Google Denies Altering YouTube Code To Break Microsoft Edge (theverge.com) 135
Earlier this week, a former Microsoft Edge intern alleged that Google deliberately introduced bogus changes to YouTube to break the functionality of the video portal when users on Edge and other browsers tried to access the website. Google today denied the allegation. From a report: Google disputes Bakita's claims, and says the YouTube blank div was merely a bug that was fixed after it was reported. "YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when they're discovered," says a YouTube spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies, the Web Platform Tests project, the open-source Chromium project and more to improve browser interoperability." In a statement, Microsoft said, "Google has been a helpful partner and we look forward to the journey as we work on the future of Microsoft Edge."
And so did Microsioft (Score:3, Interesting)
Wasn't that old when all that Navigator mess.
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Or at least I think they did.
Wasn't that old when all that Navigator mess.
"YouTube ain't done 'til Edge can't run"?
Re:And so did Microsioft (Score:5, Informative)
While Netscape wasn't Mr. Standard Complaint. IE, with Active X combined with being installed and integrated in the OS so it couldn't be removed. Is what really got it, more then any coding fault in Netscape.
Being integrated in the OS, meant the browsers components started up when you booted the OS, and took less foot print, because it was used for other components, (such as the file browser). Active X was faster then Java Applets, because they only ran on Windows so it was just running the application, with the browser replacing window frame.
Back when PCs were just breaching 200mhz, and 16megabytes of RAM was considered a common amount. Waiting about a minute to load up a browser was common. To have it pop up after a double click was a big deal. And for the Web-Applications to have it run snappy was a big deal too. As on these old system, Running Java Byte Code was a big process.
Now granted Active-X combined with high level browser OS integration was a long term Stupid idea, because it turned your computer into a pile of goo. Because a bad Active-X control can take over your computer, and via the browser you have access all areas of your OS outside your normal permissions. But at the time, people didn't care about it, because "Why would anyone want to hack me? My computer isn't special"
I don't know all the details (Score:3)
I'm inclined to side with Google on this one, not because I hate Microsoft (I do, but that's besides the point) but because IE and Edge always felt way, way slower than their benchmark numbers would leave you to believe. Like buying one of those $100 GTX 1070s from Alibab
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but from what I can tell Microsoft put some hacks in place to post better in benchmarks.
Probably not. It's a common thing for hardware accelerated video playback to be a problem if you need to overlay stuff on top of the video. This basically comes down to: if the video is obscured in any way, neither Google nor Microsoft can use the super optimised hardware path and have to use the hardware decode and compositor rendering path. The difference is Google's browser appears to optimise away empty elements resulting in a non-obscured video where Microsoft's doesn't.
It happens that optimisations oc
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we believe (Score:5, Insightful)
1. we believe google when they say that they didn't blank microsoft
2. we believe microsoft that the blank div is the only reason edge was a massive fuckin piece of crap and failed.
Re:we believe (Score:5, Insightful)
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I believe Microsoft suspected Google of playing dirty, because that's exactly what Microsoft would have done.
I wouldn't put it past any of the big tech firms to play dirty. I'd be shocked if anyone could name a major tech firm that HASN'T played dirty.
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But Google said they would "Do no evil"! How dare you claim they are no different from any other money-grubbing corporation!
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But Google said they would "Do no evil"!
That was in their mission statement once upon a time- but didn't they take it out several years ago? They're allowed to do evil now.
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I was being sarcastic, aspie.
Rather an ironic post considering you completely missed the joke in mine.
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Cool story, aspie #2
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But Google said they would "Do no evil"! How dare you claim they are no different from any other money-grubbing corporation!
The official statement was "Don't be evil" which generally allows money grabbing, assuming you are grabbing it fairly with good motives.
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I'd have to check, but I think google said "Do no evil" as an imperative, not as a description of how they operate.
"I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to."
- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs
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I wouldn't put it past any of the big tech firms to play dirty. I'd be shocked if anyone could name a major tech firm that HASN'T played dirty.
Red Hat?
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Yeah, Microsoft used to pack lead foil into their hockey gloves. Best case, you get a concussion; worst case, you shuffle off this mortal coil.
Google raps the unprotected part of your arm above the glove with their stick, when they think the referee is looking away. You get a bruise, and continue to play with your head up.
Brought to you by the Encyclopedia of False Equivalency (and a stick tap from a butter-soft fast path that might very nearly trip over its own skates if they so much as repainted the blue
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Yeah, Microsoft used to pack lead foil into their hockey gloves. Best case, you get a concussion; worst case, you shuffle off this mortal coil.
Google raps the unprotected part of your arm above the glove with their stick, when they think the referee is looking away. You get a bruise, and continue to play with your head up.
OGELT'ORPE!
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wahhhh. and MS has improved, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes due to legal action. What MS has never done, at least not close to the scale of Google, is sell every bit of data they get about you to damn near anyone who asks. Some telemetry back home is a far cry from direct access to your emails, contacts, personal interests, shopping habits etc.
