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Google Forces Microsoft Edge Preview Users To Use Chrome For Modern YouTube Experience (thurrott.com) 137

Posted by BeauHD from the intentional-errors dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft started testing a new Microsoft Edge browser based on Chromium a little while ago. The company has been releasing new canary and dev builds for the browser over the last few weeks, and the preview is actually really great. But if you watch YouTube quite a lot, you will face a new problem on the new Edge. It turns out, Google has randomly disabled the modern YouTube experience for users of the new Microsoft Edge. Users are now redirected to the old YouTube experience, which lacks the modern design as well as the dark theme for YouTube, as first spotted by Gustave Monce. And when you try to manually access the new YouTube from youtube.com/new, YouTube simply asks users to download Google Chrome, stating that the Edge browser isn't supported. Ironically, the same page states "We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge." The change affects the latest versions of Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev channels. It is worth noting that the classic Microsoft Edge based on EdgeHTML continues to work fine with the modern YouTube experience.
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Google Forces Microsoft Edge Preview Users To Use Chrome For Modern YouTube Experience More

Google Forces Microsoft Edge Preview Users To Use Chrome For Modern YouTube Experience

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @10:12PM (#58669958)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )
      You must be new here. MS shills have been posting ads for the latest MS products disguised as stories since this site started.

    • The nazis who run Big Brother Google just can't help themselves. They NEED to abuse their monopoly power. It's who they are.

      • Perhaps it is time that some court helps them. These shenanigans look a lot like Microsoft pretending back in the day that Internet Explorer was an inseparable part of Windows.

        This time, I think Microsoft might have a reason to sue. And despite of what I think of Microsoft otherwise, in this I would root for them...

        • It may look like that to you but it's pretty obvious that Edge continues to be supported and an experimental browser that is completely different from Edge except in name is not. That's like trying to get your daughter in the Boy Scouts (circa 1990 e.g.) and when they so no because she isn't a boy protesting "but I named her Bob!"

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        YouTube's not done till Edge won't run.

    • Not only that, but if you go to the link for the new version of YouTube, it prompts you to sign up to participate in user research studies for Google before you can access the new design. It's apparently an experimental design that is likely being rapidly iterated, rapidly broken, and isn't even ready enough to be put in front of the general public yet for A/B testing.

      Mind you, I'm NOT AT ALL a fan of Google or Chrome, but I fail to see any issue with a company taking the perfectly reasonable step of only s

  • It's time to take the trash out (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @10:17PM (#58669978)
    Google has become the new Intel. It's sad because I had such high hopes for them when they were up and coming. But I guess the adage is true..."Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

    • We can start cleaning up the trash with Slashdot posters that vilify companies without having a clue what is going on.

      It's not Google's fault Microsoft set the user agent string on their browser incorrectly. If I fire up Edge Dev10 and change the user agent string from "Edg\" to "Edge\" then Youtube works just fine.

  • Every year we need a "no google day". Which day should we pick?

    I think cyber monday would be impactful. But also not a good day to give up my google habit.

    Maybe Groundhog day.

  • You all were so worried about Google wasting their scarce resources on cold fusion... but you didn’t need to worry. They’ve still got plenty of money to be evil with!

  • Gee, Google not giving a 100% support to a dev version of Edge. Oh, the humanity.

    • It was supported and working previously. Then Googs "accidentally" deployed changes to stop it working. Googs sure makes a lot of "accidental" changes where Microsoft is concerned.

      • Microsoft probably changed the user agent, or some other browser identifier. They are in the middle completely swapping out the rendering engine.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Lotus 1-2-3 and MS-DOS 6 comes to mind.

    • You missed the problem. They are abusing their monopoly in search/video to push their own browser. Now, I personally find that browser inferior, but that is irrelevant. The important thing is that the best browser should win, not the one pushed by the monopoly (which admittedly they have the monopoly by being the best at what they do in another field).

      • The summary mentions YouTube's new look fully supports at least:
        Chrome
        Firefox
        Opera
        Safari
        Edge

        They are evil for pushing consumers who want the dark theme to use - a browser, pretty much any browser.

        Apple's browser they support fine, Microsoft's browser is fine, Mozilla's browser, some browser that acheived 10% market share 20 years ago - all fully supported.

