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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Took a performance benchmark in both Firefox and Brave. Both of them are unusually slow (addons/extensions disabled, fresh profile), but Firefox especially so. Source for the huge render times seems to be desktop_polymer.js, specifically the part that's registering and setting up custom web components. Once the website loads, performance becomes a lot better.

My guess is that a Polymer update made Youtube slower for everyone, but SpiderMonkey isn't particularly great at the kind of excess operations that have been added. Firefox in particular seems to suffer from complete UI freezes whereas Chromium browsers seem to just have slow tabs when the browser is overwhelmed.

While I certainly wouldn't be surprised if this is part of an anti-adblocker mechanism, not every slowdown on Google's websites is done out of malice. Some of it is just caused by bugs.

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Since YouTube has massive resources and famed tooling&processes, presumably either they knew about the Firefox problems before deploying, or (if there was a genuine QA mistake) they'd know about it very soon after deploy, when they'd be able to rollback if they wanted to.

(Obviously, they know about Firefox, they've developed for it since it was available, and they've even been funding it.)

Google funding Firefox is part of the problem. It contributes to the perception of corruption around the Mozilla organization, just as it does when the bus has a supergraphic ad for a car dealership on it.

If the EU was serious about privacy they'd fully fund Firefox.

The perception of corruption is not without merit. Mozilla is pretty corrupt at this point. (Source: I work here).

I really don’t get where this whole “the EU should fund it” idea came from and why it’s repeated so often. Why would the EU throw their tax payer money at another corrupt American corporation? Mozilla has been in bed with Google for several years, has horrible web compatibility, and is only barely still in the privacy lane.

Besides, Europe isn’t the land of open source software and privacy. Look at the laws in the UK, France, and Germany; they’re not exactly privacy friendly. Look at the tech stacks at companies in the UK and Germany, they lean very heavily into the Microsoft/.NET world.

Then they should fork it and start a new organization.

The EU and the world could have a privacy focused browser if they paid for it. If they don't they're going to always be waiting for the market to do it and it won't. Given that Mozilla wastes a lot of resources on things that are thoroughly pizzled (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac) a browser could be maintained for much less than the current Mozilla budget. This is why "fully funded" as opposed to "funded" is key. So long as the organization feels the need to go around with its hat out it is going to be corrupt.

They can fork Chromium instead. Doesn't mean Firefox is the best base to start.

… and there are many Chromium forks out there. For web standards to really be standards and not “Chromium” there has to be a viable non-Chromium browser.

The illusion of choice:

You can have any color car as long as its black. I mean you can run any browser you want, as long as its Chrome.

If Firefox had 90% of the market would it be a choice?

Yes, because Mozilla can't force is onto it by making google finance and YouTube run like shit on competing browsers

Can you elaborate on specifics of corruption?

Basically, follow the money.

To keep nonprofit/tax benefits, the work has to be done for some sort of public benefit. That work never gets done, instead it’s constant reorganizations, hiring/firing, and shuffling money around. We’re always profitable, and every few years there seems to be decent to huge layoffs even though we’re beating revenue estimates and behind on our hiring goals.

Money keeps going up from Google, usage keeps going down, start new projects, never staff them to what is budgeted, cut project, fire people, and the money disappears into the foundation. Foundation sends money out to various levels of ghost and shell corporations.

Most of this sounds like poor management and not corruption. But perhaps the corruption is intentional mismanagement to keep it uncompetitive

I wonder what your thoughts are on Firefox's absence of an AdBlocker on iOS? Edge has one, Brave has one, but Firefox still doesn't have one. I know that on iOS they can't run plugins, but since the other browsers can, it feels like a lost opportunity.

Could Google's funding be related?

Why would EU fund a US corporation?

EU has funded Servo, which is a lot better than giving money to already-rich Mozilla CxOs: https://nlnet.nl/project/Verso/

I always find these comments a bit rediculous. You think that big corporations are incapable of having accidental bugs?

Wish that were true. The world would be a much less buggy place.

> I always find these comments a bit rediculous. You think that big corporations are incapable of having accidental bugs?

I didn't say they that they couldn't have accidental bugs.

I did note that they'd normally be able to rollback a deploy with problems.

Why do you say that's ridiculous to comment?

I don't think it's ridiculous, it's just they might not necessarily care enough. They will consider it a bug if there's enough uproar, for now there are just a couple of unhappy users here and there, no reasons to revert something that presumably took a lot of work to implement, especially if the fix takes more effort than the original implementation (I wouldn't be surprised since we're talking about performance differences between browser engines).

I kinda hope that time-to-render is in their A/B rollout metrics to prevent rollouts...

In the world of fail early, fail often this stuff is bound to happen. That said YouTube works fine for me minus the obvious resolution issues that YouTube has been enforcing forever because of DMCAon some videos

You’d be shocked how shitty the development practices inside a bigco can be. Working at a FAANG-level company is profoundly disillusioning.

One of recent Chromium updates (affected Chrome's and Edge's wide release, not just betas) completely broke all pages with select elements containing a large amount of option elements. We're talking 100+ times slower parsing of the page. An internal tool of ours went from rendering pretty much instantly to 30s long hangs and/or crashes.

Found the bug: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/341095522

From the thread:

> We’re now directing users to move away from Chrome

…to where, exactly?

It feels more like YouTube just doesn't prioritize an unpopular browser. Google only put resources into Firefox so they can say they're not a monopoly, but that strategy didn't really pan out. So, now, they're probably going to stop caring about Firefox altogether.

I have a strong feeling the developers behind sites like YouTube and Reddit don't actually use the software they make, because both are slow and laggy to use on any computer I use.

I just can't think of any other reason why they're both so infamously bad.

