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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

And yet 95% of the time I try to watch YouTube in Firefox, it just hangs, never actually playing. Yet Chrome works flawlessly every time.

I'm not saying Google is doing anything malicious here, I think it's more of a "we put a lot more effort into making YouTube work" kinda thing.

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YouTube is now written in Polymer, a library made by Google that uses the Web Components specifications, which currently only Chrome supports natively[1], so they have to rely on polyfills on the rest of the browsers, so it's understandable that YouTube can perform bad on browsers other than Chrome.

[1]: https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components

> which currently only Chrome supports natively

Firefox Nightly supports it, too, but Google still uses the polyfill there, and not even their normal polyfill, but a significantly slower one.

Just as a counter anecdote, I'm a heavy youtube watcher and I haven't had any issues with high res video playback on osx 10.12.

I've seen something similar — because I turned off auto playing videos. Manually scrubbing the video forward and back seems to fix it for me.

It's also not that surprising that Google has less of an incentive to test interoperability with their competitor's product…

I've just been clicking the small play button.

It doesn't hang for me, but it is slow and even lags in Quantum on an underpowered machine on Ubuntu. Works fine in Chrome though.

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