Comment by gustavus

Interesting thought that I had, that is probably not true but interesting anyway.

Is this a move by Google to boost Chrome usage numbers. Although it is a terrible way to do it, many organizations still count views by looking at User-Agent. Google makes Youtube work worse if you report a non-Chrome UA, but all you have to do is report a Chrome UA and then it works perfectly fine. Suddenly a lot of people who were using FF now look like they are using Chrome because the UA has changed.

They then use this as proof that no one should bother developing for anything other than Chrome because no one uses anything but Chrome, because all the FF users spoofed their UA to make it look like Chrome because Google purposefully cripples their site if you aren't using Chrome.

I doubt there was that much aforethought, but it is a nice win for Google regardless.

In the meantime I'll still just be sitting here telling websites I use IE 6 or Netscape Navigator to mess with web admins.