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.

Comments

Shadow DOM is a W3C standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Shadow DOM is a W3C standard. I don't know why they throw in "v0" there, as far as I know, the version of the Shadow DOM that Chrome supports is the released standard. Firefox flat-out doesn't support it yet.

The Shadow DOM makes various repeated elements load much faster because it allows the same snippet of HTML be reused without being reparsed. It's a very useful feature if you're writing a web UI library where you have effectively the same HTML chunk over and over again. The lack of support in Firefox and Edge is annoying and results in effectively having to manually add the elements to the DOM, which is, not surprisingly, slower than just being able to copy them.

This isn't Google being evil. This is Google using web standards that Firefox is too lazy to adapt.

Re:Shadow DOM is a W3C standard

[GeLeTo]

The parent post is moderated into oblivion but it is 100% correct. The statement that Shadow DOM is deprecated is factually wrong. If Shadow DOM did not exist - Polymer apps would have been equally slow on all browsers. Firefox currently has experimental support for Shadow DOM, you can enable it with the dom.webcomponents.shadowdom.enabled flag.

Re:Shadow DOM is a W3C standard

[squiggleslash]

This appears to be correct. Mozilla are in the middle of implementing Shadow DOM and there's an about:config flag you can flip to turn it on (although whether that means Youtube will automatically start using it is another question, most websites go by browser ID rather than probing for features alas.)

The notion this is tied to "version 0" is the bit that I don't get about the summary. It doesn't matter what version of Shadow DOM is targeted by Youtube, none of the major browsers except Chrome supports it right now.

On that basis, I'd say "Google making use of a good new standard that they happen to support but other browser makers haven't gotten around to yet, with a safe workaround for browsers that don't support it" is hardly the anticompetitive act the summary makes it out to be. I'd expect websites, be they Google or anyone else, to do the same thing.