Microsoft has been releasing new canary and dev builds for the browser over the last few weeks, and it was starting to get good reviews.

While Vole thought its new partnership with Google was tight, it turned out that the search engine outfit had crippled Microsoft’s efforts before they even started.

Google has randomly disabled the modern YouTube experience for users of the new Microsoft Edge. Users are now redirected to the old YouTube experience, which lacks the modern design as well as the dark theme for YouTube, as first spotted by Gustave Monce.

When you try to manually access the new YouTube from youtube.com/new, YouTube simply asks users to download Google Chrome, stating that the Edge browser isn’t supported. Ironically, the same page states “We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge”.

The change affects the latest versions of Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev channels. It is worth noting that the classic Microsoft Edge based on EdgeHTML continues to work fine with the modern YouTube experience.

Microsoft might be wondering what Google is playing at.  It has been working closely with Google engineers on the new Edge and Chromium to improve Chromium and introduce new features like ARM64 support to Chromium. So why would the search engine outfit block users of the new Microsoft Edge browser from using the modern YouTube experience?