Hacker News Reader

Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

The change in useragent would indicate that if they didn't Add specifically to exclude it, it should detect as Chrome.

It sends 3 different useragents in different circumstances for some reason. Edg, Edge, and Chrome. This case is definitely the Edge team's fault.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com