Mozilla exec says Google slowed YouTube down on non-Chrome browsers

> This seems like a poor choice of technology rather than an outright nefarious decision.

How would you tell the difference?

Deliberately and knowingly made decision that hurts already barely existing competition is not an innocent polyfill mistake. It's more like policy level abuse of dominant position to transition users to Chrome from non-Chrome browsers.

It's a symptom of a greater problem, which is that Google (the search engine) owns Chrome, Youtube, Android, Maps, Gmail, and a whole host of other services that are tenuously linked at best (outside of the fact that all the data gets fed into advertising algorithms)

Quite frankly, the company should be broken up forcibly by the government. All of these services should be profitable on their own, not used as loss leaders to grab as much ad data as possible and stamp out any sort of competition.

Is there a Youtube setting to keep this enabled?

I'm using an ancient browser and youtube seems to always append this automatically for me.

What new UI features does a video-catalogue website really need, though?

They've reached or passed maturity and are adding dubious features like the miniplayer that keeps playing the video you've just back-buttoned out of. Things that benefit advetisers, not users.

The truly beneficial features should be server-side; culling those awful 'Top 10 Shocking ...' videos from my recommendations, for example. Or realising that just because I watched one programme about military re-enactment, once in ten years, I probably don't want to watch another 30.

The new version uses new features which only Chrome has implemented. For IE it still serves the old version, but for FF and Edge, it serves the new version together with a compatibility layer that makes it slower. So they could have just served the old version, but they decided to serve a new, slow version instead.

The key point here is that they made it in a way that uses a deprecated API that will not be implemented anywhere else but in Chrome. Even Chrome own platform status page[1] says v0 is deprecated and scheduled for removal. By making their web properties rely on APIs which are no longer in standards tracks, they essentially harm the interoperability of the web. It is very comfortable when you control both extremes of some web property (the video sharing platform and the browser) to make sure they work well together and let the rest of the world play catch up.

We have standards for a reason, so that things such as this are avoidable and you can use your browser of choice, whichever that browser is, on the web. By allowing their web developers to play the "chrome-first-and-foremost" game, they make the net-positive side-effect of acquiring more users for their browser, after all, who wants to use a slower browser right?

[1]: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4507242028072960

From the fine article: "YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension..."

Look at where the internet was before google and all the tech that improved because of google. I think many people underestimate how much of the internet, web server hardware moved forward was directly or indirectly because of google. And many if not all the major web based companies that exsist is because of the tech google introduced and open sourced.

china net is a really interesting place

I am with you. I want to see a world where Google is nothing more than a search engine.

But in this case I don't think they are at fault. As far as I understand it they didn't they just over-optimize for their own browser, which is not quite the same as degrade performance on other browsers on purpose.

FTA: "YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome". Shadow DOM v0 never was a standard, merely a proposal in a draft.