Mozilla has accused Google of slowing down YouTube on Firefox, as well as on Microsoft’s browser, Edge.
The company runs Firefox, a popular browser like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
Chris Peterson, technical program manager at Mozilla explained that an API called Shadow DOM v0 seems to be causing the slowing down of the website that doesn’t appear on Chrome.
“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." Peterson said about the issues he had discovered.
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. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://t.co/F5uEn3iMLR
— Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) July 24, 2018
It's not us
A Google spokesperson responded to Peterson’s claim and said the company found that YouTube’s overall performance on Firefox is the same as it’s been since a site redesign happened.
Google said that they are always working to make YouTube faster, regardless of the browser in use and will continue to do so. They recently fixed a bug that was causing performance issues on Firefox.
In May, YouTube revealed that Chrome was the most popular browser used for registered users, with Firefox accounting for just five per cent of the results found.
