Google making YouTube slower for non-Chromium browsers? | Hacker News Reader

Google making YouTube slower for non-Chromium browsers?

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40 pointsmarsrover10 comments

discussed 3months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027

Methinks it's time for an anti-trust investigation on Google like the one on Microsoft during the Internet Explorer heyday.

At the same time, I don't trust the US has institutions that haven't been sabotaged by successive US administrations (from both sides) in their capacities to pursue anti-trust investigations of this sort.

Europe to the rescue?

The technologies YouTube is relying on are deprecated in Chrome and will be removed in April.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-d...

It's hard to believe that someone at youtube decided to screw probably 50%+ of their users in hopes they'll move to chrome.

We're talking about Google here. It's not remotely hard to believe that Google would screw things up for people to try to get them to use more Google things.

my point was that they'd be screwing themselves.

His point was that they do that routinely.

Google does a number of things like this that give Chrome based browsers more power for Google based websites.

Another example is the *.google.com cookies, they are not deleted when you go to clear browsing history -> clear cookies.

Also a recent version of Chrome implemented "no autoplay audio or video" as a feature, but YouTube and Google music are on a whitelist pre-built into the Chrome browser.

> Also a recent version of Chrome implemented "no autoplay audio or video" as a feature, but YouTube and Google music are on a whitelist pre-built into the Chrome browser.

They use the media engagement index[1] to gather global statistics to generate global average user preferences to determine if a domain get's to autoplay. It is not something manually defined through someone's decision about a specific domain. This global list is only used until the user has enough interactions with the site in question to allow chrome to use local MEI data to auto-whitelist the domain.

It will likely allow youtube to autoplay, both initially because of the global data but also continuing oin after individual usage data is acquired, but that makes sense and is exactly as you would expect and want out of a system like this. It should also let a competitor auto-play after enough usage is detected, and continue to do so per-user after local data is collected for that instance of chrome.

It will stop random domains from having video pop-ups that auto-play, or in page auto-playing, and it will also prevent domains that initially allow auto-playing from doing so later on if you stop the auto-playing enough that the local chrome instance learns your preferences.

1: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

2: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=843427...

New youtube design eats a lot more memory than old. 250 mb is too big.

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