        YouTube also supports the test version of Edge which hasn't even been released, though thr browser that hasn't been released doesn't show the dark theme y

        • Why would you not support newer versions of a browser you support??

          Hint.. Because you want them to change to Edge, because you are abusing your market position........

          • Hmm, why would you support, but not add new features, for a browser version that hasn't been released? Let's think about that.

            Maybe an easier question - with all the security issues on the web and in browsers, why would you USE a browser version that even Microsoft says it's release ready yet?

            Tell you what, how about we see what happens after Microsoft releases the new version of their browser? Until then, I'm not going anywhere near it.

            • Hmm, why would you support, but not add new features, for a browser version that hasn't been released? Let's think about that.

              Maybe an easier question - with all the security issues on the web and in browsers, why would you USE a browser version that even Microsoft says it's release ready yet?

              Tell you what, how about we see what happens after Microsoft releases the new version of their browser? Until then, I'm not going anywhere near it.

              Let's see do more work and something unethical that would will be bad PR, or do no work, and be ethical..

              so hard a choice, I wonder why ANYONE would take position two...

              • Sorry, I'm having trouble parsing that sentence. I don't know if there is a missing or mistyped word perhaps? Maybe the punctuation is throwing me off.

                Anyway, YouTube fully supports Edge (and every browser with more than 4% market share). When Microsoft releases a new version, we'll see if YouTube supports it.

        • Apple's browser they support fine, Microsoft's browser is fine, Mozilla's browser, some browser that acheived 10% market share 20 years ago - all fully supported.

          Half your list (bolded for emphasis) they already killed. Or at least, they succeeded in forcing to be Chromium skins by killing native support for IE/Edge/Opera.

          And Opera, in many ways, invented the modern web browser UX. Little things like "tabs".

      • wrong, you missed the problem. and that there is no problem, some crappy prototype version of edge that might not see the light of day doesn't work with "the modern youtube experience" (- as aside, that's shithead marketing speak)

  • modern YouTube experience. (Score:3)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @10:24PM (#58670006)
    This must be a mistake, Google wouldn't do this to Microsoft, I'm sure. I actually do like the dark mode in Firefox. I feel that I'm enveloped in a modern YouTube experience.

    • It is a mistake. Microsoft's. Edge is whitelisted for the new Youtube interface. But the latest dev build lists the user agent string incorrectly. If you set it back to "Edge\" instead of "Edg\" then Youtube works just fine.

      • I correct myself: Make another typo in Edge such as "Edh" instead of "Edg" and it works fine. Google is actively targeting the dev build for whatever reason.

        • No they aren't - in fact both Google has fixed the browser detection to work with Microsoft's error, and Microsoft have pushed a fix to the error in Edge.

          It looks like simply optimization - sniffing for "Edg" is more reliable than sniffing for "Ed", and faster than looking for "Edge" (about 25% faster, which is negligible on single access, but significant when you are handling millions of requests.

          So it has classified the browser as something it needs to check the version of - but has been unable to parse t

  • More amusingly (Score:3)

    by tomxor ( 2379126 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @10:34PM (#58670038)
    .. For me Youtube recently stopped working on chromium Linux, back to Firefox. Strange times google.

  • User Agent? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @10:46PM (#58670072)

    Seems silly to ask, but has anyone tried accessing NewTube in Edge after setting the user agent to Chrome?

    • Seems silly to ask, but has anyone tried accessing NewTube in Edge after setting the user agent to Chrome?

      Yeah that works. You know what else works? Setting the user agent to Edge.

      Currently my user agent on the latest dev build is "Edg/76.0.167.1" putting back the missing e makes youtube work just fine.

      • To reply to myself, "Ed" works and "Edh" works too, so Google IS specifically targeting the Edge dev build.

  • Evil R Us

    • Yeah I'm sure you'd think that if you just take news articles at face value rather than researching what is going on, namely that MS isn't using a normal user agent string in the dev builds.

  • This is a non-story. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sheetsda ( 230887 ) <doug@sheets.gmail@com> on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @10:57PM (#58670120)

    It is not unusual for web apps to check browser versions for optimization and compatibility purposes. The ephemeral versions of Edge are no doubt falling outside YouTube's expected range. Anyone using a developer build should be expecting this exact sort of quirk.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It is not unusual for web apps to check browser versions for optimization and compatibility purposes. The ephemeral versions of Edge are no doubt falling outside YouTube's expected range. Anyone using a developer build should be expecting this exact sort of quirk.

