7 ms·

Mozilla exec says Google slowed YouTube down on non-Chrome browsers

89 points by john58 8y ago

derf_ 8y ago
If you append the magic URL argument "&disable_polymer=1" then things should load instantly in Firefox and Edge.
- superkuh 8y ago
  I'm using an ancient browser and youtube seems to always append this automatically for me.
- hhsnopek 8y ago
  Is there a Youtube setting to keep this enabled?
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    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.
sparrish 8y ago
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?
- binarycrusader 8y ago
  From the fine article: "YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension..."
- sp332 8y ago
  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.
- soapdog 8y ago
  The key point here is that they made it in a way that uses a deprecated API that will not be implemented anywhere else but in Chrome. Even Chrome own platform status page[1] says v0 is deprecated and scheduled for removal. By making their web properties rely on APIs which are no longer in standards tracks, they essentially harm the interoperability of the web. It is very comfortable when you control both extremes of some web property (the video sharing platform and the browser) to make sure they work well together and let the rest of the world play catch up. We have standards for a reason, so that things such as this are avoidable and you can use your browser of choice, whichever that browser is, on the web. By allowing their web developers to play the "chrome-first-and-foremost" game, they make the net-positive side-effect of acquiring more users for their browser, after all, who wants to use a slower browser right? [1]: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4507242028072960 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4507242028072960
suyash 8y ago
What about for Safari, anyone?
bbrunner 8y ago
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
- some_account 8y ago
  > This seems like a poor choice of technology rather than an outright nefarious decision. How would you tell the difference?
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    I read a really good take once that I can't find anymore, but the gist was: sometimes a company knows about a poor decision or a bug, and just leaves it in because it gives them a competitive edge.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    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.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  Deliberately and knowingly made decision that hurts already barely existing competition is not an innocent polyfill mistake. It's more like policy level abuse of dominant position to transition users to Chrome from non-Chrome browsers.
some_account 8y ago
I want to see an internet without Google. I'm probably in a large minority though. But they are so awful.
- noncoml 8y ago
  I am with you. I want to see a world where Google is nothing more than a search engine. But in this case I don't think they are at fault. As far as I understand it they didn't they just over-optimize for their own browser, which is not quite the same as degrade performance on other browsers on purpose.
- SurrealSoul 8y ago
  china net is a really interesting place
- xbmcuser 8y ago
  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.
pwaivers 8y ago
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?
- zajd 8y ago
  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.
  - TremendousJudge 8y ago
    the only actually profitable part of the company is AdSense; the rest would just go bankrupt if it was on its own
    - zajd 8y ago
      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
jwilk 8y ago
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027
joombaga 8y ago
> 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.
- dingaling 8y ago
  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.
mindcrash 8y ago
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.
- detaro 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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-overview https://www.polymer-project.org/2.0/docs/devguide/feature-ov...) 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
    - detaro 8y ago
      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?
    - bzbarsky 8y ago
      Youtube is using Polymer v1 as far as I can tell.
hiyer 8y ago
The new redesigned gmail is another site that loads a lot slower on FF than in Chrome.

89 points by john58 8y ago

derf_ 8y ago

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

superkuh 8y ago
I'm using an ancient browser and youtube seems to always append this automatically for me.
hhsnopek 8y ago
Is there a Youtube setting to keep this enabled?
- lallysingh 8y ago
  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.

sparrish 8y ago

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?

binarycrusader 8y ago
From the fine article: "YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension..."
sp332 8y ago
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.
soapdog 8y ago
The key point here is that they made it in a way that uses a deprecated API that will not be implemented anywhere else but in Chrome. Even Chrome own platform status page[1] says v0 is deprecated and scheduled for removal. By making their web properties rely on APIs which are no longer in standards tracks, they essentially harm the interoperability of the web. It is very comfortable when you control both extremes of some web property (the video sharing platform and the browser) to make sure they work well together and let the rest of the world play catch up. We have standards for a reason, so that things such as this are avoidable and you can use your browser of choice, whichever that browser is, on the web. By allowing their web developers to play the "chrome-first-and-foremost" game, they make the net-positive side-effect of acquiring more users for their browser, after all, who wants to use a slower browser right? [1]: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4507242028072960 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4507242028072960

suyash 8y ago

What about for Safari, anyone?

bbrunner 8y ago

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

some_account 8y ago
> This seems like a poor choice of technology rather than an outright nefarious decision. How would you tell the difference?
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  I read a really good take once that I can't find anymore, but the gist was: sometimes a company knows about a poor decision or a bug, and just leaves it in because it gives them a competitive edge.
- Spivak 8y ago
  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.
zzzcpan 8y ago
Deliberately and knowingly made decision that hurts already barely existing competition is not an innocent polyfill mistake. It's more like policy level abuse of dominant position to transition users to Chrome from non-Chrome browsers.

some_account 8y ago

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

noncoml 8y ago
I am with you. I want to see a world where Google is nothing more than a search engine. But in this case I don't think they are at fault. As far as I understand it they didn't they just over-optimize for their own browser, which is not quite the same as degrade performance on other browsers on purpose.
SurrealSoul 8y ago
china net is a really interesting place
xbmcuser 8y ago
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.

pwaivers 8y ago

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?

zajd 8y ago
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.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  the only actually profitable part of the company is AdSense; the rest would just go bankrupt if it was on its own
  - zajd 8y ago
    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

jwilk 8y ago

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027

joombaga 8y ago

> 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.

dingaling 8y ago
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.

mindcrash 8y ago

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.

detaro 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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-overview https://www.polymer-project.org/2.0/docs/devguide/feature-ov...) 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
  - detaro 8y ago
    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?
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    Youtube is using Polymer v1 as far as I can tell.

hiyer 8y ago

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