This is already happening. Web version of Skype refuses to work in Firefox, but if you change user-agent to Edge, it works.

This is risky behaviour though when dealing with other megacorps. Legal ramifications and antitrust suits come out of actions like that.

It's like Google found developer goodwill burdensome, and decided to pack it all up into container trucks and ship it all to Microsoft.

I agree. It is truly unbelievable. Same with user goodwill.

Microsoft is vaccuuming it all up. Meanwhile Microsoft is making tons of great moves to get devs and users back on their side.

You have to read that comment from a long-time Microsoft developer : https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2019/05/24/github...

The referenced comment rehashes the evils of Ballmer's Microsoft which Nadella has mostly corrected. Satya Nadella has embraced (but not extended!) Open Source. Their Azure strategy puts all platforms on a level playing field - yet has also made Azure an incredible place to make Windows/Microsoft technologies shine. It's a great place for all apps.

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.

Do you live in a parallel universe where it was Ballmer and not Steve Jobs that founded Microsoft and was its CEO in 1995 ?

Meh, he lost me when he tried to say Microsoft success in cloud is due to Office. Microsoft's success in cloud is due to having a good enough cloud platform and being better at selling to enterprises than Amazon or Google. IBM and Oracle can sell to enterprises but lost because their cloud platforms suck.

MSOffice gives a pretty big advantage when you want to sell to enterprises !

And I've heard that these days, Office 365 collaborative work is at least as good as Google Docs, if not better !

So, in your opinion, Microsoft is a bad company because they have a better product and they're using it to make money from other corporations?

Wow, that's pretty damning!

And what do you think will happen when all devs and users join Microsoft? The same cycle will repeat.

Linux and Open Source tech is a huge part of Azure now. They profit from people using Linux on Azure. They don't have a reason to chase customers away when they are making money from them.

There comes a time in every corporate's life where good will is neither important nor needed.

Such as switching their browser to be based on Chromium, which is controlled by Google?

>It's like Google found developer goodwill burdensome, and decided to pack it all up into container trucks and ship it all to Microsoft.

Funny how that changes. If anyone told me in 1999 that Microsoft would eventually become one of the Good Guys...

Nah. "Stands against the Big Bad" is not sufficient to become one of the Good Guys...but it's a very convenient spin.

They did not. Read up a few levels, Skype refuses to work with Firefox, because it's inconvenient for them.

Skype is now owned and maintained by Microsoft. I don't see goodwill in either company.

Every large player has been wilfully degrading user experience in any browser they don't approve of for a few years now. This is a ship that has sailed - from the lack of antitrust suits we can deduce that there are in fact very few legal ramifications, if any.

I am very surprised that Alphabet Inc. has gotten away with what they have so far today when I look back at the history of Big Bell being broken up.

Yeah, sure, the government spent millions to break up AT&T and the Baby Bells, then let AT&T get back into the local phone and Internet business by buying up companies left and right. Now AT&T is part of a nationwide duopoly with cable companies, and most US consumers have exactly 2 choices: either AT&T for non-cable or some other company for cable.

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.

It seems like Google just treats fines due to antitrust lawsuits as the cost of doing business, and they're potentially making more money with such behavior than they are losing due to legal costs.

that seems like a slam dunk antitrust case to me, no?

Even some Microsoft enterprise software refuses to work on Firefox.

Well, at least we have Edge on Linux now so duopoly can live on...

We don't have Edge on Linux. Right now, it is on Windows and Mac; the questions about Linux version got an uncertain answer.

> Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.

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.

Somebody over on reddit tested different user agents: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/btysl9/google_have_...

It seems pretty clear from the fact that nonsense user agents like "TotallyNotMicrosoft" and "IE6" worked, that there is a blacklist, not a whitelist.

Do you remember when almost all sites worked fine without internet explorer but refused to work without it unless you faked the user agent? Why are you defending round 2 of best with IE?

The web is a standard. Auto failing based on user agent is a sign of developer incompetence.

> The web is a standard

If only that were true. The web is, at best, a series of suggestions. See also https://caniuse.com

I wouldn't be defending them if YouTube refused to work with a "strange" user agent, but that's not what happened. Judging by the screenshots, YouTube still worked, it just refused to use a new design. The old design is still perfectly functional.

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.

> 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

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?

That isn't how the web is supposed to work. Browsers implements standards. It shouldn't matter what the user agent says.

Your company's customers aren't going to care when you tell them this. They're going to complain to your support department that your app doesn't work.

Pray tell, which YouTube support department do I complain to as a viewer?

The ’I want to be a product and you aren’t letting me’ department.

Then why did it work before?

I'd been using YouTube's new layout just fine on Edge Chromium for at least a week before getting the "not supported" message.

I haven't seen that yet, but Meet just started working for me. Previously it didn't.

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.

This is a rediculous justification. Websites should not be coded to a whitelist of browsers.

Biased reply - I work for Google.

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.

Interpreting user agent strings is what amateur programmers do. I don't generally expect high standards from Google engineers (a whole other argument I won't entertain here) but that's still pretty tragic for a top-five website.

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.

> 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.

You appear to have somehow missed the extremely loud chorus of "we hate it, change it back" that happen every time any web app gets a new design. See also the saga of Instagram on Android.

You appear to have misunderstood the comment you are replying to.

The same could be said of you. We'll never know, since your comment could mean anything.

yeah but blacklisting or at least conscious degradation is necessary. hit that with a game I built, had to degrade the experience on chrome/iOS because of the non-accelerated canvas element

And by making captchas harder or insoluble for Firefox users they block access to lots of other sites

All the more reason to stop using those "prime" properties...

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

First of all, we have no evidence that your Edge example was intentional. In fact, we have evidence to the contrary as they fixed it within hours of it being reported [1]

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

Wrong! Google deliberately blocked Edge, see the tweet here for proof: https://twitter.com/sinclairinator/status/113344983464663859...

Wrong! You didn't read the full thread:

> 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.

Chredge worked for many weeks, then it didn't for a day or so, then it worked again.

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.

>How's this polluting their telemetry? Also, how is some random UA NOT polluting their telemetry? It's a horrible excuse, that's all it is. It was fine and then suddenly it became "an issue". It's singling out them, SPECIFICALLY. Nice try.

Read the reply too. ;)