
Mozilla exec says Google slowed YouTube down on non-Chrome browsers - john58
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-youtube-down-on-non-chrome-browsers/
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jwilk
Yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027)

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bbrunner
This seems like a poor choice of technology rather than an outright nefarious
decision. Polymer [0] uses the shadow dom api [1] extensively, but shadow dom
v1 still isn't fully implemented across all vendors and shadow dom v0 is
deprecated and slated for removal in April 2019 [2].

This feels more or less like some premature dogfooding of Polymer. It probably
would've been advisable to serve the old version until modern non-Chrome
browsers caught up, but Shadow DOM v1 will be implemented eventually so my
guess is they made the decision to transition those users now.

[0] [https://www.polymer-project.org/](https://www.polymer-project.org/)

[1] [https://www.polymer-project.org/3.0/docs/devguide/shadow-
dom](https://www.polymer-project.org/3.0/docs/devguide/shadow-dom)

[2]
[https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4507242028072960](https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4507242028072960)

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some_account
> This seems like a poor choice of technology rather than an outright
> nefarious decision.

How would you tell the difference?

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Spivak
How can you ever know someone's intent? I don't think it makes sense to assume
malice in this case.

\- Because YT makes money on eyeballs and runs on every terrible device
specific browser under the sun. Making users experience worse intentionally
only really hurts them.

\- Because we're in a forum of devs that are all about chasing the latest
features and polyfilling everywhere that doesn't have them -- it's practically
SOP. I totally believe performance problems like this wouldn't get caught in
testing when everyone has a corp network connection and powerful
laptops/workstations.

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pwaivers
I don't know what to think here. On one hand, Google is writing code to make
YouTube faster on its own browser. This is reasonable. On the other hand,
Google is also using its dominance in internet video streaming to make Chrome
look like a better product than the others. This is anti-competitive.

It is wrong to optimize for your own ecosystem, without optimizing for others?

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zajd
It's a symptom of a greater problem, which is that Google (the search engine)
owns Chrome, Youtube, Android, Maps, Gmail, and a whole host of other services
that are tenuously linked at best (outside of the fact that all the data gets
fed into advertising algorithms)

Quite frankly, the company should be broken up forcibly by the government. All
of these services should be profitable on their own, not used as loss leaders
to grab as much ad data as possible and stamp out any sort of competition.

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TremendousJudge
the only actually profitable part of the company is AdSense; the rest would
just go bankrupt if it was on its own

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zajd
Or they would be forced to charge for their services and actually compete in
the market. Fastmail/protonmail exist, there's no reason Gmail couldn't charge
$10/mo and provide the same services

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derf_
If you append the magic URL argument "&disable_polymer=1" then things should
load instantly in Firefox and Edge.

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hhsnopek
Is there a Youtube setting to keep this enabled?

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lallysingh
Doubtful, that would be account wide, not scoped to your browser. An add-on
(or just a bookmark) is your best bet.

Oh! You could change user agents.

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joombaga
> He notes that YouTube "still serves the pre-Polymer design" to Microsoft's
> Internet Explorer 11, which launched in 2013 and has been replaced by Edge,
> and suggests that Google could have taken the same approach with Edge and
> Firefox.

Okay, but without new features? Does the pre-polymer design served to IE
maintain feature-parity with the shadow DOM (or its' polyfill equivalent)?
Because YouTube never _seemed_ slow to me on FIrefox, but I'd hate to miss new
features.

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dingaling
What new UI features does a video-catalogue website _really_ need, though?

They've reached or passed maturity and are adding dubious features like the
miniplayer that keeps playing the video you've just back-buttoned out of.
Things that benefit advetisers, not users.

The truly beneficial features should be server-side; culling those awful 'Top
10 Shocking ...' videos from my recommendations, for example. Or realising
that just because I watched one programme about military re-enactment, once in
ten years, I probably don't want to watch another 30.

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sparrish
Am I understanding this right? It didn't actually slow it down... it just
didn't speed it up for those browsers when it added features to make it faster
for Chrome?

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sp332
The new version uses new features which only Chrome has implemented. For IE it
still serves the old version, but for FF and Edge, it serves the new version
together with a compatibility layer that makes it slower. So they could have
just served the old version, but they decided to serve a new, slow version
instead.

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some_account
I want to see an internet without Google. I'm probably in a large minority
though. But they are so awful.

~~~
xbmcuser
Look at where the internet was before google and all the tech that improved
because of google. I think many people underestimate how much of the internet,
web server hardware moved forward was directly or indirectly because of
google. And many if not all the major web based companies that exsist is
because of the tech google introduced and open sourced.

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hiyer
The new redesigned gmail is another site that loads a lot slower on FF than in
Chrome.

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suyash
What about for Safari, anyone?

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mindcrash
So basically the Mozilla exec is saying that the Chrome implementation of the
Web Components W3 standard is _a lot_ faster than Mozilla's implementation.

Because that is what YouTube's frontend is currently running under the hood:
Web Components and Shadow DOM. Both W3 standards. No magic at all.

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detaro
FTA: "YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API
only implemented in Chrome". Shadow DOM v0 never was a standard, merely a
proposal in a draft.

~~~
mindcrash
Both Polymer v2 (previous version) and Polymer v3 (current version) are based
on Shadow DOM v1, as can be seen in the docs ([https://www.polymer-
project.org/3.0/docs/devguide/shadow-dom](https://www.polymer-
project.org/3.0/docs/devguide/shadow-dom), [https://www.polymer-
project.org/2.0/docs/devguide/feature-ov...](https://www.polymer-
project.org/2.0/docs/devguide/feature-overview)) so this statement is VERY
strange.

Although it's true that only Safari and Chrome (through WebKit and Blink)
currently have the best support for Web Components, and polyfills are required
for everything else due to flaky support.

Google even mentions this in the Polymer README:

"Web Components are now implemented natively on Safari and Chrome (~70% of
installed browsers), and run well on Firefox, Edge, and IE11 using polyfills.
Read more below."

Source:
[https://github.com/Polymer/polymer](https://github.com/Polymer/polymer)

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detaro
Well, if I check the source of the desktop_polymer.js on Youtube I see v0 API
calls in it, and not their v1 equivalents. (e.g. createShadowRoot vs
attachShadow). I might be missing something, since I obviously don't
understand how all of that works, but it seems supportive at least?

