
Did Google Cripple Edge’s YouTube Performance? - janderit
https://medium.com/@jeremy.noring/did-google-cripple-edges-youtube-performance-ce5169d3e5f4
======
kup0
Now, I can't prove malice, but this does strike me odd:

> "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."
> [https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/25/1128225/google-
> has-...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/25/1128225/google-has-made-
> youtube-slower-on-edge-and-firefox-mozilla-alleges)

Relying on a deprecated API, only available to Chrome, and forcing a slow
polyfill on everyone else seems like a sure fire way to try to push people to
use Chrome and make things slow for everyone else.

Whether or not this latest Edge / div debacle was malicious or not, the
company has a history of doing stuff leaning that direction.

------
t0astbread
Wow, that's a rude standpoint to take. Of course a monopoly can implement
technically better solutions more quickly but the author is completely
disregarding the benefits of distributed power: That you as a consumer can
decide what you need and what you will use and that you're not a big company's
slave. Ignoring this is just short-sighted and an asshole move towards others,
IMO.

Oh and also, EdgeHTML might not have been the best engine but saying it "sucks
shit" is a bit extreme.

~~~
jnoring
Author here. Diplomacy isn't my strong suit, and I don't care if you think me
rude.

I'm not saying consumers shouldn't have choice. That isn't at all what I'm
saying. What I am saying is: Chrome didn't arrive at its market share by some
corporate scheme to enforce usage by vertical tying. Chrome arrived at that
market share by making a great piece of software that most consumers like and
are happy with.

And I take particular offense to a browser that is bundled with an operating
system by default--as opposed to one a user has to go out of their way to
download--as being some panacea to Google. Edge and Safari likely have
meaningful market share for no reason beyond: they ship with Windows and macOS
respectively.

Chrome certainly ships as the default on Chromebooks and Android, but you'd be
remiss to ignore that Chrome is the most used browser on Windows, and second
most common on macOS. Those are _consumers_ making a choice. Yet so many
people in programming and tech circles don't stop to ask themselves _why_
consumers are opting for Chrome.

So maybe the final line in my post seems harsh, but here's the reality: Edge
is only a thing because it ships with Windows. Beyond that I see no technical
reason to favor it over Chrome or even Firefox. On Windows, consumers have
already spoken: they like Chrome. Lastly, Edge is a pretty questionable
argument in favor of "consumer choice", given it represents a choice no
consumer actually made beyond "default browser in Windows."

~~~
plushpuffin
While I share your disgust for IE and its successor Edge, you are incorrect
about one thing.

The Chrome install base on Windows is not entirely due to user choice. Chrome
is/was bundled and selected for installation by default with many other
software products, including Adobe Reader, CCleaner, and Avast antivirus.

~~~
cronix
My dads Dell came with Edge, Firefox and Chrome installed. I wonder how many
other vendors are including multiple browsers? Surely if you purchase Win10 on
its own you only get Edge, but I don't think most people are buying Win10 on
its own compared to purchasing a PC that has it installed already.

~~~
merb
all computers should do that. and then have an icon called internet which
spawns randomly either of the three (session based) also you need a standard
to share favicons.

------
sjansen
If you look past the clearly frustrated tone, what he says makes sense.

It's much more likely that Google was trying to improve their user experience
by working around an IE bug, than deliberately harming their user experience
for a PR article.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

------
bitpush
Disappointed with people talking about the tone and not the content of the
blogpost.

Didnt realize it was an intern (who probably lacks experience with the code)
who made the false accusation in the first place. Even if that werent true,
making baseless arguments do not sound like the new MSFT that HN tries to
project.

~~~
ABCLAW
The tone of the article and the posts in this thread are literally the most
important piece of content.

This is the person who was directly called out for a specific action which
broke one element of Edge functionality. His commits and comments have a very
strong "well, fuck them" vibe to them.

I read the initial post that led to this blog reply. It accused google of not
playing well with others. The engineer in question is in this thread saying he
doesn't give a shit what people think about his tone and that he isn't
diplomatic.

He is literally the criticism personified - the hubris made person.

No wonder people are talking about it.

~~~
jnoring
Author here. I do not work for google. I mistakenly thought that obvious, but
clearly it's been misunderstood.

And here's where I take umbrage with your response: I'm an engineer. I'm not
here to sugar coat shit for people. There are a dozen different legitimate
reasons someone may position some element over a video rendering window, and
it is 100% MSFT's bad for not even considering this test case when they wrote
their rendering engine.