America, where no one is ever forgiven for wrongdoing. Corporation or petty criminal, no amount of atonement or punishment is ever enough. Yeah, MS did
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" What MS has never done, at least not close to the scale of Google, is sell every bit of data they get about you to damn near anyone who asks. Some telemetry back home is a far cry from direct access to your emails, contacts, personal interests, shopping habits etc. "
No, they only hand it to those we most fear having it. Not corporations, but governments. And telemetry can spy on literally everything you do on your PC, and the EULA gives them the right to do most anything with your data. Trusting Microsoft
Re:we believe (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it certainly was either incompetence or malice. Google were (actually are) using a non-standard "Shadow DOM v0" model that was only implemented in the Google Chrome browser. On non-chrome, a "polyfill" or pure javascript implementation of that DOM engine was used instead.
And it's not just Microsoft that are complaining here [cnet.com].
That's right, all you anti-microsoft blinkered people out there, Mozilla has the same complaint about Google.
YouTube basically uses an experimental version ("v0") of the shadow DOM API that is officially oboslete before it really got any traction (it's been superceeded by other versions). It was so obsolete that only Chrome implements. it is officially "depcreated [chromestatus.com]" by Google, but we'll see what happens in April 2019.
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Shadow Dom Support [caniuse.com]
Now it is being included in the standard Dom/Html/CSS/Event W3C specs.
W3C [w3.org]
So yes, YouTube (ie Google) provided a hacked "pollyfill" and/or javascript version to emulate what was spec by W3C but not implemented by IE.
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And what has that to do with an *empty* DIV disabling hardware acceleration of video decoding on Edge?
A video is simply a byte stream, I put it through the decoding API and get frames to display. How the funk can an HTML element have any influence on the decoding happening behind the API? The API does not even know if it is called by a web browser, browser extension or VLC.
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Well, yeah, I did confound this with a different issue--which does still stand though.
However, to address your point, a transparent div over the video that might be used for text and thus require a different video decoding code path to combine both HTML and Video? Absoultely could because it could be the difference between 'render via GPU into the screen directly' and 'render via CPU into memory for further processing'.
"The API does not even know if it is called by a web browser, browser extension or VLC.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you believe either company isn't running on maximum nastiness setting these days?
I believe a company that has spent the past 2 years endlessly fucking with their UI every other day is covered by Occam's Razor when it comes to some other company's browser not being able to handle a crapy div element.
Re:we believe (Score:5, Interesting)
Google can't make a webpage properly, and Microsoft can't make a browser.
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Google is claiming they didn't act willfully, you are ascribing incompetence to them, sounds like you believe them. Me too. Any time Google does something dumb, I have no trouble believing that who ever did it was incompetent given Google's past record with web applications. Most of the ones they have now have problems, and most of the ones they've canned did too.
The time when we can believe the myth of the superior Google employee has passed, much like the days when we could believe Google wasn't evil.
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Google can't make a webpage properly
So you just did believe Google, because that was ultimately their excuse.
Mind you that's also quite a believable excuse given in the past 2 years the Youtube website probably went a grand total of 7 days in a row without some kind of another busybody UI change. "Oh noes a div element that does nothing but broke our browser, it must be because they hate us and we are perfect at coding in every way! Just don't ask us why we can't handle a div."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not just that, but this revelation implies that edge's acceleration features have to be special-cased EVERY TIME. Why? Because this is a trivial case. There is clearly nothing going on that needs to be accelerated in a div that requires no drawing. There is zero defense for the browser choosing to accelerate undrawn elements. Frankly, if the engineer is not a total moron then his only meaningful goal would have been exposing just how poorly this browser is designed. Even if Google did it intentionally, ther
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Your conspiracy bullshit falls apart when you realize it was not an optimization just for YouTube.
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Microsoft made no allegations against google whatsoever. A former intern of no importance out of their hundreds of thousands of current and former employees made an off-hand frustrated remark that was probably a joke, and of course the media ran with it to invent newsworthy controversy.
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They are legally obligated to their shareholders to deny abusing their virtual monopoly.
Virtual monopoly. Parker Brothers on an Oculus Rift.
grabs the rant ball away from the moderator (Score:2)
If I want to sell my own version of "Monopoly" with blackjack and hookers, I should damn well be able to sell my own version of "Monopoly" with blackjack and hookers!
[1] GEEZUS XRIST, that's a lot of versions of Monopoly!
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A-Ha! Gotcha! (Score:3)
That's exactly what a saboteur would say!
yeah, no shit (Score:3)
This whole thing came from a single hacker news post, and where does it say he's an intern?
https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
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It comes from his LinkedIn page:
Software Engineering Intern
Company NameMicrosoft
Dates EmployedMay 2018 – Aug 2018
Employment Duration4 mos
LocationGreater Seattle Area
Implemented the background-blend-mode and mix-blend-mode CSS properties in the Edge browser and Windows (C++).
Wrote web platform standardization tests in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to verify Edge interoperability. Found bugs in both Chrome and Firefox during this process.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo... [linkedin.com]
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It doesn't. Firefox and Chrome like all other browsers have problems with buggy implementation of standards. And it's often rival product developers that find them.
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Typical M$
Careful on that 1995-era edge
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Google would never screw with YouTube on competing platforms!!
