Thursday, July 26, 2018

YouTube’s Poorer Performance in Non-Chrome Browsers

Tom Warren:

Google launched a new YouTube design nearly a year ago, but if you’ve been using Edge, Safari, or Firefox then you’ve probably wondered why YouTube is loading so slowly. Mozilla program manager Chris Peterson has highlighted the issue this week, and it’s not your alternative browser that’s to blame. Google’s redesign still relies on a deprecated shadow DOM API that’s only implemented in Chrome, making other browsers render YouTube five times slower.

Via Nick Heer:

The implication here seems to be that Google has built YouTube to run well specifically in Chrome because they want more people using their own browser, and that it’s somewhat anticompetitive in the vein of their blocking of other products on competing platforms. I get that angle, but I think it’s misapplied here. It seems more likely to me that Google just didn’t adequately test YouTube in non-Chrome browsers, probably because they’re less popular and maybe because they don’t care.

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There’s absolutely no way this is laziness or incompetence on Google’s part. This will be a *giant* development team lead by extremely experienced people, working on a website visited by literally billions of people. It is 100% malicious.

Google every year is more and more like Microsoft circa 1998.

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