Google has slowed down YouTube on Firefox and Edge – Mozilla exec

Authored by mybroadband.co.za and submitted by V0lta

Mozilla technical programme manager Chris Peterson stated that Google has deliberately slowed down the performance of YouTube on Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge web browsers, CNET reported.

“YouTube page load is 5-times slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome, because YouTube’s Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome,” Peterson said.

“YouTube serves a Shadow DOM polyfill to Firefox and Edge that is, unsurprisingly, slower than Chrome’s native implementation.”

Peterson said that on his laptop, the initial page load takes five seconds with the polyfill – compared to one second without it. Subsequent page navigation performance is comparable, he found.

He suggested the YouTube Classic Firefox extension to restore YouTube’s pre-Polymer design to increase the first-load performance of the site.

To fix YouTube on Edge, you can install the Tampermonkey extension for the browser and use a “YouTube Restore Classic” user script.

Now read: Firefox tests muting autoplaying audio

internetguy__ on July 27th, 2018 at 12:32 UTC »

Idc ill still use firefox til I die

fabsch412 on July 27th, 2018 at 11:52 UTC »

Atleast get it right, youtube uses an old deprecated api only implemented in chrome and because the others dont have it it is slower.

EDIT: It was some experimental technology though, so you cant really blame the other browsers for not implementing it.

Dazzman50 on July 27th, 2018 at 11:43 UTC »

I dont usually complain about clickbait titles, but this is a little clickbaity.

It doesn't sound like they've purposely slowed it down on Firefox, Chrome just has a certain component that allows YouTube to load faster initially. They haven't "slowed down YouTube on Firefox" at all. It's like saying Ubisoft has "slowed down Assassins Creed on Xbox" because the ps4 has a rendering component that can happen to benefit running the game.

Unless Google were playing the long game and this API in Chrome was purposely intended to cause discrepancy between YouTube on Firefox and YouTube on Chrome.