This reminds me of a blog post a former exec of Mozilla put out saying Google had been intentionally breaking things to get users to jump ship to Chrome.
> "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?"
> "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said.
I tend to believe him
Chrome has 65.76% of the browser market share.
Firefox has 2.93% of the browser market share, and of those, only some Android users were affected.
And you're saying Google purposefully contrived a situation to break their own service to get those <3% of users to go and install Chrome, and assume those users knew to take that action? All while keeping this conspiracy quiet from other staff at Google and with malicious (and possibly anti-competitive) intent?
Or is it possible no one cares about Firefox because so few people use it and this is the result of a simple bug?
I use Youtube in Firefox daily, even in Strict mode with many user.js tweaks, and have never had a problem.
> The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'.
Get a faster computer.
> Get a faster computer
or... and keep up with me here. Google has been known to do A/B testing on users. Just because your part of "B" group that doesn't see it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It only means Google is artificially putting their thumb on the scale and I take serious issue with people handwaving issues with "get a better computer" Nothing is wrong with my computer and only Youtube has this issue, any other video platform does not do this so why is it only Youtube?
Yeah my m2 max is a total fucking slouch, just barely better than a 486.
Swallow your fucking pride and admit that you don't know what you are talking about.
To prevent the market share from going up? That's the logical thing to do after spending millions developing and marketing your browser to the number 1 spot.
Why would they waste that money and effort by playing nice now and letting the market share go back up?
This keeps happening over and over for Google at a rate far in excess of other major tech companies so we know they don’t make an effort to test with Firefox, and it’s why I’d like regulators to force anyone making a browser used by more than, say, 100k people to be obligated to test in other browsers on every site their larger organization operates and have a maximum time to patch any compatibility or performance issue which isn’t due to a browser not implementing a W3C standard. The goal would be to cover things like YouTube using the Chrome web component API for ages after the standard shipped and serving a slow polyfill to non-Chrome browsers.
FWIW, over my time at Google (2012-2022) we had massively better testing on Firefox than Safari, because you can run Firefox on Linux on arbitrary hardware while Safari requires MacOS which requires Apple hardware and is automation-hostile. We did eventually get some tests on Safari, but they were slower and flakier.
(Not defending; trying to give background.)
I appreciate that - it’s been really frustrating knowing how many good technical staff Google has and seeing things just not get fixed. Our GCP reps seemed resigned to this happening but didn’t feel they had leverage to get attention on the product side, which made me feel bad for them.
If it looks like a banana, shaped like a banana, feels like a banana, it’s probably a banana (or a plantain).
Not to mention the fact that this is google.com, not some wild feat of frontend engineering. They shouldn't be serving any JS that wouldn't run on IE, forget anything close to a modern browser.