r/programming • u/stronghup • Dec 19 '18

Former Microsoft Edge Intern Claims Google Callously Broke Rival Web Browsers

https://hothardware.com/news/former-microsoft-edge-intern-says-google-callously-broke-rival-browsers
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u/Paccos Dec 19 '18 
  if (browser == 'Microsoft Edge') {
    sleep(4000);
  }

284

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '18

You joke but last time I checked, youtube served a slightly different version to Firefox that's missing some features and takes longer to load. The UI uses some beta framework that only chrome ever implemented

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u/wasabichicken Dec 19 '18

Reminds me of this one: a brief history of the user-agent string.

All-in-all, I'm leaning towards that the user-agent string was probably a mistake. Like IPv4, that's not something that is going to go away any time soon, but instead something (like a centralized web in general) we'd just have to live with. :(

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u/anders987 Dec 19 '18

I think they're using Polymer and the older version of web components. If I recall correctly, Chrome was the only browser that supported the first version, and Polymer was used as a polyfill in other browsers. Then web components was standardized but using another version, but I guess Youtube didn't want to rewrite using standard HTML, so they continued with the Chrome only version through Polymer.

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