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Congressional hearing! (Score:2)
We need a congressional hearing to prove that it wasn't intentional.
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I think this was intended as a joke, but yes. We need government at least paying attention to why the number of browsers continues to shrink. We have anti-trust laws, and should enforce them.
It's possible Google didn't intentionally do this. It seems more likely to me that they did. But we should find out, because monopolies* are bad. And even if they didn't do so intentionally, it probably is worth splitting up Google (and Amazon, and probably MS although that seems less important now.)
* And so are cl
When Asking Google .. (Score:5, Insightful)
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because we don't give a fook. ... that sounds martial somehow!
Oh, did you want to say: we don't give a fork? Hm, hm
Google intentionally breaks youtube in iOS (Score:3)
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They intentionally disable full screen on youtube videos embedded on web pages in iOS
Err no. They disable videos fullscreen embedded on webpages in all browsers, on all platforms where the ebedded iframe doesn't expressly implement allowfullscreen. The fact that Apple's locked down only rendering engine allowed on their platform doesn't implement it properly has nothing to do with the reason they added the option in the first place which was done at the request of the media so they could control the behaviour.
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No shit Sherlock?
and says the YouTube blank div was merely a bug that was fixed after it was reported.
Straight from the summary...
Alligation from Intern. (Score:2)
Did anyone seem to get this was from a Microsoft Intern who was complaining about this?
Unless Intern now means something different today. But usually the Intern is the college student who is doing work that the Jr. Developers pawn off on them because the work is too humdrum for them.
I expect what was happening was Google You Tube service supported a feature, that wasn't in Edge. So someone task the Intern to put that fix into the code to make it work, probably due to it being a simple fix and most likely fr
Everyone did the same thing!!! (Score:2)
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Microsoft says Google is helpful (Score:2)
Sorry Intern, they didn't have your back...
A bug. (Score:5, Funny)
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Nothing funny at all. When someone designs a browser to an artifical benchmark rather than to a webstandard, expect that benchmark to break.
Or do you somehow doubt that a company that seemingly changes their interface in some way every other fucking weekend (OMG Youtube is black today!) is capable of writing bugs? What do you expect? Regression testing a competitor's browser?
TBH, Edge never impressed me (Score:1)
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Standards (Score:2)
We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies,
That's a pretty low blow. Google is really going after Microsoft's Achilles Heel with that strategy.
Yeah... (Score:3)
Google is so not trustworthy. (Score:1)
I just had to go back to Chrome because of Firefox not working on a simple Adwords help page. After a few minutes, I gave up and loaded Chrome where the scrollbar magically appeared making the page usable. Not even a complicated page.
More info (Score:1)
A post on another forum regarding this article from an ex-Google engineer who said he didn't work on YouTube infrastructure said Microsoft's Edge browser's optimizations were very fragile and making small changes to the HTML would slow down page load considerably.
Another post on the same forum said that unexplainable HTML sequences were used to thwart fraud (e.g. automated scripts) and that invisible divs over video content were a common tactic.
Oops! (Score:2)
"Oops! It was an accident! We never meant to get caught!"
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code's not done until Edge won't run (Score:2)
good for the goose, good for the gander
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Every goose I've met has a bad attitude. A brick to the head is what's good for the gander.
New app in Google Play, just announced - Install? (Score:1)
Google Denies, out now!
Must be 18 or older.
Google denies (Score:2)
I know I should assess the assertion based on its merits, but "Google denies" really lends it an undeserved credibility.
Microsoft Edge (Score:2)
Microsoft Edge, AKA "The Little Browser That Couldn't".
Be reasonable people! (Score:2)
Microsoft's cheating bit them back (Score:1)
From this story, it looks like Microsoft tooks some "shortcuts" while displaying Youtube video in order to get "better performances"...
Shortcuts like not actually parsing the whole page but grabbing some specific parts, less to process = running "better"...
And then google changed youtube page... the parts that Edge used to grab directly were not at the same place anymore and the optimization were lost...
What could have been the result is Edge showing it's true speed... The speed that could be expected on
You ever notice (Score:4, Insightful)
Anytime a company gets caught doing something stupid these days that it's always a bug, glitch or software error ?
" Oh, it was a bug. "
It's like a perfect digital scapegoat where no one has to face any consequences.
Oh the algorithm accidentally sold all of our stock at .1 instead of 100 dollars a share ?
" Not our fault, the computer did it ! "
Oh we accidentally shared all of your personal info online.
" Bug "
No matter how epic a problem that gets created, they always go to the same excuse.
" Bug "
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Anytime a company gets caught doing something stupid these days that it's always a bug, glitch or software error ?
The claim: A div tag that was invisible broke our super tuned browser.
The defense: It was a bug and was removed when reported.
The context: We are talking about a site that has seen a shitton of UI changes over the past year.
Occam's Razor: It was a bug, and there's no way Google is regression testing their website on Edge.
Tinfoil hatter: Google is Teh Evil (TM).
Why would Google try to break Edge? (Score:1)
Nowadays most people know how to download Chrome to their fresh copy of Windows. For those who don't, the YouTube video "How to download Chrome to your new Windows installation" is actually expected to work properly without a bug.