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Google Has Made YouTube Slower on Edge and Firefox, Mozilla Alleges (neowin.net)
Usama Jawad, writing for Neowin: Early last year, YouTube received a design refresh with Google's own Polymer library which enabled "quicker feature development" for the platform. Now, a Mozilla executive is claiming that Google has made YouTube slower on Edge and Firefox by using this framework. In a thread on Twitter, Mozilla's Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube's Polymer redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only available in Chrome. This in turn makes the site around five times slower on competing browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox. Further reading: Safari Users Unable to Play Newer 4K Video On YouTube in Native Resolution.
This is what happens when any corporation gets into too many supporting markets. That situation rewards anticompetitive behavior. Google has every incentive to use Youtube to prop up Chrome, and vice versa. They have become Microsoft.
Remember when Google declared that Amazon Fire TV users would no longer be able to use an app to access their site, because rea$ons? Well, that's still the state of affairs. You have to use a browser instead of an App because Amazon won't carry Google's devices in their web store. Well, Google doesn't carry Amazon's devices in their web store, either. How on earth is this not anticompetitive?
While I'd like to see Google held accountable for their anticompetitive behavior, the best solution is still for someone else to spin up a video streaming site. There's enough people who want an alternative to Youtube for it to work out. But it has to be at least as friendly to uploaders as Youtube...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More fully,
Shadow DOM supported by default in Chrome and Opera. Firefox is very close; they are currently available if you set the preferences dom.webcomponents.enabled and dom.webcomponents.shadowdom.enabled to true. Firefox's implementation is planned to be enabled by default in version 63. Safari supports shadow DOM already, and Edge is working on an implementation as well.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/Using_shadow_DOM
No one said Shadow DOM is deprecated. The point is that Polymer 1.0, which is being used on YouTube uses on Shadow DOM v0, which is deprecated. They could update their version of Polymer to 2.0 or higher and rely instead on Shadow DOM v1, which is not deprecated. https://www.chromestatus.com/f...
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They throw "v1" in there because "v0" is deprecated and the version of Polymer that Google is using on YouTube uses v0. https://www.chromestatus.com/f...
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They could, but that wouldn't fix the problem here, the version number is a red herring. Mozilla, IE, et al, do not support Shadow DOM at all, not any version. They have plans, there's an about:config flag in Firefox you can flip to test their current implementation, but it's not enabled by default.
So, what people are saying Google should have done, in order to be "fair" to competitive free browsers including the one Google has funded for most of its lifetime, is to upgrade one of the most highly traffic'd websites on Earth to the "latest version" (not revision, we're talking major version number, so the one with API changes) of the framework they're using in order to achieve literally nothing at all.
There is no urgency for Google to do any of this until Firefox has Shadow DOM support, and it's absolutely the wrong thing for Google to do to try to rush an upgrade just to satisfy some competition checklist that has nothing to do with the real world.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The point of mentioning version 0 is because every major browser that is working on Shadow DOM is developing towards version 1. The v0 implementation was more experimental that made its way out there because Google doesn't always go through the proper standards practice. Version 1 is actually going through the normal standardization process. Firefox and Safari have the version 1 code in development, while Edge has it marked as a high priority consideration.
To be clear, Chrome deprecated v0 in April 2018 and will remove in 2019. If Google does nothing than Chrome will slow down on YouTube as it will have the same issues Firefox and Edge currently are feeling.