How to make YouTube faster in non-Chrome browsers

If you do not use it
Chromium
and you feel
Youtube
charge slower than usual or should do it, you're not crazy. Your Internet connection (probably) is not the problem. And no longer your browser. Instead, the culprit is YouTube itself.

Last year,
Google
deployed a brand new design for YouTube . This redesign not only brought a dark fashion but was part of the brand consolidation across all Google products.

At the:
Watch it:

How to activate the new "dark theme" on YouTube

1:21

What Google did not mention, however, is how this new design could affect YouTube's loading speed in browsers other than Chrome. Chris Peterson, Technical Program Manager at
Mozilla
highlighted this divergence on Twitter earlier this week, claiming YouTube was loading up to five times slower in Firefox. Slow loading into other browsers is due to YouTube's use of the Shadow DOM v0 API, which is now obsolete and used only in Chrome, which means that YouTube is significantly slower in most other browsers.

Fortunately, there is an easy workaround for non-Chrome users: Go back to the old design. Of course, the option to opt out of the new design is long gone. But there are extensions and browser extensions that will bring it back and speed up your YouTube experience.

Firefox

For Firefox users, the solution is simple. Peterson recommends using the YouTube Classic add-on for Firefox. Just click on Add to Firefox . When you load YouTube, it should be much faster.

Safari and Edge

For Safari and Edge, the process is a bit more involved. The Verge's Tom Warren suggests using the Tampermonkey extension for Safari and Edge. You will need to activate the extension or the add-on and install a script that will recall the old version of YouTube.

In Safari after extension downloaded:

• Click on the Downloads button to expand the menu
• Double-click on tampermonkey. safariextz ].
• The Extensions preferences panel and the prompt will appear asking you if you want to approve the extension. Click on Trust .

For Edge you will need to download Tampermonkey on the Microsoft Store. Once it is downloaded and installed:

• Click Launch from the Microsoft Store Page
• This will open Edge and ask you to enable the extension. Click Activate it .
• If this does not work, activate the extension manually by opening Edge and clicking the overflow button (three horizontal dots) in the upper right corner of the browser window. ] Select Extensions and click the toggle to the right of Tampermonkey .

Once installed, the Tampermonkey extension icon will appear to the left of your address bar in Safari and to the right of the address bar in Edge. Click on the icon and select Create a new script . A new window will open with an editor. Download the YouTube – Restore Classic script and copy and paste the contents of the script into the editor, then click on File> Save .

Next time you visit YouTube, loading may take a little longer. But once the script runs and the design goes back to the old YouTube layout, you should see a significant increase in the loading times of pages on YouTube.