Youtube no longer supporting IE on Windows 7.

[-PK-]

I watch a couple playthroughs on youtube and I normally don't pay attention to what browser I use while viewing them. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere yet, but last week, I noticed youtube was forcing lower quality videos for IE11 on Windows 7 (maximum of 720p). Ironically, you can still press F12 and change the browser's agent string to IE10/Firefox to view 1080p and 4k videos just fine. In the quality dropdown there is a link saying "Missing options?" which primarily suggests upgrading your browser to Chrome or upgrading Windows to continue using IE11. I actually do have both firefox and chrome installed for compatibility reasons, however I feel it is rather misleading to throttle connections or degrade video quality in order to get people to switch to Chrome. While this is Google, it hits very close to all of the backwards things that Microsoft has done to get people to upgrade to Windows 10.

source: YouTube videos missing quality options on this browser

 

[BinarySynapse]

Probably because Youtube is using some features that aren't available in IE11 on Windows 7. Most likely this one: Media Source Extensions


By switching the agent string, you're probably forcing YouTube to fall back to it's flash-based code. If that's the case, then there will come a time when that code is decommissioned and you'll get nothing.

 

[POMPyro]

Sounds like a trick to get you to upgrade. They wasted no time ditching windows 7 did they?

 

[ncjoe]

wow, glad you brought this up...... I was watching some Kawasaki h2 videos and was wondering why they
were only 720p , guess it's time to change browsers....

thanks

 

[-PK-]

Probably because Youtube is using some features that aren't available in IE11 on Windows 7. Most likely this one: Media Source Extensions


By switching the agent string, you're probably forcing YouTube to fall back to it's flash-based code. If that's the case, then there will come a time when that code is decommissioned and you'll get nothing.

Interesting, I didn't know IE11 was missing a piece of the html5 functionality on Windows 7. It's currently still using the html5 player, but if they are in a transition phase, changing the agent string might stop working in a few months.

 

[GotNoRice]

Is there anyone on here that thinks this is being done for any reason other than to push more people onto Chrome? Of course it's going to be framed into some BS about IE not being secure, or part of the Windows 7 vs 10 debate, etc. Google loves it when people install chrome... Unfortunately giving an advertising company direct control over your browsing experience is like working as a prostitute without charging any money.

 

[pxc]

Is there anyone on here that thinks this is being done for any reason other than to push more people onto Chrome?

MSE is actually quite handy for something like YouTube. In ye olden times, web sites would cater to a lowest common denominator and IE often benefited from that. It's much better to primarily support web standards, and offer a fallback for less capable browsers (or in this case, an EOL'd browser on MS's by far most popular OS). Why should Google work around something basic like support for web standards that MS doesn't seem to care about in IE11, despite its large-ish market share?

I think the situation is a bit more complicated than Google just trying to push Chrome.

 

[PornoSatan]

What sucks is the move also means most people aren't getting accelerated decoding / rendering through their GPU anymore. This is true also for anyone on Windows 10 and any other OS. I noticed HD videos on YouTube now seem to take up more CPU since they use an HTML5 player with the vp9 codec instead of Flash and the h264 codec. When YouTube was using Flash and h264 any GPU all the way back to the GeForce 8800 GT could accelerate the video content, now though with vp9, no one but skylake/broadwell can accelerate the rendering.

 

[FnordMan]

What sucks is the move also means most people aren't getting accelerated decoding / rendering through their GPU anymore. This is true also for anyone on Windows 10 and any other OS. I noticed HD videos on YouTube now seem to take up more CPU since they use an HTML5 player with the vp9 codec instead of Flash and the h264 codec. When YouTube was using Flash and h264 any GPU all the way back to the GeForce 8800 GT could accelerate the video content, now though with vp9, no one but skylake/broadwell can accelerate the rendering.

There's solutions to that, at least with Chrome. Noticed high cpu usage on my little Atom based HTPC, installing an addon to block vp9 solved that right quick. Still the same HTML5 player but uses h.264 now.

 

[PornoSatan]

There's solutions to that, at least with Chrome. Noticed high cpu usage on my little Atom based HTPC, installing an addon to block vp9 solved that right quick. Still the same HTML5 player but uses h.264 now.

Wow nice, didn't even think about that. Installing it on all my machines now!