
YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome - vezycash
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/91jil3/youtube_page_load_is_5x_slower_in_firefox_and/
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jcstryker
If true, then it is yet another example of anti-competitive behavior from
Google. Reminds me of Firefox support in Hangouts.

~~~
thermodynthrway
The worst I've seen is that Google serves an ancient version of their homepage
to Firefox mobile for "reasons". With an extension to spoof useragent to
Chrome, you get the regular page and it works fine

~~~
leppr
Used to be the case with Google Maps as well, Chrome user agent would get you
served with a faster version.

The worst I've seen though isn't by Google themselves. It's user-agent
whitelisting on other web sites, that think it's okay to prevent users from
using the browser they want because they couldn't spend time testing in the
other browsers. Sometimes they even exclude Chromium. For that reason I have
an user agent spoofing extension on each of my browsers.

~~~
thermodynthrway
IMO, Google put a new stage on embrace extend extinguish I call "neglect".
Make everything open source and nice, then continue to update G specific
functionality by simply not maintaining good support for anything else.

Google probably has the best engineers and greatest minds since IBM in the
60's, possibly ever. But great engineers are attracted to shiny objects, and
if all of those are Google objects there's suddenly no reason to use anything
else

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wruza
It I remember when chrome only appeared, they deployed try-chrome banners,
specifically seen on /. that froze both opera and firefox for a couple of
seconds, but worked fine in chrome itself. No one believed me on local forums
back then.

~~~
hadrien01
I think you messed up your example url.

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watermelon0
I assume he meant [https://slashdot.org/](https://slashdot.org/)

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skybrian
So apparently a misguided dependency on an obsolete version of a web framework
that uses a dodgy polyfill on some browsers is now proof of a dark conspiracy
since browsers won't have the same performance.

This a good discovery and certainly an unfortunate result, but do people not
know how web development works? Mistakes like this do happen (though usually
with less severe consequences).

~~~
ledriveby
HN hivemind: the only cure for a Google bug is... more regulation!

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squirrelicus
I'm not super quick to think they're doing something malicious here. I've
experienced this exact thing at two of my jobs this decade, one of which I
currently work at. Firefox and especially Edge are often just slower for some
DOM manipulation use cases and style recalculations.

Although Pendo has been identified as the primary cause for Edge slowness :P

~~~
jonathanyc
No, the tweet points out how this is specifically because Google uses a
deprecated, older version of a standard that only Chrome supports. It’s
absolutely not a question of Firefox or Edge being “just slower,” it is a
question of using a feature that is literally only implemented in Chrome and
that other browsers have agreed not to implement.

~~~
detaro
And the current version of the standard also isn't implemented in Firefox yet,
so using that would change nothing?

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dblohm7
It is implemented behind a preferred ATM, IIRC

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kristianp
The tweet that it refers to:
[https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185](https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185)

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dagenix
It's an interesting topic - but, the linked Reddit thread isn't all that
interesting itself. It's most just a collection of unsupported conspiracy
theories.

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zamadatix
The title implies two things:

\- Google is pushing Shadow DOM before other major browsers agreed to
standardize the API

\- The page load in Firefox/Edge is worse than it would be without Shadow DOM

If either or both of these are true then it's pretty shitty on Google's part.
If neither are true then it's just a load of FUD. Is anyone more familiar with
the situation able to speak to these questions?

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Manishearth
For the first one, this is pretty well known : Google "shadow dom v0"

v0 is the old stuff chrome shipped before there was consensus, and it's pretty
different from v1, which is what the spec settled on. To be clear, "is
pushing" isn't exactly correct, it's "pushed". I _think_ everyone is now on
the same page wrt v1?

(Disclaimer: I do work at Mozilla but I've not been involved in this and this
is just what I've read)

I'm surprised YouTube is still using v0 since v0 was deprecated a while back.

~~~
ksec
But v1 is not being implemented yet in Edge or Firefox? [1]

And then you get these kind of "crap" from twitter [2]

It seems we have been talking about Shadow Dom for years, grid, flexbox, web
development still isn't anywhere near good enough.

[1]
[https://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdomv1](https://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdomv1)
[2]
[https://twitter.com/Shihrer/status/1021891405633925120](https://twitter.com/Shihrer/status/1021891405633925120)

~~~
Manishearth
It's implemented, it's preffed off. These things take time to roll out
properly. Chrome jumped the gun on v0, Firefox/Edge aren't "dragging their
feet".

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zaarn
And now I know why Youtube always takes several seconds to begin working after
page load. Usually it would sit there, showing me a thumbnail or even daring
to play an add while basically every single UI element was a grey blob slowly
pulsing while the javascript in the background was busy shitting data into a
polyfill. And with that addon? Basically instant page load.

Why in all that is holy did anyone think this was a good idea and why did
noone bother to test this on Firefox or if they did why did the engage in such
shitty behaviour?

~~~
marcodave
and yet, the saddest thing of them all, is that one can just... install
Chrome!

it's not like the dark ages of IE6, where having to resort to use IE6 was also
forcing to use Windows as well and forcing to use a dated, closed, non
standards compliant browser.

Chrome is free, available essentially everywhere, standards compliant, fast
and with cutting edge web features.

And that's a pity, that's what makes it just too easy to create a monopoly.

~~~
zaarn
Chrome _IS_ the new IE6. Just consider the number of times that Chrome breaks
features because Google thinks webdevs can't think. And Websites breaking
because I'm not using Chrome is exactly why IE6 was shit. Websites worked in
IE6 but not anything else. THAT was the true tragedy.

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mabynogy
I confirm that here too with debian and firefox 52.9. YT is damn slow and
HookTube is faster even with the embedded YT player.

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megaman22
I would hope that Googlers can make their sites work fastest on the browser
that they own and control the internals of.

If I were building a browser, I'd be seriously tempted to do a lot of things
for speed that don't seem to be on the table right now. For instance, I'd
aggressively bundle common JS or CSS dependencies and short-circuit loading
them over the wire. E.g. a site wants jquery 1.x, or Bootstrap 3? I can load
that faster from even spinning rust than over fiber, and a few MB of JS or CSS
is nothing to store.

~~~
fps_doug
> If I were building a browser, I'd be seriously tempted to do a lot of things
> for speed that don't seem to be on the table right now.

Yes that's all fine, but we're talking about YouTube here as the offender not
Chrome. It's fine to make your browser work faster, that's not the same as
making your website work slower on other browsers.

> I would hope that Googlers can make their sites work fastest on the browser
> that they own and control the internals of.

I would hope they'd do that by just optimizing for Chrome, not by deciding to
base the whole website on an API that's deprecated and has been superseded and
is ONLY still supported by Chrome.

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gaius
Time for antitrust to break Google up. At the very least force the divestiture
of both Chrome and YouTube. And obviously given the case in Europe, Android as
well.

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HNNewer
Sure, on Firefox adblocking works pretty much solid, removing all kind of ads
thanks to uBlock origin.

On Chrome, I get sometimes still ads across videos, plus Chrome is Google's
Browser: obviously they test YouTube extensively with it and they just make it
"work" for other vendors.

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ferongr
uBlock Origin shares the same code in Firefox and Chrome. Any differences you
see have nothing to do with the browser.

~~~
krageon
They do, because there is an exploit for chrome that makes 3rd party look like
first party. [https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-
Extra](https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-Extra)

You will only get this behaviour on Chrome, Firefox is not vulnerable.

