A Mozilla executive has recently claimed that Google has made YouTube slower on the browsers Edge and Mozilla Firefox.
Google in early 2017 had provided a design refresh to YouTube with the company’s own Polymer library. This enabled a ‘quicker feature development’ for YouTube. But the claim of the Mozilla executive suggests that Google used the same framework to tone down the pace of the platform on the mentioned browsers.
On a Twitter thread, the Technical Program Manager of Mozilla said that the Polymer redesign of YouTube heavily depends upon the highly criticized Shadow DOM v0 API, and it is only available in Chrome. This further makes YouTube about 5 times slower on Edge and Firefox, which are direct competitors of Google’s Chrome.
The executive Chris Peterson said in one of the tweets that it takes 5 seconds on his laptop to load YouTube while using the Shadow DOM polyfill. According to him, without using the polyfill, the site gets loaded in 1 second. That’s one significant difference you can’t miss in terms of convenience.
Chris went on to give out a few workarounds for the users of Edge and Firefox to get the pre-Polymer version of the video streaming site. These workarounds involve the use of extensions.
Another suggestion he dropped is following Google’s activity for Internet Explorer 11. This means offering the older version of YouTube to the users on the affected browsers. This seems pretty easier!
Relevantly, Google is still using the deprecated API in Polymer 1.0, whereas the latest versions of Polymer support both v0 and v1 APIs of Shadow DOM. The search giant is yet to comment on these claims.
Are you an Edge or Firefox user? Facing the slower YouTube loading issue? Let us know in the comments below. Stay with us to follow the development. While we are keeping a tab, we do wish for the sake of user convenience that Google takes care of this soon enough.
