New YouTube redesign fastest on Chrome browser

Jul 25, 2018 05:24 GMT  ·  By

YouTube’s new Polymer redesign has brought not only improvements to the video sharing platform, but also a new controversy in the browser world, as non-Google browsers are said to be deliberately slowed down.

The issue was brought to light by Chris Peterson, Technical Program Manager at Mozilla, who revealed on Twitter that a technology that Polymer relies on is only available in Google Chrome, in turn making Firefox and Microsoft Edge slower.

“YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome,” Peterson explained.

“YouTube serves a Shadow DOM polyfill to Firefox and Edge that is, unsurprisingly, slower than Chrome's native implementation. On my laptop, initial page load takes 5 seconds with the polyfill vs 1 without. Subsequent page navigation perf is comparable.”

IE11 gets the old YouTube

As it turns out, Internet Explorer 11 is still being served the old design by default, and as the Mozilla engineer notes, Google could have chosen “to service it to Firefox and Edge too.” By not doing it, however, YouTube becomes substantially slower on these browsers, and there’s no easy way to fix this unless turning to third-party add-ons that would restore the old version of YouTube.

At this point, Google Chrome is the number one desktop browser with a market share that exceeds 60 percent, while Microsoft Edge is far behind with a little over 4 percent.

Google hasn’t obviously commented on these claims, but the company has just launched a new version of Chrome browser that introduces changes as to how HTTP pages are flagged as insecure to users. Starting with Chrome 68, Google marks all HTTP sites as not secure, as an attempt of the search giant to encourage the adoption of HTTPS.

Starting with Chrome 69, HTTPS pages would no longer be flagged in any way, as Google believes that this should become the new default on the WWW.