Mozilla executive claims that Google has made YouTube slower on Edge and Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla executive claims that Google has made YouTube slower on Edge and Firefox

neowin.net

19 pointskerng14 comments

From the homepage:

> “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

> Since the beginning, our goal has been to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.

> Not just for some. For everyone.

Oops sorry, we mean,

"For people using Chrome."

Not surprising unfortunatley. That's the result of market dominance, a company can just act as they please. Chrome has become like IE in some ways (and the arguments of defenders are the similarly the same that Microsoft supporters had back then). Google probably hardly tests with other browsers, so it might not even be with malicous intent.

Win back the web was the Firefox motto to challenge IE, and it might be time again.

Any idea if the API is proprietory, or is it a standardized?

While I wouldn't put it past Google, it does seem less like a "performance advantage" and more of a pettiness thing if it's deliberate - slowing down only the initial navigate probably wouldn't deter anyone from going to YouTube or from their browser of choice - I think those tech savvy enough to chose their browser are also the ones on Mozilla for a reason, and those on Edge are on Edge because they aren't tech savvy enough to choose.

> slowing down only the initial navigate probably wouldn't deter anyone..

Keep in mind, time to load actually impacts user retention on most sites. If a user is savvy enough to notice that it only happens in Firefox - the result could be anything from maligning the reputation of Mozilla, to driving them to use Chrome.

On it's face, it appears anti-competitive and something a 90s Microsoft would have done.

clickbait title (on the original article).

Google didnt slow down Edge and Firefox on purpose, they simply use an old API, which is still natively supported by chrome, but has to polyfill in Edge and Firefox. This unsurprisingly leads to longer loading/js execution time

And YouTube will need a polyfill for Chrome in April when it removes v0 support.

My guess is that they won't remove it, since YT is a major product.

that sounds like plausible deniability

Shadow DOM/web components are really a good idea and hopefully FF/IE will implement them.

What obligation does Google have to optimize their own platform for anything other than Chrome? It should be up to Mozilla and Microsoft to keep up if they so choose.

It seems like a deliberate action to drive people to the Google browser. Other companies should not have to continually implement deprecated APIs just to play catch-up. It's a clear abuse of market dominance.

> Another rather interesting aspect to note is that Polymer's latest versions support both Shadow DOM v0 and v1 APIs, but for some reason, Google still uses Polymer 1.0 with the deprecated API.

They have an obligation to code websites using modern and open standards.

That's part of being a good internet citizen. Other companies have broken that responsibility (silver light) and we were correctly critical of them then.

None, but it's political. Gov could step in and break Google, because it's a monopoly.

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