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Google Has Made YouTube Slower on Edge and Firefox, Mozilla Alleges (neowin.net) 145

Posted by msmash from the interesting-insights dept.
Usama Jawad, writing for Neowin: Early last year, YouTube received a design refresh with Google's own Polymer library which enabled "quicker feature development" for the platform. Now, a Mozilla executive is claiming that Google has made YouTube slower on Edge and Firefox by using this framework. In a thread on Twitter, Mozilla's Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube's Polymer redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only available in Chrome. This in turn makes the site around five times slower on competing browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox. Further reading: Safari Users Unable to Play Newer 4K Video On YouTube in Native Resolution.
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Google Has Made YouTube Slower on Edge and Firefox, Mozilla Alleges More

Google Has Made YouTube Slower on Edge and Firefox, Mozilla Alleges

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  • Chrome is the new IE 6 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:01AM (#57006218)

    Long live IE6

  • video loads first now, too (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:04AM (#57006226)

    This means that after the page finished loading, any resize that you've done gets reverted.... good job Google.

  • I think I've noticed this (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:05AM (#57006234)

    On Firefox, the video portion loads right away, and all the other shit I don't care about loads later. Sometimes quite a bit later.

    But, as I said I don't care about that, so I thought maybe Google was purposely loading the actual content first.

  • Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:5, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:06AM (#57006236) Homepage Journal

    This is what happens when any corporation gets into too many supporting markets. That situation rewards anticompetitive behavior. Google has every incentive to use Youtube to prop up Chrome, and vice versa. They have become Microsoft.

    Remember when Google declared that Amazon Fire TV users would no longer be able to use an app to access their site, because rea$ons? Well, that's still the state of affairs. You have to use a browser instead of an App because Amazon won't carry Google's devices in their web store. Well, Google doesn't carry Amazon's devices in their web store, either. How on earth is this not anticompetitive?

    While I'd like to see Google held accountable for their anticompetitive behavior, the best solution is still for someone else to spin up a video streaming site. There's enough people who want an alternative to Youtube for it to work out. But it has to be at least as friendly to uploaders as Youtube...

    • Fight back - make your site slow too (Score:5, Funny)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:23AM (#57006332) Journal

      I'm going to give Google a taste of their own medicine and make my site slow too. CNN is leading the fight in this; their site is super slow in all the major browsers.

    • Re:Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:26AM (#57006352)

      I remember when they added video adverts, that was bad enough (remember when it was just text advertising?) Now because they keep fucking with monetization content creators are setting sometimes up to 3 ads per 25 minute video which is beyond what I care to deal with. There are a few YouTube only shows I'm gonna miss, that said there are a lot of sites out there that (with adBlock) mirror the content and give me less hassle.

      It's not that I don't want to support creators, I just don't want to support Google's scummy behavior anymore

    • Re:Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:2)

      by Cinnamon Beige ( 1952554 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:27AM (#57006354)

      While I'd like to see Google held accountable for their anticompetitive behavior, the best solution is still for someone else to spin up a video streaming site. There's enough people who want an alternative to Youtube for it to work out. But it has to be at least as friendly to uploaders as Youtube...

      They're steadily working on making that an easier hurdle to clear.

    • Re:Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:2)

      by swilver ( 617741 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:36AM (#57006432)

      Brilliant idea. I'll get some servers and spin up a YouTube replacement, give me a couple.

    • Re:Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:16AM (#57006694)

      Remember when Google declared that Amazon Fire TV users would no longer be able to use an app to access their site, because rea$ons? Well, that's still the state of affairs. You have to use a browser instead of an App because Amazon won't carry Google's devices in their web store.

      That is an interesting retcon, Amazon decided they didn't need to follow the Youtube API's licensing agreement when they implemented their Fire TV application. Amazon's anti-competitive store behaviour certainly didn't engender them to Google but Google has similarly kicked off other companies, see also Microsoft when they violated the Youtube terms.

      • Amazon decided they didn't need to follow the Youtube API's licensing agreement

        That licensing agreement was created specifically for anticompetitive purposes. Amazon wasn't interfering with Youtube's revenue-generating abilities in any way, since they were showing the ad content.

        • Re:Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:2)

          by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @03:46PM (#57008604)
          The agreement is so that Google maintains direction of their service instead of a different experience on every device based on the priorities of the manufacturers.
          • A fact which also means that it is difficult, maybe even impossible, for a manufacturer to add value and differentiate themselves in the set top appliance market. Why bother making yet another Android based streaming content appliance when the only way you can compete is on price? Since Google has its own digital media appliance line, handicapping other manufacturers ability to differentiate themselves is arguably a clear case of anti-competitive behaviour. Both Amazon and Google have vast amounts of cash reserves they can spend on lawyers, so any legal challenge to this practice would likely be long and expensive. What would matter to Amazon is whether the cost of winning is out-weighed by the potential profits. (It seems that Amazon's primary interest in this market is as a channel for promoting their own software and entertainment content, so access to Youtube content would be a lower priority for them anyway)

    • Re:Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:20AM (#57006716)

      Remember when Google declared that Amazon Fire TV users would no longer be able to use an app to access their site, because rea$ons?

