Mozilla engineer says Google slowed YouTube on non-Chrome browsers

Chris Peterson, technical program director, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that the video-sharing site was loading at one-fifth the speed of non-Chrome browsers because of its architecture, as originally reported by Softpedia.

"YouTube's Polymer redesign is based on the Shadow DOM v0 API implemented in Chrome only," wrote Peterson.

"YouTube serves as a DOM Shadow polyfill for Firefox and Edge that is slower than the native implementation of Chrome. For my laptop, the initial load of the page takes 5 seconds with polyfill, compared to a second without her."

Peterson suggested solutions for Firefox – the Mozilla browser – and Microsoft Edge, which bring YouTube back to the previous version by using add-ons.

He pointed out that YouTube "still serves the pre-polymer design" on Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, which was released in 2013 and replaced by Edge, and suggests that Google might have adopted the same approach with Edge and Firefox.

Responding to Peterson's supporters, a Google spokesman said the company had found that YouTube's overall performance on Firefox was the same as before the redesign of the site, according to the latest measures.

He said that he was always working to make YouTube faster, regardless of the browser used. The company says it's not perfect and has recently fixed a bug that helps improve Firefox's performance.

Neither Microsoft nor Peterson immediately responded to the request for comment.

In May, YouTube revealed that it had 1.8 billion viewers recorded each month and previously claimed that 400 hours of videos were uploaded to the site each minute. Thus, performance is an essential factor in the choice of browser people.

Chrome is the most popular web browser and accounts for 59% of the site's usage, according to the StatCounter analysis firm. Firefox is 5%, and Edge has 2%.

Last weekend, Firefox added the ability to block audio-video editing in the Nightly Test of its browser.

On Tuesday, the latest version of Chrome has extended Google's fight against surveillance and security risks by displaying the "unsecure" warning for any HTTP site.