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Comment by skndr | Hacker News Reader

For those who've switched over to Firefox recently and find Youtube inexplicably slow, it's "because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome." [0]

The YouTube Classic extension will speed things up: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...

[0] https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185

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I'm on the Polymer team at Google. We've been helping the YouTube team, who's been doing a ton of work to update to the final v1 version of the webcomponent specs. So far it's a bit neck and neck between Firefox launching version 63 with native web component support (eta October) and YouTube switching the main desktop app over.

These are new standards, and there were a number of breaking changes from the v0 specs to v1. It's a lot of code to update, but we're working super hard to get all of Google onto v1.

Thanks for the update.

Shame about all the conspiracy theories regarding this topic. It seemed likely enough to boil down to a logical explanation.

fwiw if you read the rest of that thread on Twitter it explains that Youtube is not using Shadow DOM v0, the slowness is likely related to polyfills for HTML Imports, and the next version of Polymer no longer uses those to resolve issues like this.

Also Chrome is actively removing the web standards that didn't end up being adopted broadly: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/bli...

So YouTube will end up just as slow in other browsers unless they upgrade to a newer polymer that uses the broadly implemented standards.

Seems that the days of "Best viewed in browser X" have come back sadly.

When you give a browser a 70% market share it will always start abusing its position. Same as last time.

It's more of an OS issue here. Google doesn't view Android as a separate line of business. It's merely a moat for the search business. There's no way for an OS to be a moat for another business without abusing the OS.

Microsoft left IE6 stagnant. They didn't "abuse their position" other than through inactivity.

Google is actively involved in the standardization process, and moved Youtube over to a new API too prematurely (v0 of a spec). Now that v1 has been standardized, they're updating to that instead.

These are opposite problems. Microsoft got complacent whereas Google moved too fast.

Firefox will not, because they don't control youtube or google.com, or facebook or any major website. One of the reasons they are the best.

Haha gov't websites and banks here in my country is still best viewed (or only works) in Internet Explorer.

Oddly enough I haven't had too many issues with YouTube's slowness (as a Firefox user). I mean, it's slow, but "tolerable". It's the new Gmail that's horrifically slow now. It takes a good 20 seconds to get to the point where I can interact with it, and then each interaction takes another 10 seconds.

Shadow DOM v0 is deprecated in Chrome and will be removed in April 2019. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/09/chrome-70-...

This is like Microsoft and IE all over again.

I mean, polymer also broke most of the chromecast functionality in google's own browser to the point that I have to use ?disable_polymer=1 to really use it at all from a browser (really I mostly just use it from my phone now), so this doesn't seem terribly surprising by comparison.

YouTube works fine for me in Firefox on OS X with 6 year old hardware.

YouTube fixed something a few days after that post. I no longer experience the slowness it was describing in Firefox.

Is that the same reason why reddit is so slow in Firefox?

Try using mpv + youtube-dl to stream Youtube. It even has playlist/mix support.

I feel so stupid for not knowing this existed; thanks a lot.

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