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Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

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Re: Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

#82

Yeah, it's time for Google to be broken up into pieces because of anti-competitive laws and really get back to making America into a capitalistic society once again.

> Yeah, it's time for Google to be broken up into pieces because of anti-competitive laws and really get back to making America into a capitalistic society once again. Isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place? Seems to me that anti-competitive practices are the logical conclusion of privately-owned enterprise. EDIT: to be clear, I'm very pro breaking up google. I'm just surprised that people are comin…

What got us here is a capitalistic society where antitrust laws are not implemented in practice. Time to go back to square one and change that

Re: Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

#83
Took a performance benchmark in both Firefox and Brave. Both of them are unusually slow (addons/extensions disabled, fresh profile), but Firefox especially so. Source for the huge render times seems to be desktop_polymer.js, specifically the part that's registering and setting up custom web components. Once the website loads, performance becomes a lot better.

My guess is that a Polymer update made Youtube slower for everyone, but SpiderMonkey isn't particularly great at the kind of excess operations that have been added. Firefox in particular seems to suffer from complete UI freezes whereas Chromium browsers seem to just have slow tabs when the browser is overwhelmed.

While I certainly wouldn't be surprised if this is part of an anti-adblocker mechanism, not every slowdown on Google's websites is done out of malice. Some of it is just caused by bugs.

Re: Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

#85

Can confirm. Google is a new Microsoft, they leverage their position to cross promote their shit browser and their shit data stealing services. Sorry guys, if your data collection website doesn't work well with Firefox and uBlock Origin, I just won't use it.

Frontend devs usually know exactly what browsers they support and to what level. I wonder if at Google the list is just Chrome and other browsers can deal with it.

Re: Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google may yet be forced to divest from Chrome as a result of the recent judgement.

Would that force them not to give Chrome preferential treatment? Even if Chrome becomes independent, it will still likely be the most used browser. Google could just do what other companies already do, and never test on Firefox anyway.

It would remove any incentive to intentionally worsen the non-Chrome(ium) experience. Relevant if you suspect they are deliberately sabotaging Firefox. (That would be a foolish move to make while they are in the middle of multiple antitrust cases and already lost one, but companies aren't immune to acting like idiots)

Re: Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

#88

Google has been degrading YouTube in Firefox for me for about six months. Where are the antitrust enforcers when you need them?

Have you reported it to them? I have nothing but praise for the EC on the way they have handled the few complaints I have registered regarding such things.

I complained about Chrome Web Store but they said it's not a gateekeper even though everything applies... They aren't very competent it seems

Re: Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

#89
post #32

going by Hanlon's Razor, i would guess that this is merely the result of an engineering update that nobody bothered to QA on Firefox rather than a malicious attack on a single browser that isn't _really_ winning market share let's not assume Google malice is _too_ competent

Yeah, I'm baffled that people on HN will happily accept pretty damning conspiracy theories at face value when there are much more plausible explanations available.

My app is also having performance issues with WebGL on Firefox so I guess I'm part of the conspiracy?

Re: Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox

#90
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's something I value, I keep my own copy.

Do you get much value out of a youtube video the second time around? If I need to figure out which screws to remove or something like that, it's probably the first and last time I'll need that particular information. If you're not also ensuring that others can access that copy then I don't really see the point.

I rewatch home/car fix videos whenever I need to eventually do some task again.
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