Buzz
Google Docs displays a notification stating that it does not support the Edge browser at the top of the page to inform users. Excerpt from the notification: 'the browser version you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to supported browser versions'.
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A useragent is a unique string associated with a browser and used to identify that browser. When a web browser is linked to a website, the browser's useragent string is also sent to the website so that the website can provide customizations based on the browser.
For example, the useragent string for the new Microsoft Edge browser based on Chromium is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3763.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/75.0.131.0
Although the new Edge browser is compatible with Google Docs because the browser uses the same HTML engine as the Chrome browser. However, because the browser's useragent is not whitelisted, Google Docs does not support the browser.
To demonstrate this, a user installed the User-Agent Switcher extension for Chrome on the Edge browser and configured the browser to use Chrome 74 useragent as follows:
'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.108 Safari/537.36'
After switching the useragent and refreshing Google Docs, the unsupported browser notification no longer appears on the Google Docs page.
Google can address this issue
There's no reason why Google shouldn't include Edge browser's useragent string in the whitelist; the only reason is Google's unfair play.
However, there's good news for users as Microsoft is rolling out a new feature on Edge browser that allows switching useragents based on accessed domain names.
According to reports, earlier this month, the integration of the new feature is being carried out to whitelist certain websites or provide different features based on the useragent string of the browser working accurately on the new Edge browser.
Assuming Google resolves this issue in the future, Microsoft could overlook the feature and create new rules for the docs.google.com URL, using Chrome's useragent string to announce that the 'browser is not supported,' which will disappear permanently.
Google Docs harbors a treasure trove of handy tricks. If you're not familiar with using this tool, check out some Google Docs tricks here.
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