First were the messages of incompatibility with Google Docs, and now we also see that it is not possible to access the modern YouTube experience from the new Microsoft Edge, if you enter the web of videos you will be shown the old YouTube.
If you want to enjoy the ” new ” YouTube that has been available for more than two years and you are using the preliminary version of Edge based on Chromium, we are sorry, but Google does not support it. They recommend, course, of course, that you try to install Google Chrome.
Of course, all this could change once Microsoft Edge leaves the preliminary version, at the moment it only has Canary and Developer versions. Google, in theory, will support them when they release a stable version, but in the meantime, how do we test the performance of Google sites on this Edge if Google blocks them?
Google has all the cards in this game
This is a block at the user agent level, it is not really because the websites are not going to work or your computer is going to explode for it. In the case of Google Docs, we learned that Microsoft made some changes to Edge (among those that eliminated a lot of things) that make that, as explained by Google itself, the company’s sites can not identify it as a known browser and so it both shows it and not supported.
In case you do not understand at all, the user agent or “user agent” is a text string that identifies the application that you use to access the web before the server you are trying to access. Browsers have a default user agent depending on several things, for example, if the user agent says it is a mobile browser, a website can use this information to show you the mobile version directly, you can also use it to block access because you are not going to to have the best experience, or simply the site is not designed for it.
This was done with Edge and other browsers before. Many of us get tired of seeing messages that the old Inbox only worked in Chrome, or the same thing happened with some of Google’s messaging services.
This type of thing undoubtedly generates discomfort among users and in search of not the best experience, but the only available experience, you end up always opting for Chrome. Taking into account that there are plenty of stories of how something similar happened with Firefox after the arrival of Chrome, a former Mozilla manager accused them not long ago of sabotage, and so have other Edge developers.
What is crazier about all this, is that we are talking about a browser based on the same Chromium, a browser that is facing these limitations before leaving the incubator. A browser that in theory has the same basis as Google Chrome except for Google services, but apparently is not compatible with Docs or the new YouTube for reasons that probably only understand well in Google.
