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Surprised nobody brought it up when talking about terrible UX. The current YouTube UI is this shit called polymer. It's terrible, on most systems it delays load

Surprised nobody brought it up when talking about terrible UX. The current YouTube UI is this shit called polymer. It's terrible, on most systems it delays loading any text around the player until the player is loaded. (Especially bad in Firefox/Edge) This can be disabled by appending disable_polymer=1 to the URL, but it can't be saved as a cookie or set per account. I have a greasemonkey script to it. For me it's an annoyance, for my blind friend it means no working screenreader when polymer is enabled.

sushid 8y ago
Really? This certainly can't be a limitation in the language, correct? I find it hard to believe that Google doesn't have accessibility support for one of their websites written in their own language.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  YouTube's Polymer UI uses Web Components and Shadow DOM, which are natively implemented in Chrome but not Firefox or Edge yet. So YouTube serves slow JavaScript polyfills for JavaScript to non-Chrome browsers. Firefox and Edge (on my Windows laptop) take about five seconds to replace a YouTube page's wireframe layout with text. But if I append "&disable_polymer=1" as joecool1029 recommends above, the text loads instantly in Firefox and Edge. Is YouTube's new Polymer UI sooo much better that is worth five second page loads in non-Chrome browsers?
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    Correction: I did some more research and YouTube's Polymer UI uses Chrome's non-standard Shadow DOM v0 API, so even when Firefox and Edge ship the standard Shadow DOM API (which is in progress), YouTube will still be 5x slower than in Chrome. :|
  - progval 8y ago
    It's almost as if Google wanted to push its own web browser
jaflo 8y ago
You can also use UA faking: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74j8r6/how_to_set_old_youtube_layout_permanently_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74j8r6/how_to_set_...
- joecool1029 8y ago
  Thanks for that. I can confirm that works better than the Greasemonkey Script.

sushid 8y ago

Really? This certainly can't be a limitation in the language, correct? I find it hard to believe that Google doesn't have accessibility support for one of their websites written in their own language.

cpeterso 8y ago
YouTube's Polymer UI uses Web Components and Shadow DOM, which are natively implemented in Chrome but not Firefox or Edge yet. So YouTube serves slow JavaScript polyfills for JavaScript to non-Chrome browsers. Firefox and Edge (on my Windows laptop) take about five seconds to replace a YouTube page's wireframe layout with text. But if I append "&disable_polymer=1" as joecool1029 recommends above, the text loads instantly in Firefox and Edge. Is YouTube's new Polymer UI sooo much better that is worth five second page loads in non-Chrome browsers?
- cpeterso 8y ago
  Correction: I did some more research and YouTube's Polymer UI uses Chrome's non-standard Shadow DOM v0 API, so even when Firefox and Edge ship the standard Shadow DOM API (which is in progress), YouTube will still be 5x slower than in Chrome. :|
- progval 8y ago
  It's almost as if Google wanted to push its own web browser

jaflo 8y ago

You can also use UA faking: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74j8r6/how_to_set_old_youtube_layout_permanently_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74j8r6/how_to_set_...

joecool1029 8y ago
Thanks for that. I can confirm that works better than the Greasemonkey Script.