      The "rea$ons" being Amazon's anti-competitve behavior?

      Well, Google doesn't carry Amazon's devices in their web store, either. How on earth is this not anticompetitive?

      Because the Google Store only carries products made by Google, (or Nest, a subsidiary of its parent company, or at one point hardware that was made by other OEMs, but than ran a Google OS such as Android or ChromeOS). Amazon, however, makes it a point to try and carry everything and they even did carry the Chromecast when it first appeared.

      While I'd like to see Google held accountable for their anticompetitive behavior, the best solution is still for someone else to spin up a video streaming site. There's enough people who want an alternative to Youtube for it to work out. But it has to be at least as friendly to uploaders as Youtube...

      Yeah Amazon should be held accountable too, I mean, how hard is it to make an ecommerce at the same scale???

    • Re:Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:25AM (#57006748)

      Ever heard of vimeo or dailymotion?

      There already are alternatives to youtube but people (both uploaders and viewers) will need a reason to migrate. Youtube is currently "good enough" that I won't migrate.

    • How on earth is this not anticompetitive?

      Both parties had devices and in each others' stores, putting them on equal footing. That means that, when Amazon removed Google's devices, Google had a matching competitive move (which they took): remove Amazon's devices from their marketplace.

      Absent that equal footing, it absolutely would by anti-competitive; but, given the similar posture of the two competitors, this is simply them mutually agreeing not to help each other compete.

    • Re: Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:2)

      by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @01:23PM (#57007522) Journal
      There might be a few corner cases of users who would like a YouTube alternative, but what really matters are the advertisers. And good luck getting the record industry to let a new startup site host the vast amount of copyright content that makes up a huge chunk of YouTube's traffic...

      • There might be a few corner cases of users who would like a YouTube alternative, but what really matters are the advertisers.

        Starfucks, Home Despot, and Dodge+Apple (comarketing) all interrupted me watching Mighty Car Mods this morning. And I will not forget, and I will shop somewhere else. Not, to be fair, that I would have given any of those companies money in the first place except for possibly HD. I will also have to remember to install my Youtube downloader on the tablet so I can use it next time. Or, I guess, I can just install Kodi.

        I laud companies for sponsoring content I want to watch, but not for interrupting it with advertisements. I call them out for that.

    • Re:Just part of their war on... everyone (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:06PM (#57010560)

      ...{snip}... the best solution is still for someone else to spin up a video streaming site. There's enough people who want an alternative to Youtube for it to work out. But it has to be at least as friendly to uploaders as Youtube...

      First I should preface with the fact I owned and operated a UGC video sharing site pre-YouTube, We reached 42M users with a Billion streams before YouTube outpaced us and all other other UGC video sharing site out there. That service I started had it's hay day and was turned off by the new owners last year, as are most video hosts (it's a Strategic Content business, not a profit business).

      Trying to create a Streaming site now to out compete with YouTube is folly best explained by the Red Queen effect
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

      To win, this "Youtube Disrupter" would have to go to where YouTube needs to go but can't (The innovators Dilemma).

      YouTube is a service built from the perspective of the video consumer (compared to Vimeo which is a service built from the perspective of a video uploader).

      Where YouTube tried to go but couldn't was to build a product from the perspective of the content curator. (Multi Channel Networks Like Machinama are a good example of this)

      So The new service might likely not host video rather provide an interface to obviate the host and aggregate content-domain appropriate video from many sources. That is, if you love Cats, here are all the great, popular and latest Cat videos from.....(yeah, no one really cares who hosts it Sorry YouTube)

      That Said We also know of a couple areas where Youtube has failed recently. Namely trying to compete with Netflix and Hulu in Premium content land (trying to be what they're not) And then alienating their top uploaders for not having "Brand Safe" advertiser-friendly messaging. So there is a desire for a replacement.

      Technically the challenge has to be paid for, I can't underscore the time, money and human cost of moderating videos, keeping streaming servers up, and dealing with the problem of serving millions of different videos to millions of different people. Trust me I ran a business doing this for 6 years and before I did that I was trained as an AT&T Backbone and IDC engineer. At scale it's a horribly inefficient design which is one reason why YouTube hires thousands of employees.

      A well run web service should have no employees, so we can see the YouTube core design is being scaled through Google's application of brute force capital.

