the desire to keep a leading position, which also includes legitimate concerns over latency and reliability. There's also the difficulty of understanding the end user experience from within a large company. The story isn't simple and one sided. It's the mess of plans hitting reality.

it's just unreliable and error-prone over the long term, and hurts the overall web browser ecosystem.

Power corrupts because it's hard to see one's own small abuses of power, and these form escalating habits over time. A goal like "Don't be Evil" doesn't fall to a single mustache twirling guy in a black hat and cape. It gets sandblasted by a million little things over time.

AaronFriel4• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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

nullwasamistake• 7 years ago

They have been doing this to Firefox and Edge for ages. See 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• 7 years ago

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

mugwort13• 7 years 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.

knd7753• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

https://files.catbox.moe/8a4psl.jpeg

Wonder if they see the irony of blocking adblockers.

ajnin• 7 years 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.

clarry2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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...

dagaci• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

From 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

tracker16• 7 years ago

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

knd7753• 7 years ago

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

ravenstine• 7 years ago

Isn't this obviously anti-competitive?

emptyparadise• 7 years 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.

RandomGuyDTB2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

zaarn2• 7 years 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).

WorldMaker3• 7 years 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?

zaarn2• 7 years ago

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

lousken• 7 years 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.

AaronFriel4• 7 years 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) 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

hollerith• 7 years 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• 7 years 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-the...

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

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