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