      Thankfully there is a solution.
      When I first built my service my day job was watching Bit Torrent fill up the backbone with packets. It was painfully clear that P2P design is a fundamentally superior solution for Media distribution. When you're getting started and boot strapping from your garage it's a million times easier to just make a single server solution, which is what happened with Napster. But if you don't have serve content in a way that Madison Avenue approves, they shut you down (which is also what happened to Napster and is happening to YouTube streamers today).

      15 years ago The tech to make P2P streaming simply wasn't possible, but now the only thing that truthfully blocks a serverless P2P Video streaming network is the "No Ad-Hoc Networks" Commandment from the Apple App Store. That's it. Remove that non-technical business-focused limitation and we could see the app that replaces YouTube.

      And Ironically the tech to do Serverless P2P streaming was recently created in 2011 by Bram Cohen while working at Bit Torrent,
      So guess what? That means it's never going to happen because Bit Torrent suffered so hard at the hands of Madison Aveneue that the LAST THING they're going to do is release tech that would piss off their now media partners.

      So the tech is there to make what happens after YouTube, but it's held back by business interest. Which is ironic to me, because when UGC video sharing popped 15 years ago it was against everyone's bus

  • Google is a monopoly (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:09AM (#57006260)

    and will be broken up

  • Hosts File Help? (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:10AM (#57006262)

    How can I use a hosts file to help bring back my performance?

  • Shadow DOM is a W3C standard (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:15AM (#57006296)

    Shadow DOM is a W3C standard. I don't know why they throw in "v0" there, as far as I know, the version of the Shadow DOM that Chrome supports is the released standard. Firefox flat-out doesn't support it yet.

    The Shadow DOM makes various repeated elements load much faster because it allows the same snippet of HTML be reused without being reparsed. It's a very useful feature if you're writing a web UI library where you have effectively the same HTML chunk over and over again. The lack of support in Firefox and Edge is annoying and results in effectively having to manually add the elements to the DOM, which is, not surprisingly, slower than just being able to copy them.

    This isn't Google being evil. This is Google using web standards that Firefox is too lazy to adapt.

  • Recaptcha Too (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:23AM (#57006334)

    They don't seem to trust anyone unless they're running mainline Chrome. With Waterfox, whatever else, they make me redo the captcha several times and take the sweet time to fade out and in more image tiles. Literally every site within reason uses their shitty captcha and so I end up wasting time to simply respond to a comment in many cases.

  • Google did something evil? Do tell! (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:23AM (#57006336)

    Hey, it's not like an out-of-control overgrown ad agency that makes its money in a fundamentally evil way by strip-mining your privacy and selling it to anyone who wants to pay for would have any scruples about underhanded behavior with it's spyware, er, browser.

  • When a browser is slow (Score:2)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:34AM (#57006406) Journal
    Add more CPU, RAM and GPU to a desktop computer.
    See if that can outpace the software of an ad company.

  • Whose problem is this? (Score:1)

    by bigtech ( 722116 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @10:35AM (#57006412)
    So, let me get this right. YouTube uses Shadow DOM v0, which while currently supported by Firefox has slow load-times. Wouldn't the best solution be to have Polymer use Shadow DOM v1, and for Firefox to load this at competitive speeds?

  • This happens with their captchas too (Score:2)

    by ilikenwf ( 1139495 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:08AM (#57006642)
    Chrome, one and done with recaptcha. Firefox/Waterfox, it forces you to do 3-4 proper captchas and takes the sweet time to load new tiles by fading them out and in...

  • Actually... (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:14AM (#57006684)

    Actually the problem is two-fold and not only on Google.
    YouTube is coded like shit, while Firefox is littered with Memory Leak problems and also shit interpreter code.
    It's been like this for the past almost a decade now.
    It's a problem that both the Browser coders and the webcoders are at fault jointly, and the infinite circlejerk between the two parties throwing blame at the other doesn't help.
    Until someone consolidates a nice map of how bad webcode in conjunction with bad browser code both result in the consumers having to upgrade their god damn CPU's and RAM to run "modern" webpages which have the same amount of fucking UI elements as over 10 years ago, yet somehow eat 10 times more performance and memory now; this whole shifting the blame ad infinitum game of Catch 22 will never be the answer.
    We can start with purging Java and JavaScript from existence just for fucking starters.

  • Obvious Solution (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:17AM (#57006704)

    Obviously, what this means is that Google would prefer that people make their own front end, and just use youtube-dl to get the videos. That way, you can fully enjoy them without any inconveniences or slowdowns. And as a bonus, also without ads and Google getting revenue.

    I, for one, think it's very interesting that they went to the trouble and expense to create this new incentive. But it's not unprecedented: Hollywood adds DRM to encourage people to pirate their media, for example. For whatever reason, the theme of 21st century media business always comes down to pure asceticism and altruism, over selfishness.

