Edgium pretends to be Chrome towards Gmail, Google Play, YouTube, and lots of non-Google services; on the other hand, it pretends to be Classic Edge towards many streaming services (HBO Now, DAZN, etc.) because it supports PlayReady DRM, which Chrome doesn't.
[Edit] Here is the full list: https://pastebin.com/YURq1BR1
I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.
Currently only Microsoft itself even try to implement it on their own Chromium-based browser.
Another popular choice for high quality is Safari on macOS because it implements Apple's FairPlay.
I'm surprised, because Fairplay is publicly crackable.
Chrome uses Widevine, but one of Chrome's philosophies is that you should be able to wipe a Chrome install, reinstall Chrome, and have no trace that before/after are the same person. That means no leveraging machine-specific hardware details that would persist across installs. "Software-only DRM", essentially.
Edge on Windows (and Safari on OSX) are able to leverage more hardware-specific functionality --- which from a DRM perspective are considered "more secure", but the tradeoff is a reduction of end-user anonymity (i.e. if private keys baked into a hardware TPM are involved).
Last I checked, Chrome/Firefox were capped at 720p content, Safari/Edge at 1080p, though it looks like Edge is now able to stream 4k.
When I use netflix, I have a much better experience.
With torrents you can get a film in minutes. With popcorn you are exposed the entire time you watch the film.
In Germany they monitor peer connections and send a payment demanding an out of court settlement. After two years they escalate to a court appearance in a remote town. If you don't show, you lose and they turn it over to debt collection.
But I have to say Birdman was a great film.
If you're on Linux, you won't be able to stream at 1080p, let alone 4k. Netflix even went out of their way to disable workarounds that users developed.
I don't know what the resolution of my TV is, but I highly doubt it's over 1080p, if that.
> Mozilla Firefox up to 720p
The actual DRM limitations also vary by content (and region) - with some titles I get 720p on Linux while some other titles are limited to SD, while I get 1080p on Windows Edge on those same titles.
After you pick your torrent, it takes the seedbox a few seconds to download the content. Then you can stream your download using emby, vlc over http, or whatever you prefer.
Why did you use piratebay unless that was your goal?
DRM on streaming and BluRays made it so that any usage outside basic consumption on prescribed devices is better served by illegal means.
There are plenty of torrent streaming and download clients that work just as well and are just as convenient as Netflix, without needing to rely on a central authority.
The evercookie project doesn't appear to leverage EME, for what that's worth. https://samy.pl/evercookie/
Why would that be their philosophy? It sounds like some kind of privacy-motivated idea which seems contrary to Google’s typical philosophy. Or is it more about portability?
On Firefox only. Obvious solution to which being...
They do, I'm not sure that should be called as a 'fix' though.
Because it even works perfectly on firefox as long as you spoof your useragent to chrome.
Installing an extension to spoof your user agent? Since we wouldn't want to reward Google being anti-competitive.
Pretend firefox as chrome makes it works perfectly.
They lock the community thread and fixed that after several days I found the finding and post it there.
Shame on you, google.
(That's not snark - I really don't get it. They don't appear to mind people talking negatively about a lot of other stuff they get up to. Maybe lingering antitrust fears from the 90's MS suit?)
They have been a hypocrite from the start, but people got too consumed with its free Gmail, RSS Reader along with its Do no Evil they decided to trust them blindly.
The current browser, and Web Tech scenario is pretty much Google's way or the highway. So I am glad Apple kept Safari as the only option on Apple platform. Not allowing them to dictate everything.
Yesterday I saw a HN comment saying you can add the (?|&)disable_polymer=1 parameter to the end of YouTube URLs to make the site much faster - iirc Polymer is extremely slow on Firefox only. This extension was also linked: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-polym...
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any workaround for ReCaptcha on FF. I generally end up opening the website in the GNOME or KDE (Falkon) browser which use something like WebKit/Blink - there it works on the first try every time.
Gmail is painful compared with OWA (work) and zoho (home), I stopped using my gmail account for new stuff about a year ago.
I'm trying maps.me because unlike google it does offline walking directions but I haven't used it enough.
I really want to like duck duck go but it feels like google still provides better results.
I find I get better results with ddg than google. YMMV I guess.
are you actually asserting that Google is purposefully adding code/"tweaking" their web apps to run slowly on browsers other than Chrome?
do you have any evidence at all for this other than anecdotes about people experiencing Google web app clunkiness on Firefox?
That said; if it's possible to measure firefox/chrome performance (with altered user-agents) it would make for a good blog post.
However, I interpreted it differently, to basically mean that because of objective fact, of all the explanations you can think of, only one of them is defensible. In other words, it's similar to saying "admit it, this is the only reasonable conclusion".
The meaning is inverted by swapping the "to" and "not".
Slack, Skype, and Zoom video calls don't work in Firefox, even though WebRTC is an open standard. But Google Hangouts works perfectly.
I'm loath to give Google credit for something that ought to be standard practice, but of the major (key word) free video conferencing options, they seem to be the only one that's Firefox-compatible.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Google’s front-end development process is completely incompetent and has no respect for customers’ battery or bandwidth.