      Literally any other site? I'd agree with you. But this site? Not so sure. Google playing silly buggers with youtube and Edge is one of the rumours about why this mess even started.

      Let's try loading youtube.com/new with different user agents:

      edge-chromium user agent string: "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" doesn't work.

      Chrome's "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chr

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fred911 ( 83970 )

      "It is not unusual for web apps to check browser versions for optimization and compatibility purposes."

      Exactly. If the browser you use doesn't render HTML5 properly and doesn't support flash it's the users problem. If it does, just change your user-agent. Pretty simple. If the property owner does a redirect or interstitial LP warning users who's user-agent it doesn't care to support, that is their right. I mean you're not paying them.

      There's actually no difference in this than the consistent pop-ups

    • It is not unusual for web apps to check browser versions for optimization and compatibility purposes. The ephemeral versions of Edge are no doubt falling outside YouTube's expected range. Anyone using a developer build should be expecting this exact sort of quirk.

      Except that's not what is happening at all. Quite the opposite. Edge works just fine on Youtube, but the developer build does not identify itself as Edge. My current user agent string is: Edg/76.0.167.1 If I add in the missing e everything works just fine. MS Goofed.

    • The "outrage" here is that Google is forcing people to use Chrome to do this thing... But, of course, they're not doing that. They just forcing people to not use this version of Edge if they want to do this specific thing.

  • bizarro slashdot (Score:5, Funny)

    by oneiron ( 716313 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @11:31PM (#58670200)
    I don't care how far down down the wrong fork in the road google has traveled. There's no room, here, for submissions that claim something created by microsoft is "actually really great."
  • Youtube? Why would anyone use something that is designed purely to put ad's in their faces? And that goes for Windows as well these days...

    • Re:Youtube? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @05:41AM (#58670946)

      Designed for ads, sure.

      But in fact the only ads I see on youtube are the rare banner on front page to subscribe to heir paid service that the adblock does not apparently manage to suppress. Everything else in there is ad-free.

      Adblockers, yey!

    • Why are you using the internet? Its designed to put ads in your face more so than Youtube is. Hell if you're in the USA you can't even use the internet at all without the ISP harvesting your data. Why don't you take your privacy more seriously! Hypocrite! Anger! *froth* RAGE

      • I used Internet years before www was invented.

        It was never designed for ads.

        I live in a part of Europe where privacy is still valued - because, as part of the Soviet Union, they learned what life is without it.

        • I used Internet years before www was invented.
          It was never designed for ads.

          Ding ding ding. We have a winner. I used Youtube years before it started showing for ads. It was never designed for ads.

  • And nothing of value is lost (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @02:12AM (#58670538)

    In my opinion, the older Youtube user interface is better laid out and more user-friendly than the new one anyway ... despite lacking a dark mode.
    I often view videos on Youtube while browsing in another window side by side: which the new interface isn't made for.
    For instance, Youtube's older user interface allows me to have a smaller video player, and I don't have to scroll incessantly in an unmaximised window to get to a video's comment section.

    I use a Greasemonkey script [greasyfork.org] to force the old interface in Chromium.

    • +1 (Score:2)

      by Moskit ( 32486 )

      Good news, now instead of tweaking I can just use Microsoft Edge for correct Youtube experience :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      And faster too. Is there a way to force it like in SeaMonkey and Firefox?

  • When the ads don't show someone will do some real work.

  • It's a typo in the user agent (Score:5, Informative)

    by grahamtriggs ( 572707 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @03:44AM (#58670698)

    In the current Edge Chromium, the user agent is listed as:

    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

    Note the bit at the end "Edg/76"

    The "old" edge has a correctly spelled "Edge/XX" user agent.

    If you enter a custom user agent and simply correct the spelling to "Edge/76", then you get the modern YouTube interface.

    Clearly the user agent detection algorithm for YouTube recognises that it is not Chrome, Safari or Firefox (as the user agent might hint at), but it also can't recognise and parse the Edge version, and therefore it doesn't see it as a browser that is capable of the modern experience.