    I can only conclude that media companies always put in the effort to make themselves unprofitable due to the examples provided by their subject matter, e.g. politicians in the news. (It was so nice, for example, of our president to offer free money to that playmate.) Why don't more types of businesses become charities like how Youtube and Trump's business try so hard to?

    • Re:Obvious Solution (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:32AM (#57006790)

      I've been using MPV + Youtube-dl + Open With to view YouTube vids just because of this retardation, so i don't have to open a new page for every vid to kill my computer but just right click a link so MPV loads it fast and nice, and due to the nature of this system it's one of the reasons i'm still on FF56 and not updating ever again. Both Mozilla and Google have started wasting my limited time with each their own type of shit, and i've fucking had it.

  • We neec to get Chrome away from Google (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:24AM (#57006734)
    Development of Chrome should be sent off to an independent organization (perhaps forced to by anti trust courts). Chrome now has more market share than internet explorer used to and also owns phones and schools with chromebooks. We also need to force Google to code to standards and work on all of the competition’s browsers under interoperability laws. this includes minority browers like waterfox and falkon.

    • Re:We neec to get Chrome away from Google (Score:2)

      by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:50AM (#57006890)

      ShadowDOM is a W3C standard. Firefox and Edge have not implemented it yet.

      The complaint in the article is that Firefox is behind Chrome in implementing a W3C standard, and somehow that's Chrome's fault.

    • Re:We neec to get Chrome away from Google (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @12:27PM (#57007152)

      My sarcasm meeting is flickering... yet I somehow suspect you are being serious.

    • Re:We neec to get Chrome away from Google (Score:2)

      by Arkham ( 10779 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @04:19PM (#57008866)

      Development of Chrome should be sent off to an independent organization (perhaps forced to by anti trust courts). Chrome now has more market share than internet explorer used to and also owns phones and schools with chromebooks. We also need to force Google to code to standards and work on all of the competition’s browsers under interoperability laws. this includes minority browers like waterfox and falkon.

      So I'm not fan of Google, but this is 100% crap. Some actual facts:

      • Chromium [chromium.org] is open source -- -- the only parts that aren't included are the the commercial codecs like H.264, and those will never be open-source because Google pays the licensing costs and gives away the results for free
      • Google does code to standards. Shadow DOM [github.io] v0 API is a standard. It's just an old one (relatively speaking)

      Google does a lot of things that I don't like, but Chrome on the whole is a net positive contribution to the web-going world. They push companies like Apple and Mozilla to move faster and do more. Suggesting that someone "take it away" is absurd. Fork the code, release your own browser, have a nice day.

  • quality too (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:55AM (#57006936)

    Mobile Firefox has less YT quality than approved Google ways of accessing YT.

  • Chrome is IE all over again (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @11:58AM (#57006960)

    Users were dumb enough to be drawn into Chrome and now its come back to haunt everyone just as IE did when it completely dominated the web. Even other browsers like Opera and Brave along with other have all just become more Chrome clone's. You either use Chrome or a clone or face issues with some web sites. Its just that simple and frankly I don't see any light at the end for any other browser including Firefox and Edge. Chrome like IE is it and everything else is a second class browser.

  • ... and if they're not there polyfills them. ... That means it lazy-loads JS libs that emulate those features. This may make some browsers slower if those features need polyfilling.

    The goal of Polymer is to offer the cutting edge of web features today and wither away as these features become native in all browsers everywhere.
    It's that simple. No rucus required. Move along.

    • That's great, but what is fine in some library can become anticompetitive when a massive monopoly does it.

      If you make Qbert's own video site slow on Firefox, nothing much changes. If you make your own browser (with a high usage share) and make one of the largest websites in the world much worse on a competing browser when you've already been levering other monopolistic advantages to squeeze out the browser then yes there is a problem.

      Google are behaving like the bad old Microsoft.

  • Fast or Slow now? (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @12:23PM (#57007132)

    From an outsider's perspective with competition, I'm not sure it is important if one browser is currently faster than another with Youtube. What I'd like to know is, has any browser become SLOWER with Youtube's "upgrade"? If so, then that may be an issue.

    Could someone more knowledgeable than me clarify this please.

  • It does not matter because (Score:2)

    by Gabest ( 852807 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @12:57PM (#57007362)
    Because Chrome plays videos in VP9 format and it is slower to decode, older hardware has no acceleration either.

  • I agree. (Score:2)

    by Colin Castro ( 2881349 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @01:15PM (#57007466)

    It won't even load on my edge or IE browsers, but man it loads on Chrome.

  • Google becomes Microsoft (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26, 2018 @05:08AM (#57011486)

    More and more I look at Google, more it looks like Microsoft from 2000. What a pity that the once not evil company took this path.

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