Chromium-based Edge has been hit by a new glitch when running Google-owned YouTube. Some folks today noticed that YouTube opens with the classic interface in Edge browser and the new design is no longer available for some unknown reasons.
Google Meet, Google Docs and Google Drive were also marked unsupported in Chromium-based Edge. Today, Chromium Edge users have been confronted by a similar error informing them that YouTube’s new design is not available in the new browser.
YouTube throws up an error message when trying to access it from the new Edge. “Your browser is not supported. Try it with the latest Google Chrome” reads the message. The message recommends you to download Google Chrome or switch to any other supported browsers.
YouTube says it only supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari and (old) Edge. What’s more surprising is that YouTube had no issues until yesterday and this problem only popped up earlier today.
You can still go back to the YouTube homepage and browse the outdated classic look of the streaming service.
Google or Microsoft hasn’t acknowledged the problem, but it is likely to be another oopsie at Google’s end and it should be fixed in the next few hours.
View Comments (14)
Why even block your service on any browser, just why?!
cuz google is like that.
i've found a method for fixing this by installing user agent extensions
Because sometimes some browser (although quite rarely nowadays) doesn't support a certain feature that your service use, therefore to avoid people complaining why the website breaks, they block those people from using their service or in this YouTube case, they revert it back to the older more-older-browser-friendly version of YouTube.
Of course in reality since new Edge uses Chromium -- which basically means it has all the rendering capabilities of Chrome -- they shouldn't have blocked it. There's a high probability that either it's a mistake on their side or Google purposefully block them because they're not sure whether it's stable enough to run new YouTube. Of course there's also the negative thinking side that may be true, but no one can know for sure.
Well it wouldn't be the first time Google tried to pull this sort of anti-competitive nonsense.
Well, they did once with Edge back during Windows Phone era, but they rarely done something similar to this.
However, it's true that they did "nonsense" thing few months ago when YouTube became slow on non-Chrome browsers, but that's because YouTube used a deprecated feature that most browsers but Chrome no longer implemented. That one is exactly what the person at Mozilla was afraid of when Edge moves to Chromium, that is letting Google decides the standard of the web themselves.
...which is why web sites should 'feature test' and not rely on Agent strings or other less informative tests for feature compatibility. If browser XYZ supports ABC feature, then use it. PERIOD.
The second part of this story is that Google is being successful as painting this issue as 'not whitelisting' - which is NOT accurate, as the User Agent String for Edge Chromium is the SAME and the version exceeds previous versions.
So when all these sites were WORKING PROPERLY with earlier beta versions of EdgeChromium, it means that Google has purposely changed the way it evaluates the Agent string and version to break Edge Chromium, or have modified their whitelist.
First of all, to be clear: I'm answering the "why even block your service on any browser" question, not specifically Google's problem here.
And yes, as a web dev myself, I agree that web developers should test their websites thoroughly, check compatibility issues, and test on major browsers. However, please do keep in mind that some small not-tech-focused companies prefer paying cheap web developer who only test and design their website to run only on one specific browser, which usually the one that the company's user uses and forces the user to use that browser. It's not uncommon unfortunately, but that's just that. Of course there's also the other where it's the Netscape vs Mosaic all over again, where Netscape implemented a feature that Mosaic didn't have, therefore developers used an older version of the website when the user uses Mosaic, although nowadays it's rare.
However, there's also the other case where some web developer prefer blocking possible unstable browser (like the new Edge) for the same reason as I said on the above comment: they'd rather play safe and have no one complaining if their website doesn't work because bug in the rendering engine of the unstable browser, which is completely understandable when your target audience are non-tech-savvy user or if you have report of your website not working due to bugs in the unstable browser.
Yes, I agree that Google purposefully block new Edge and I agree that they shouldn't have. However as I said on the first paragraph: my focus is on "why websites block a browser" and not specifically talking about Google -- a gigantic company with large budget.
I have to agree there are times that blocking is useful, especially when unknown issues could generate support issues or harm security. (Banking sites being a good example.)
As you mention though, in this context, Google is not a small company that can do things the right way. YouTube also doesn't have security demands, and even if end users were having issues, they don't have traditional support channels that could be costly/saturated.
The other interesting detail with Google and their 'whitelisting' claims, is that there are a lot of non-Chrome chromium browsers and even multiple variations of beta versions of Opera, Safari, and Firefox that work just fine on these same sites, just as EdgeChromium also worked until Google 'disabled' it.
The issues with Google's 'dirty tricks' have a long history that haven't always got a lot of attention as their targets didn't have a large number of users. I assume they thought they could continue to slip under the radar as they have in the past, especially since EdgeChromium is not widely released. And with the ongoing lockouts on various services from Google, done in different ways, it looks like that they have tried different ways to target EdgeChromium and test if the reduction of access and/or functionality got attention and made the tech news cycle.
Sadly, there are projects and products that don't have name brand attention or a large user base that get targeted all the time by Google, and if it doesn't make headlines, Google is able to get away with purposely breaking access and in some cases even stealing code from smaller vendors that create competitive features to Google services.
In a way, it might be a good thing to have a bunch of people paying attention and ensuring that these also make headlines, and at least try to shame or push Google to do the right thing.
Microsoft for example has been held to a really high level of scrutiny from the tech press going back to first complaints from WordPerfect and Novell. I think this has been good for the industry and also good for Microsoft.
The side effect/problem with Google or any company being able to harm products and specific market segments, is this can result in a better/newer technology never getting the chance to affect and make things better for users and the world through technology. At best, when these are lost, years are often wasted as they have been suppressed, even if Google or another someone else is able to bring the technology back.