And what really irks me is: thousands and thousands of people on the Internet
seem to take this story by some MSFT intern as not only _plausible_ but
_probable_. And that's bullshit. Our standards for truth as engineers should
be higher than that.

~~~
ABCLAW
Hi, thanks for replying.

I'm a lawyer. I get paid a lot to communicate directly and precisely. While
many people in our field are viewed as assholes, the best of us are able to be
blunt while also being tactful. Being an engineer isn't an excuse for
communicating poorly or having your tone override your message. Luckily this
is a trait that can be worked on - I used to have the same issue and am
getting better.

Let me take a deeper look at what's irking you: You state Google may have had
a valid reason to do what it did. Okay. Let's conceed that. Despite that
concession, does that actually address the problem you raised?

1) Google may have, despite having had a reason to do what it did, done it for
the wrong reason. The timing of advertising which specifically required the
negative effect of the change upon Edge's metrics certainly seems to point
that way. You've described a plausible alterative rationale for their actions,
but nothing more than that.

2) Incentivewise, Google has every desire in the world to maintain their
browser marketshare numbers.

3) The full claim made by the intern is that this was one of an onslaught of
changes made by Google to make their sites less performant on other browsers.
Other people in the same thread indicated similar issues, and Google staff
indicated that they were actually planning on resolving some of these issues
in the future, an admission that the issues do, in fact, exist.

4) The intern further makes an allegation that the Edge team attempted to
inform Google about the behavior, but did not receive any redress or
explanation regarding the issue. One would expect that the Youtube team would
have raised the issues you addressed regarding Edge's handling in a quick
reply. They didn't.

Overall, if you were Google staff, your objection would deal with a number of
these points I've raised, but as it stands that isn't the case.

I did appreciate the article's technical discussion, though, so thank you for
that insight.

------
mscasts
Well Youtube performance used to suck under Firefox as well to the point that
I felt that running youtube without the addon "Youtube Classic" in firefox was
unbearable.

I still run Youtube Classic.

~~~
Bayart
Playback or rendering ? I know my browser has performance issues because it
doesn't have hardware-accelerated playback for VP9, I don't know if FF is in
the same basket (sounds like it might be). Having an addon that only enables
h264 solves that.

~~~
PlutoIsAPlanet
Afaik YouTube uses user agent sniffing to use slower functions for Firefox.

~~~
krzyk
YouTube started using Shadow DOM V0 (which is deprecated) some time ago, which
is implemented only in Chrome/Chromium, as a result all other browsers render
it slower.

~~~
vezycash
Google also blocked Windows Phone from Google maps.

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/google-maps-
windows-...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/google-maps-windows-
phone-and-an-avoidable-mess/)

~~~
zmonkeyz
Not to mention pulling the Windows Phone Youtube app that Microsoft wrote
because it wasnt made with html5. Nevermind that the android or iphone app
didnt support it either.

~~~
mscasts
They also are still blocking pretty much all browsers except Chrome from
Google Hangouts.

------
amatwl
I have to say the author's attitude does not come off particularly well in
this post, at least in my opinion. Just seems rude.

~~~
jnoring
Author here. That's fair if you feel that way.

What I would say, however is "rude" is attributing malice when there is a
perfectly reasonable alternate explanation to a story.

That's really what I take umbrage with; our standards for truth should be
higher than the insinuations of a MSFT intern with no clear evidence, and a
total lack of the net community as a whole even to consider alternate
possibilities.

------
Lapsed
For me, Edge is the only browser that behaves properly when a Youtube video is
playing but is not in focus with hardware acceleration on (the exact scenario
is I have a game on my main monitor with a Youtube video playing on my other
monitor). Both Chrome and Firefox stop loading the video and show the spinning
buffering symbol after a few minutes. All three browsers work fine with
hardware acceleration off.

------
fatnoah
In all fairness to Google, they've been steadily degrading Chrome's
performance on all websites for quite some time now.

------
ksec
I am most frustrated not with Edge going to Blink, Not the tone of the
article, but Web Technology as a whole.

I remember when I was doing Web programming in pre IE6 era, it was _insanely_
frustrating. Pulling your hairs out trying to make the _simplest_ thing to
work across browsers. I didn't hate IE6 for Active X or its Standard forcing
practice ( It is actually both good and bad ), but M$ unwilling to improve IE
when there are _lots_ of low hanging fruit, while actively stopping other
browser from gaining ground.

Nearly 20 years passed, it still looks like a bloody mess. Yes it was a lot
better than IE5 / 6 era, CSS still sucks, ( just less ), Cross browser
handling of Keypress and Video still a mess? And we have now arrived to a
point where Chrome/ Blink becomes a living reference implementation to test
out ideas before it is "standardise". Web Pages that only works well in
Chrome? ( I am not even talking about Web Apps which somehow 90% of the case
we don't need but we still made it )

Was this what we envisioned the web 20 years ago?

------
smileypete
Seems Youtube has gotten slower for me over the years... Playing an HD video
Firefox 55 (w/classic, MP4) uses 30%, Chrome 70 uses 20%, but Videolan uses a
mere 4%!

It's puzzling why a modern browser uses far more CPU than a standalone app
these days.

~~~
dhnsmakala
Did you compare the baseline browser usage to browser + video?

~~~
smileypete
Just a clean restart then a single tab for youtube, and looking at the total
CPU in Process Hacker.

------
wonthegame
The performance on Safari is abysmal too.

~~~
bunnycorn
Not to mention they removed 4K because... Google force-feeding webm upon us.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Let's not forget that Apple tried to force license-encumbered formats into web
standards. If the publishers don't play along, any resulting poor experience
is Apple's fault. Don't support bad actors.

~~~
bunnycorn
Which ones then?

------
InGodsName
Biggest problem is that apple doesn't support hardware acceleration for vp9/8
decoding which YouTube uses.

So our battery empties faster on appple devices.

Neither google is doing anything about it nor apple.

Google is pushing their own Chromebook and my friends who are pissed off at
their YouTube performance in regard to battery switched to Chromebook.

