Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
Most likely a user-agent check to ensure compatibility. I don&#x27;t assume any ill intent.<p>That being said, what does annoy me is that we&#x27;ve known for <i>years</i> that feature detection is preferable to user-agent detection, and I would kind of expect one of the biggest web development companies in the world to be following best practices.<p>This isn&#x27;t my local pizza shop, Google engineers should know better. Have they already forgotten the dumb &quot;best viewed in IE&quot; banners that magically vanished as soon as the user-agent changed? Heck, even more recently the original version of Edge had to literally start lying to websites about its user-agent just so they would stop serving alternative IE hacks. Yeah it&#x27;s easier in the short term to do browser-detection and whitelisting for rendering quirks and bugs -- it&#x27;s just unreliable and error-prone over the long term, and hurts the overall web browser ecosystem.<p>Google should be setting an example for ordinary developers here, not encouraging hacky shortcuts. If Google isn&#x27;t going to take the time to think about progressive enhancement from the very start of their experiments, who else is going to?