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Comment by kchoudhu | Hacker News Reader

It's Youtube, not high frequency trading.

The logic is apparently that we can't do progressive enhancement because it would force us to make a second network request, but we can rely on unstandardized APIs that force us to ship polyfills that make our site slow on every other browser that's not Chrome.

Every decision, from progressive enhancement to supporting bleeding-edge features comes with tradeoffs. Youtube is still choosing tradeoffs, it's just choosing them based on what will work best in Chrome specifically.

I agree there are just a bunch of trade offs, and this shows you can’t please everyone. If you ship large bundles of polyfills people are sad they get some slow JavaScript, and if you give them fallback html and JavaScript that renders quick and supports their feature set, they are sad they didn’t get the same feature set as chrome latest. You have to minimize the fallback sadness as well as keep pushing better and better cutting edge experiences. This demanding environment is one thing I do like about the job even if it makes me feel constantly unqualified and doomed to fail :D

Speaking personally from my time before working at Google, the second network request is definitely the worse of the two options if you can’t do anything until it completes for most people- the round trip time kills you in the median US case I am familiar with.

At Apple for my small project we didn’t have these constraints so we just shipped a giant JavaScript bundle with feature detection and browser-side re-rendering that worked alright.

No, this shows you're not interested in pleasing anyone. There is no universe in which instructing the user to change browser software is preferable to adding milliseconds of latency at pageload. This attitude is so wrong it's almost sinister.

I am not defending YouTube redirecting a UA it hadn’t seen to download chrome when that UA explicitly went to /new for the new experience. I don’t know what happened there, and if I did I probably couldn’t say.

I am defending using the UA to tier responses based on the principle that it lowers the latency before the page is useful to the user, and I don’t see how that is a sinister practice.

You're right, Youtube is the largest content streaming website in history. HFT'ers would not even be able to host it.

Most of the big tech companies (amazon, google, facebook most notably) have discovered an extremely strong correlation between latency and $$$. Every saved millisecond of average load time tends to generate an incredible amount of money (like, 10s of millions of dollars a year per millisecond).

And subjectively, the latency on most google services (except for the search page) is pretty bad. Maybe Firefox Nightly isn't modern enough?

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