Microsoft is vaccuuming it all up. Meanwhile Microsoft is making tons of great moves to get devs and users back on their side.
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.
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!
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.
It seems pretty clear from the fact that nonsense user agents like "TotallyNotMicrosoft" and "IE6" worked, that there is a blacklist, not a whitelist.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Read the reply too. ;)
IOW, it was not about tech issue, but about social issue / blame-shifting.
You mean "this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 6" days? Or the earlier "this website is optimized for Netscape 2.0" days?
I think the nearest the web ever came to not being any megacorp's playground was when Firefox was at around 30% market share, and IE6 which had 60%+ market share had stopped moving. IOW, when MS still had the playground mostly to themselves, but chose to ignore it. And even then, the web / Firefox couldn't really innovate without breaking IE6 compatibility, so everyone was stuck.
It has become a little more customisable now, thankfully.
To get around this limitation, one could set up a personal speed-dial start page.
see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
they also have most requested urls as a privilege too so it could be recreated and extended with a little effort.
Sounds kinda similar to what you are looking. It does No. of sites, custom columns, custom pictures, and custom backgrounds. It really gives you a lot of control compared to all the other extensions I tried.
Depends on the content, If you are watching paid for content on YT it is most likely DRM'ed. [0] An "stats for nerds" example from such a piece of content (Notice the protected line, this line isn't present on DRM free YT Content.). But the vast majority of content on YT is DRM free.
Twitch has some DRM'ed content, things like when they streamed Thursday Night Football. But that was played via the Amazon Video player not twitches normal video player. I remember because the player threw a fit if you didn't have HDCP configured correctly, which most streamers don't. Not that they were trying to re-stream the game, but have it playing on another one of their monitors to see how it was doing. Personally I liked the idea of having a chat alongside the game :-)
Dunno about PornHub.
Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
More seriously, using a browser without DRM would be a deal-breaker to many users like myself solely because of Netflix, unfortunately. That said, if you're serious about using a DRM-free browser, there are other ways to watch Netflix (iOS/Android, smart TVs, etc).
> Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
I'm not sure that a large number of subscribers is a convincing argument of the non-terribleness of a service. A quick Google search suggests that Comcast, excuse me, Xfinity, has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 million subscribers. I don't think that you will find any argument telling them how terrible Xfinity is.
The services used to have more or less the same catalog, but it’s become more and more broken up.
To get everything you need to subscribe to 4+ services, and if you drop Netflix, you lose a hefty part of their catalog because it’s on none of the others.
Once they turned on their 250GB data cap tho it became far less useful since my wife/kids would stream several gigs a day or more of TV.
The original statement was like saying, "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Seems like ffmpeg libraries, developed outside of the web browser, support nearly all video formats a user could encounter on the internet.
Also, the part of the statement that reads "your new browser won't work with most internet video" is intriguing.
Can we define "most internet video" as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify? (Widevine users listed on its Wikipedia page)
Seems like there is much, much more video on the internet that does not come from those sources.
Maybe you could in terms of unique videos, but in terms of the volume of watched video, not at all. Netflix itself is responsible for something in the range of 15% of the worlds bandwidth usage.
Either way, it not going to win an end users to have something like that.
To my knowledge Widevine DRM works with Chromium. You can watch DRM'd videos: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-to-install-widevine-on-chrom...
I mean if you could just build Widevine and decrypt content it wouldn't be very good DRM.
"most internet video"... by what metric? Hours watched? Catalog size? I find it unlikely that DRM videos outnumber non-DRM videos by any reasonable metric.
I guess you could call it a feature at that.
Make the switch.
Minor annoyance, though. Still switched in desktop as I was on mobile
And genuinely, most people are choosing between privacy and convenience.
And with Firefox you don't need to choose.
Reproduction steps:
1. Check that Google search is working by opening Chrome, navigating to www.google.com, and searching for any term (such as the name of a newspaper and clicking the link to verify that search works as expected.)
2. Open firefox.com and navigate to www.google.com
You will receive a message:
"It looks like you have Chrome installed! For the most secure experience, please visit this page using the Chrome browser or wait and try again later.."
If you have not used Chrome in the past 1 hour from your same IP address, you receive the page as expected.
The above repro steps should be pretty much impossible under antitrust law. (Due to search monopoly.) Which is a very good thing.
And honestly, when I watch Netflix, it's usually in my Surface, in which case I'll use the app.
Isn't Electron basically just a Chrome tab as an app (to over simplify it?
I presume it would afford Google the same level of tracking that Chrome does.
Not sure about in-browser IP tracking, though...
More like a full, independent installation than just a tab.
Well, yeah, that was the whole point.
If we're saying fire up Chrome just to watch Netflix, I'm suggesting saving some effort and/or isolate the rest of your browser by wrapping it in a very basic Electron app.
At the very least, you wouldn't get auto-logged into your "browser" or anything like that.
Before I canceled my Netflix subscription (due to lack of use), I was using Firefox to view it.
Google, Microsoft new "bestie" in this collaboration, will screw them over once it's clear that Microsoft "can't turn back" from using Chromium or even fork it.
As I understand it Chromium is a lot easier to wrap your own GUI around than Gecko. XUL is still not completely decoupled, separating them completely is an ongoing effort I think.
Maybe when the embedded Gecko/Servo engine is production ready would be the time for MS to reconsider.
However for most average Joe's it's fine and won't make a difference, so I always install and recommend Firefox when I play IT guy for family/friends. Time to start doing this again like we did in 2005!! It worked then and it can now!
As a developer, I don't typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I never experienced game-breaking differences.
I can't even switch because one of the vital extensions for my workflow do not exist any more and the author of the Chrome equivalent doesn't want to port it. (I even offered a little money, I probably can't pay enough for an experienced developer to do the full port.)
Wait, you haven't had a security update for your browser since 2017?
Even on a newer computer Firefox feels jagged and hangs. Memory leaks still happening years later. It is so frustrating to see Firefox using 1.5GB of RAM when only 2 tabs remain.
Quantum helped a lot, but it's still not enough for me and many others.
What popular sites don't work in Firefox?
Really? Do you have examples? I haven’t faced this issue. Some websites breaks somehow if you block 3rd party tracking (by breaking I mean that some pictures or video embedded into the page won’t load), but that’s an opt-in feature so I don’t think that’s what you mean.
It would probably take me a bit to figure out exactly how to work with the FireFox advanced debugging tools, but it's familiar territory.
Installing is one click - as simple as the chrome web store.
If you want the ability to unload tabs, firefox struggles with it. The best addon is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unload-tabs/ but it admits that it is buggy. Haven't tried it though.
Edge & Firefox have also been useful in the same way I once used Opera (special tasks where their features really shine). I really liked Edge's reading mode & for just browsing websites it was great.
What developer tools available in chrome but not firefox?
With webRequest, Google is "just" testing the waters. Just like with the forced sign-in, they will back down when they see the backlash.
Based only on Google's description, they seem to have a valid reason to remove (even though they say "deprecate", they mean remove) the offending API. However, there's zero chance they can get away with this. For what reason I'm not sure, market share of Chrome is very important to them. So they'll have to keep it or implement some new, acceptable method.
First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.
Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.
——
To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:
> And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.
https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom....