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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

YouTube wanted to deprecate Flash video, so Mozilla enabled VP9 support in Firefox 43 for users whose operating system does not provide an H.264 codec. (VP9 for all other platforms is coming a little later.) YouTube disabled Flash for Firefox 43 users, as planned, but forgot (?) to enable VP9 for those users. Without H.264 or Flash video, those users received low-quality 360p VP8 instead of high-quality VP9. When this mistake was discovered, YouTube could not fix or revert the configuration change because of their holiday code freeze.

(I am a Mozilla employee.)

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That sounds like something that shouldn't be rolled out over Christmas when nobody is in the office.

As if similar bugs in Google products wouldn't be fixed over Christmas. Chrome playing only in 360p? That would be fixed in a matter of hours.

They said in the ticket that the issue does NOT affect the majority of Firefox users. It was just a calculation of the impact, and they decided not to release a hotfix. I'm pretty sure if it was affecting all firefox users it would be fixed in a matter of hours too.

I am quite sure that even if it were the same amount (in absolute numbers) of Chrome users, it would have been a bigger priority than Firefox, at least for most people there.

If this had happened to Chrome users, the code freeze would have magically been broken in a matter of hours.

thanks for this summary, very succinct and hyperbole-free.

I thought google committed code to prod thousands of times a day! Why do they even have a holiday freeze if it's so automated to push to prod?

Just because all of Google pushes to prod thousands of times a day doesn't mean that the team within Youtube pushes to prod that often. They may have some sort of scheduled deploy cycle and likely a review process.

During the holidays they simply may not be staffed up for that process.

Just because you can push to prod doesn't mean you should push to prod.

From what I hear, YouTube pushes daily, Monday through Thursday.

My former team (in a big company) push changes to prod at least once a day until 3PM Friday. However, the company has the no-deploy days policy for the holiday period because if things break, there are gonna be very few people in the office to fix it.

If it's so, can't they just roll back?

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