Convicted serial monopoly abuser Google found to slow down Edge and Firefox on YouTube

Clearly having to pay more than $7 billion in fines to the EU for anti-trust violations has done nothing to change the culture at Google.

The company has just released a new design for YouTube which is up to 5 times slower on Edge and Firefox than on Chrome, and this is not due to Chrome being such a wonderful browser, though that is the impression some users will no doubt be left with.

According to Chris Peterson, Technical Program Manager at Mozilla, Google is using a “deprecated Shadow DOM V0 API” which has only been implemented in Chrome for its new Polymer redesign, resulting in load times as slow as 5 seconds on Firefox and Edge vs 1 second on Chrome.

https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185

There is no doubt a massive company such as Google would have tested the redesign on rival browsers, but either maliciously or in either case arrogantly decided that poor performance on other browsers was a price worth paying.

Hopefully, another multi-billion dollar fine in 2023, when Chrome has 80% market share,  will make the company more accommodating.

In the meantime, a Firefox extension called YouTube Classic  can disable the new design on Firefox, while Edge users can try and edit the Cookie that tells Google you want the new design.

The method, according to Redditor Froggypws, is as follows:

1. Go to YouTube.com
2. Open Developer mode (F12).
3. Click the Application tab
4. Click on Cookies, then youtube.com
5. A table will come up, under Name column, find the row that has “PREF”, and then paste this in its value box: al=en&f5=30030&f6=8
6. Reload the Youtube page and you will be on the old UI.

Do our readers think Google is simply competent or actually evil? Let us know below.

Via Reddit.com, thanks P20 for the tip.