Browser Wars Back? Latest YouTube Broken on Edge

Before the utter dominance of Chrome, Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were locked in a heated battle for your usage. Today, though, the peaceful collaboration between Google and Microsoft — which worked together on Edge with Chromium — may have hit a speed bump, as Edge can't access the latest and greatest version of YouTube.

Chromium Edge users can't use the "new" YouTube rolled out years ago.

Yes, the 2017 redesign that Google rolled out, which features a sidebar that shows which channels are live, progress bars for the videos you've started, live chat and more features, just doesn't open in the new developer builds of Edge. Oh, and YouTube's dark mode is also not available in the pre-2017 design that Edge users are limited to.

I tried this out at the Laptop Mag offices, after installing Microsoft Edge on a Mac and found that opening YouTube.com gives you the old design, while opening YouTube.com/new gives you a message that the new desktop design for YouTube, which "puts the videos and creators you love front and center with a cleaner, simpler layout" isn't supported, and that I should download Google Chrome.

Edge users are currently limited to YouTube's older design.

Hovering over the word "supported," though, you find out that YouTube's redesign is supported by "the latest versions" of many browsers, including Edge. We've reached out to Google for comment, and will update this story if and when we receive a reply.

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This isn't the first issue between YouTube and Edge, as a former Microsoft software intern wrote a Hacker News post claiming that Google modified YouTube's code to slow Edge's performance when using the video site. Google denied this, and claimed the incident was the result of a bug.

If this incident is another bug-related mess up, and not an act with intent behind it, that could make sense of the timeframe. Windows Latest reports that this issue wasn't a part of the first releases of the new Edge, and only "popped up earlier today" (May 28).

Over in Chrome, you can access Dark Mode and more, plus see ads for a YouTube original you may or may not care about.