Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
Most likely a user-agent check to ensure compatibility. I don't assume any ill intent.<p>That being said, what does annoy me is that we'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't my local pizza shop, Google engineers should know better. Have they already forgotten the dumb "best viewed in IE" 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's easier in the short term to do browser-detection and whitelisting for rendering quirks and bugs -- it'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't going to take the time to think about progressive enhancement from the very start of their experiments, who else is going to?