The new Microsoft Edge-based Chromium has been under public testing for more than a year. It was released on January 15, 2020. It is similar to Chrome as it too uses Chromium, but some Google services are reportedly not working on the new browser. It has been discovered that the vast services of the most used search engine platform, Google are sniffing Microsoft Edge and some other browsers. Chromium and Blink were supposed to help with the compatibility, but issues still exist with them.
It was noticed that Google Meet, Google Docs, Youtube Music, and a few other services were blocked by Google in Chromium-based Microsoft Edge. Google has also blocked its Stadia Cloud Gaming Service on the new browser. It has been observed that changing the User Agent string from ‘Edg – Windows’ to ‘Chrome – Windows’ solves the issue. This is because Google is blocking the User Agent string of Chromium-based Edge.
As Microsoft Edge engineer Eric Lawrence has noted, Google’s Gmail sniffs Chromium Edge and returns the name of the attachments incorrectly. Google might have a poor UASniff-to-NonStandardsBehavior table somewhere, and the solution they use in Chromium Edge should be used for IE8 and lower versions, according to the Microsoft engineer. He found that Gmail returns |Content-Disposition: attachment| header with an incorrectly encoded filename, thus replacing Unicode characters with underscores and when they find the User-Agent’s “Edg/” tag, they encode the Content-Disposition header’s Filename attribute using raw bytes rather than RFC-specified encoded UTF8. Consequently, in Microsoft Edge, the attachments of Unicode texts are saved with an incorrect name.
Vivaldi, another Chromium-based browser also faced similar issues and the company stated this as the reason to drop the User Agent altogether in their last update and to resolve it, they used User Agent, which was identical to Chrome.
It is expected that Google would take certain steps to resolve the issue. While the issues in the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge have been detected by the company, it is expected that the issue will be taken care of by it soon.
