Microsoft started testing a new Microsoft Edge browser based on Chromium a little while ago. The company has been releasing new canary and dev builds for the browser over the last few weeks, and the preview is actually really great. In fact, I have been using the new Microsoft Edge Canary on my main Windows machine and my MacBook Pro for more than a month, and it’s really good.
But if you watch YouTube quite a lot, you will face a new problem on the new Edge. It turns out, Google has randomly disabled the modern YouTube experience for users of the new Microsoft Edge. Users are now redirected to the old YouTube experience, which lacks the modern design as well as the dark theme for YouTube, as first spotted by Gustave Monce. And when you try to manually access the new YouTube from youtube.com/new, YouTube simply asks users to download Google Chrome, stating that the Edge browser isn’t supported. Ironically, the same page states “We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge.”
The change affects the latest versions of Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev channels. It is worth noting that the classic Microsoft Edge based on EdgeHTML continues to work fine with the modern YouTube experience.
The weird thing here is that Microsoft has been working closely with Google engineers on the new Edge and Chromium. Both the companies engineers are working closely to improve Chromium and introduce new features like ARM64 support to Chromium. So it’s very odd that Google would prevent users of the new Microsoft Edge browser from using the modern YouTube experience. This is most likely an error on Google’s part, but it could be intentional, too — we really don’t know for now.
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft