Google optimizes YouTube for Chrome and slows it down to competition



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Via Twitter, a Mozilla manager drew attention to differences in YouTube loading times depending on the browser used. According to him, Google has optimized its platform for Chrome, reducing the performance on Firefox and Edge browsers.

 YouTube logo

About a year ago, Google offered a new design to its famous platform streaming YouTube. As always, as this skin has been deployed, some users have welcomed the refresh, while others have not embraced the change. This week on Twitter, Chris Peterson technical program manager shared his findings. Beyond any personal appreciation, he observes much longer full load times on the home browser, Firefox, than on Google, namely Chrome. His tests with Edge have delivered the same result: Microsoft's browser loads pages from YouTube much more slowly than Chrome can do.

In his view, this is due to Google's technical choices. With the new design, the firm relies on a technology that only Chrome integrates deeply, although newer versions and better supported by other browsers exist. Moreover, the use of an extension (for Firefox) or a script (which can be managed by Tampermonkey for Edge, but also for Safari) to force the return to the old design removes these gaps. According to Chris Peterson's measurements, despite a fast connection (200 Mb / s), Firefox and Edge can take up to five seconds to display an entire current YouTube page (video, suggestions, comments …). By forcing the old design, this loading time drops to one second on the same page.

YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign links to the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://t.co/F5uEn3iMLR

– Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) 24. Jul 2018

With its new design, has Google knowingly favored Chrome on one of the most popular platforms on the Net? It is hard to imagine that the firm could have missed such a detail, especially since it has obviously raised the question of differentiation: Internet Explorer 11, for its part, still benefits from the old design.

Why does YouTube use the Shady DOM polyfill for Chrome instead of its native Shadow DOM? I see Firefox and Edge load the webcomponents-lite.min.js polyfill, but Chrome does not. Firefox and Edge a lot of time in webcomponents-lite.min.js.

– Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) 26. Jul 2018

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