Microsoft is vaccuuming it all up. Meanwhile Microsoft is making tons of great moves to get devs and users back on their side.
And I've heard that these days, Office 365 collaborative work is at least as good as Google Docs, if not better !
Wow, that's pretty damning!
Yes, they control Office and are the defacto office document standard. What they do with Office now is affordable and ubiquitous. No other office document suite can do this. They are a for-profit company, and Office serves their customers very well. Yes, in Ballmer's days this wan't the case, but today you can run Office (365/Cloud) on a Chromebook and on Android and iPhone as supported apps.
Funny how that changes. If anyone told me in 1999 that Microsoft would eventually become one of the Good Guys...
It's government's responsibility to foster competition to push back against companies wanting to limit it. Govt is doing a shitty job and gets an F.
Well, at least we have Edge on Linux now so duopoly can live on...
The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.
I don't have time to test this, but I'm willing to bet that you'd get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn't recognize.
Why almost certainly? We're seeing antagonistic, self-preserving and dare I say abusive monopolistic behavior from Google with Chrome's anti-adblocking. Why the benefit of doubt when blocking a competitor's browser?
More pointedly, would an independent YouTube have behaved similarly for as long?
The web is a standard. Auto failing based on user agent is a sign of developer incompetence.
If only that were true. The web is, at best, a series of suggestions. See also https://caniuse.com
Chromium-based Edge is not stable. It's a new thing that I don't expect website owners to test against. The error message showed that the new design is tested against the latest version of Edge. Complete rewrite of Edge still hasn't replaced the old Edge.
Also, no, the web is not a standard. There's no fixed set of things that a browser should implement and call it a day. It's constantly-evolving depending on the needs of the owners of the website. It's why nobody dares to create a browser from scratch nowadays.
I'd been using YouTube's new layout just fine on Edge Chromium for at least a week before getting the "not supported" message.
Very happy with my Edge switch so far! And I did it before the ad blocking really reared its ugly head too.
Google needs to faceplant hard on this one.
It depends on what you choose as your choice of technology, if you choose web components then you really can only really offer that same experience to users that have a browser that supports that API natively (without polyfills) which old Edge did not do.
My understanding of this situation with yt was that our server side detection code was wrong based on an update in edge (or our UA management), and we don't do feature detection in the client because it is too slow... So we send people to the older version.
Developers care a lot more about this ‘experience’ than users do.
Yes it’s fun to play with the new shiny, but users don’t care.
User experience is an excuse, it’s double-talk.
And besides, your claim is doubtful at best since Chromium Edge doesn't share any User Agent string elements with previous EdgeHTML versions. Your YT developers would have needed to be intentionally malicious to match "Edg/" as a trigger to downgrade the user experience.
It seems pretty clear from the fact that nonsense user agents like "TotallyNotMicrosoft" and "IE6" worked, that there is a blacklist, not a whitelist.
Now as far as your hypothetical, sure they can, but I use all of those services, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, ... on Chromium every day and they do not block nor have they ever blocked any of them.
[1]https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/1133782407419613184
> And it may even be a quick ‘n dirty deliberate hack to exclude Chredge this way, just so it doesn’t pollute their telemetry / testing of new website features.
That test proves nothing without seeing the Google's code. Feature detection is incredibly slow, requiring JS and multiple round trips. Whereas user agent strings are instantaneous.
Read the reply too. ;)
Turning the block on was intentional, and turning it off was intentional.
We can only guess at their motivation, and I can guarantee you it was not benevolent given what Mozilla said recently about their interactions with Google.