As they say, you aren't the customer, the advertiser is the customer.

If the site works for the 95% of ad dollars who use Chrome on their phones, it works as intended.

> the advertiser is the customer.

Excellent point. If any change on the site caused ad views or clicks to drop by >1%, automated tests probably shoot flares up to the exec level. Whereas the vast majority of users on FF are blocking ads anyway, so their lagging performance probably barely registers on those tests.

While YT probably still has non-ad automated performance tests, in the case of a non-Chrome, non-Apple desktop browser, those tests probably run every odd Thursday and regressions send a toast message to an intern. :-)

Even advertisers don't matter anymore, only metrics. Because they can be manipulated.

The software engineering show isn't being run by engineers, middle-managers or even MBAs anymore.

It's run by product people who treat it like a mini dictatorship.

So releases like this have to go out, no matter the consequence.

Working on software rarely, especially at large companies, means you have any sort of agency over the features of the software. That's Not Your Job (TM).

They use it but in Chrome on a maxed out MacBook Pro

What actions do you find slow and laggy? There are definitely UX improvements, but I don't find either laggy on the multiple platforms I use them on, as long as I have a good network connection.

Another wild-ass guess is that a lot of garbage may be generated? I had to use an intranet site that was developed on an older version of vue, and that version apparently was a profligate allocator; difference between chromium and firefox was stark.

On an only-slightly-related note, if anyone knows how to use the new firefox profiler when there is no internet access, please point me at it.

>desktop_polymer.js

its doing such fun things as patching tons of standard js methods (.append() .appendChild() etc) for no reason other than maybe fighting adblockers?

When debugging own scripts/extensions running on YT every other call to standard function ends up calling some proxy in desktop_polymer.js

even after load, youtube shorts (the doomscrolling section of youtube) has a 2-3 second lag between when the audio starts on a new video and when the video starts moving.

seems monopolistic. what's goin on with peertube and rumble these days

my question is why isn't this being tested for before it is rolled out? shouldn't google be running testing on their sites for each of the major browsers before dropping it on everyone?

Also, it is Firefox on the desktop. 90% of YouTube views come from mobile, and Firefox only has about 5% market share on the desktop. So desktop Firefox is a half a percent of the overall users of youtube.

Is it any surprise that maintaining support for a browser that delivers less than a percent of the total users is deprioritized or just forgotten about?

Despite those stats, if Google wants to avoid being called a monopoly they need to support it, and it needs to receive the same level of support as their own product.

It’s not monopolistic to not support shitty browsers with little user base. This isn’t even the basis for the current antitrust ruling against Google, for what it’s worth.

As the parent comment points out, if YouTube isn’t buggy for most of their users, why do they have to worry about it? We don’t expect either Microsoft or game devs to ensure their stuff works well with wine on Linux.

So you work at Google on Youtube then right?

The _WEB_ is a open standard. A Game running on Windows is a false equivalence.

Web standards are open but that doesn’t mean you can’t build on top of them. YouTube is not an open standard. If Google wanted to end web support for YouTube and force everyone to use some sort of YouTube app even on desktop, they could do that. They’re not obligated to make sure YouTube works on EVERY browser especially when an insignificant amount of their users come from there.

A game running on windows isn’t a false equivalence either. A lot of games are built on open standards and open source (e.g. OpenGL, various game engines, etc) and still won’t work on wine/linux. If a bunch of people are using windows in order to play their games, that’s not too different from a lot of people using chromium browsers to use YouTube.

Also, I work at Mozilla.

I'd argue the opposite. You need to be a monopoly and have basically every eyeball in the country on your website for it to be worth spending the engineering hours optimizing a browser that only delivers a fraction of a percent of your viewers.

If they're doing it to intentionally damage firefox because they feel it is competition, that's an argument for Chrome to be severed from google.

If they're inadvertently doing it because firefox is so insignificant as not to be worth thinking about, that's an argument for Chrome to be severed from google.

How is Firefox having abysmal market share an argument that chrome should be severed from Google?

In a vacuum, it's not. The market is completely dominated by Google though, and they exercise that authority and mindshare brazenly, to the point that it's easy to see how it affects Firefox. Firefox functions great. It doesn't function great with Google products/services such as YouTube in this case, which has no real competition. What's someone to do? Switch to Chrome. One might even make the assumption that the repeat offenses over time, across various services, across various fields, demonstrates... malice.

> demonstrates... malice

Not demonstrates, hints at. In each of these cases, Google is very careful that you can easily come up with an alternative plausible explanation. It's hard to use the en masse argument if each of these problems can be accounted for.

These guys are not stupid - they're happy with the current status quo where they have a de facto monopoly but they can pretend they don't.

Sorry, it is absolutely hard-core malice. No hinting, after we found out last year that a deliberate sleep was introduced with a user agent check. This is bald-faced murder. Its like shooting someone in public and stomping on the body. No need to dance around it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

You should actually read the link you posted. That had nothing to do with Firefox and has everything to do with ad blockers. Looks like YouTubes goal was to bring parity between those using ad blockers and those not, as to not incentivize ad blocker usage, not to cripple Firefox.

And ? It is part of the anti-adblocker code which is clearly targeted at Firefox. What sort of extra-ordinary bar are you keeping for malice if not this ?

Considering Firefox's current situation is the result of years of abusive monopoly practice from Google, Chrome should be severed from Google.

If you knew the amount of project changes, reorgs, CEOs, products, executives, etc we’ve went through you’d realize Googles behavior had little do with it. In fact, if it weren’t for their corporate generosity we’d be finished by now.

We’re basically run by a bunch of lawyers and ex-McKinsey people now (and have been for some time). We’re not victims of Google, we’re victims of our own hiring practices.

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