But I remain astonished there's an apparently very successful startup who's entire effort is a "pro" webmail client for gmail.
It would have never occurred to me to create a better webmail.
As I reach my greybeard years, I'm increasingly aware that I've been doing everything wrong.
>I'm increasingly aware that I've been doing everything wrong.
Any theme to this?
I frequently consume web articles with a combination of newsboat + Lynx, and it's astounding how many websites throw up HTTP 403 messages when I try to open a link. They're obviously sniffing my user agent because if I blank out the string (more accurately, just the 'libwww-FM' part, then the site will show me the correct page.
I'm pretty sure that the webmasters responsible for this are using user agent string blocking as a naive attempt to block bots from scraping their site, but that assumes that the bots that they want to block actually send an accurate user agent string the first place.
That is exactly what they are doing, and it works really well.
We blocked user agents with lib in them at reddit for a long time.
Any legit person building a legit bot would know to fake the agent string.
The script kiddies would just go away. It drastically reduced bot traffic when we did that. Obviously some of the malicious bot writers know to fake their agent string too, and we had other mitigations for that.
But sometimes the simplest solutions solve the majority of issues.
What, that's totally backwards. Anyone using a bot to do things that might get blocked by publishers fakes the string, legit purposes should really show who / what they are.
This seems like a pretty good reason in itself why they might be interested in phasing out User-Agents.
I'm saying, the hypothetical flow from Google is:
1. Our Chrome detection relies on the User-Agent header.
2. But people can just lie in the User-Agent header.
3. Let's get rid of it and use something that's harder to lie about.
Closing any feature discrepancy isn't a goal here, as far as I can see. The whole point is to lie to the user that a feature discrepancy exists when it doesn't.
You can make the argument that Google is free to do their browser detection however they want (and therefore doesn't need to solve this problem by eliminating User-Agents), but this is still an obvious example of the User-Agent header causing problems for Google.
Many people assume Google, as an upper-level business decision, purposely makes products work better on Chrome in order to vendor-lock users to the browser. Maybe that's true; or maybe it's developers being lazy and using User-Agent detection. Removing their ability to do so might actually improve cross-browser compatibility of Google products.
So Google developers don't need to improve feature detection - that part is working fine already.
You can see that they should have fought harder and escalated, but issues like this are probably not the ones most upper-middle management want to potentially damage their career for.
The attitude of “it works on Chrome, I don’t care about anything else” is fairly widespread anyway. Just to stem the tide a little bit I’ve been developing on Firefox and Safari first, and then checking Chrome last.
I got bitten before when I made a browser game, and then noticed that it was all sorts of broken on Edge, even though Edge supposedly had all the features I needed. It turns out that Edge did have all the features I needed, but I had accidentally used a bunch of Chrome features I didn’t need. The easy way out is to turn things off when I detect Edge. The hard way is to find all the broken parts and fix them. So nowadays, I don’t do any web development in Chrome.
But I'll admit I will also poke around outside of the tests, and I'll usually only be doing that in chrome, unless I've had a bug report about firefox in particular. And I'll only really open up Safari when I'm testing VoiceOver. ChromeVox just isn't good enough.
Some examples I've seen using the latest Firefox on *BSD:
Facebook won't let you publish or edit a Note (not a normal post, the builtin Notes app). I think earlier they wouldn't play videos but they might have fixed that.
Chase Bank won't let you log in. Gives you a mobile-looking UI which tells you to upgrade to the latest Chrome or Firefox.
In these cases if you lie and say you're using Linux or Windows it works flawlessly.
It sounds a lot like you are making excuses for them and bad/lazy/poorly thought out code.
Did I mention it's the same code as a working configuration?
I think it's more likely somebody did not know how to properly parse user-agent and they blocked more than they intended to.
UA has a lot of limitations and is fairly easy to work around giving data to for power users. I would imagine Google didn't want to keep playing around with that.
Chrome includes a unique installation id in requests to Google owned domains. They don't need any cookies or user agents to guess who you are and best of all they don't have to share that information with their competition.
A lot of stuff gets blocked for this reason. The company doesn't want you calling them because HD video doesn't work on Firefox even though you pay for HD quality, they do not test or guarantee Firefox compatibility in the slightest and yet they have to talk to an angry customer now. It makes business sense to redirect people to supported use cases when you know your product probably won't work as intended otherwise.
You don't have to agree with the decision (and you can always cancel your membership if you do) but they had their reasons.
Even knowing what they were doing, I fielded at least two support requests asking what was going on. I can only hope I wasn’t the only one.
Now that everything plays nicely I just happen to have no interest in Netflix for other reasons...
Or we could build for Firefox. There's always that.
Google isn't a singularity ️
So, basically, Microsoft using user-agent to detect Chrome....
Which is probably why Google wants to phase out the user agent.
For sure whatever Google invents to replace it will not be so easily circumvented.
/s
Gee, I wonder how this is going to end: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/