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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Google has coincidentally made their products not work on Microsoft's Chromium based browser...and it's not even out of beta.

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"Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result.

Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?

Considering it uses the same rendering engine as the most popular browser in the world?

Microsoft Chrome is essentially Chrome slapped with a new, pardon the pun, chrome. If a website works on Chrome it should work on the MS version as well - assuming they haven't made many breaking changes - and from what I have read so far they have only replaced auxiliary services and haven't altered the rendering engine.

Presumably they're still loading a version of the website which Trident/Edgekit which used to make up for the discrepancies between the other browsers.

The Edge devs went out of their way to craft a useragent that doesn't trigger Edge UA sniffing, which is why the pages used to work until Google intentionally broke them in Edge.

Do you have any sources that talk about these breaking issues? I wouldn't be entirely shocked that Google would be doing this, but I do want to see more than just one anecdote that it's ill intent rather than incompetence.

Except if you change the user agent it works.

Which easily explains the warning that was shown on docs. A misparsing of a new, never-before-seen user-agent string (especially one with an apparent typo) could lead the code to assume that the browser is indeed an older, no longer supported version.

Who would expect the browser user-agent to actually call itself "EDG" and not "EDGE" though? If you edit the user-agent to include "EDGE" in place of "EDG" everything works, someone thought "EDG" was surely a typo. Malice and stupidity and all that.

Now why they're still sniffing user agents instead of doing feature detection is a good question for Google, who themselves, to the best of my knowledge, push for feature detection instead of sniffing user agents as best practice. Do as we say - not as we do?

Google is not a single entity. Chrome DevRel and Docs web front end are not even remotely related teams, and DevRel cannot dictate practices to other teams.

In some cases feature detection is not enough because while the browser may define the method you need it’s implementation is broken. A good example of this was indexeddb was horribly broken in safari and even doing feature detection was tricky so you had to check the user agent to see that it probably had a bad indexeddb and work around it. It’s never ideal and there is always possibly and more clever work around but sometimes you have a tight timeline and need a site to work in a specific browser.

Note: I think safari has since fixed indexeddb?

Goddamn the web is such a mess.

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