
Google making YouTube slower for non-Chromium browsers? - marsrover
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/25/google-making-youtube-slower-for-non-chromium-browsers/
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lousken
discussed 3months ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027)

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drasticmeasures
Methinks it's time for an anti-trust investigation on Google like the one on
Microsoft during the Internet Explorer heyday.

At the same time, I don't trust the US has institutions that haven't been
sabotaged by successive US administrations (from both sides) in their
capacities to pursue anti-trust investigations of this sort.

Europe to the rescue?

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abraham
The technologies YouTube is relying on are deprecated in Chrome and will be
removed in April.

[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-d...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-
dev/h-JwMiPUnuU/sl79aLoLBQAJ)

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halayli
It's hard to believe that someone at youtube decided to screw probably 50%+ of
their users in hopes they'll move to chrome.

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scblock
We're talking about Google here. It's not remotely hard to believe that Google
would screw things up for people to try to get them to use more Google things.

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halayli
my point was that they'd be screwing themselves.

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Brian_K_White
His point was that they do that routinely.

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CryoLogic
Google does a number of things like this that give Chrome based browsers more
power for Google based websites.

Another example is the *.google.com cookies, they are not deleted when you go
to clear browsing history -> clear cookies.

Also a recent version of Chrome implemented "no autoplay audio or video" as a
feature, but YouTube and Google music are on a whitelist pre-built into the
Chrome browser.

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kbenson
> Also a recent version of Chrome implemented "no autoplay audio or video" as
> a feature, but YouTube and Google music are on a whitelist pre-built into
> the Chrome browser.

They use the media engagement index[1] to gather global statistics to generate
global average user preferences to determine if a domain get's to autoplay. It
is not something manually defined through someone's decision about a specific
domain. This global list is only used until the user has enough interactions
with the site in question to allow chrome to use local MEI data to auto-
whitelist the domain.

It will likely allow youtube to autoplay, both initially because of the global
data but also continuing oin after individual usage data is acquired, but that
makes sense and is exactly as you would expect and want out of a system like
this. It should also let a competitor auto-play after enough usage is
detected, and continue to do so per-user after local data is collected for
that instance of chrome.

It will stop random domains from having video pop-ups that auto-play, or in
page auto-playing, and it will also prevent domains that initially allow auto-
playing from doing so later on if you stop the auto-playing enough that the
local chrome instance learns your preferences.

1:
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-
policy-changes)

2:
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=843427...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=843427#c2)

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kotenok2000
New youtube design eats a lot more memory than old. 250 mb is too big.