    • In the current Edge Chromium, the user agent is listed as:

      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

      Note the bit at the end "Edg/76"

      The "old" edge has a correctly spelled "Edge/XX" user agent.

      If you enter a custom user agent and simply correct the spelling to "Edge/76", then you get the modern YouTube interface.

      Clearly the user agent detection algorithm for YouTube recognises that it is not Chrome, Safari or Firefox (as the user agent might hint at), but it also can't recognise and parse the Edge version, and therefore it doesn't see it as a browser that is capable of the modern experience.

      So they are basically blocking anything Chrome compatible from getting a Chrome experience on purpose?

      • So they are basically blocking anything Chrome compatible from getting a Chrome experience on purpose?

        There is Opera, and Vivaldi and about a dozen other Chromium based browsers out there. How many of those are blocked from getting the modern experience on YouTube?

        As I explained, this is most likely NOT about blocking Chromium browsers, but that they have identified it as Edge - which, until very recently, will only have meant an EdgeHTML based renderer. And because the algorithm couldn't parse what version it is, it wouldn't determine that it was a minimum version required for the modern experience.

        Anyway,

        • So they are basically blocking anything Chrome compatible from getting a Chrome experience on purpose?

          There is Opera, and Vivaldi and about a dozen other Chromium based browsers out there. How many of those are blocked from getting the modern experience on YouTube?

          All of them?

  • It's because of new Edge user agent (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Suren Enfiajyan ( 4600031 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @06:31AM (#58671052)
    New Edge uses "Edg/76" instead of "Edge/76" in its user agent. Regardless of whether it's intentional or a typo, Google doesn't recognize it yet. If some Google haters think that it's done intentionally then I wonder why they're using YouTube and/or whether they're Microsoft fanboys. I'm not a fanboy of any of these companies. Both companies are broken in different ways.

    • Not fanboys, maybe just more knowledgable. You know that "Ed/76" works too, as does "E/76" and "Edh/76". It is *only* "Edg/76" that doesn't work.

      Now whether or not there are legitimate issues with the latest dev build of Edge on Youtube that justifies this is a different question, but there is zero doubt that not only Google does recognise it, but treats it different from any other spelling mistake.

      • I don't argue. But I also don't care, since I don't use Edge and Windows 10. Also MS has its share of "sins, It did similar things with IE and now it's shoving its shitty and unfinished OS down users' throats". So I think it's a fair price for this and for using Chromium for free. As I said both are broken companies. The whiners are probably MS fanboys or/and Google haters.

      • Presumably this is a quirk of an optimization / code path.

        Look at it this way - first thing any parsing is going to do is identify what type of browser it is, then figure out what version it is.

        It's common for user agents to contain multiple identifiers - in the case of Edge, it contains the strings for various other browsers (Mozilla, Chrome, Safari, etc.), so you need to look for something distinctive.

        Looking for "E", and possibly "Ed", is not sufficient to identify the user agent as Edge. It's likely the

  • The chromocalypse is coming (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @06:38AM (#58671066)
    Google’s goal is for Microsoft to give up and just preinstall Chrome with Windows. Microsoft should resist and go back to edgehtml to maintain healthy competition. They also need a viable alternative to youtube. It’s hard to sympathize with Microsoft because of the Internet Explorer days but replacing one monopoly for another is not the way to do it.
  • So, Google/Youtube's to blame that MS put an unrecognized User Agent string in the latest dev builds of chromium based Edge?
    When you have a new interface with limited QA vs an older interface that's known to be compatible with everything, you present the compatible interface when you can't recognize the client.

    • That's what I thought too, except changing the UA string to Edh or Ed or Edge or just E work just fine, it's only Edg that is treated differently.

  • $THING doesn't work in pre-release software (Score:3)

    by Merk42 ( 1906718 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @09:15AM (#58671514)
    Film at 11.

  • Websites are still checking the user agent?!? I thought that was something only inexperienced or incompetent developers did.

  • I noticed last night and earlier today that I could not turn on Dark Mode on YT with the new Edge dev version, but now that option is available and working.

  • ...if I don't like it when Google messes up a perfectly good interface (as they have: News, Maps,...), if I open it in Microsoft Edge, I can use the old/ good interface? Yes, give me Edge!

    Of course there will come a day...

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