YouTube’s Polymer Redesign Allegedly Affects Loading Time in Firefox and Edge
Jul. 25, 2018Whether by design or accident, YouTube’s adoption of slower polyfills as part of its Polymer redesign earlier this year has allegedly resulted in 5X slower page-loads onFirefoxandEdgethan inChrome.
According to Mozilla’s Technical Program Manager, Chris Peterson, Google is using theShadow DOM V0 APIthat’s implemented natively only in Chrome, and not in either of the other aforementioned browsers.
The slowness, however, only seems to affect the initial page load, while subsequent navigation performance is‘comparable’, says Peterson.
Peterson also lays out a relatively simple workaround to fix the problem – an add-on calledYouTube Classicthat restore’s the streaming site’s faster pre-Polymer design. The add-on, which is now available on the Mozilla repository, was first launched back in May, and is currently on version 1.2.
While the adoption of its Polymer library is expected to help YouTube introduce new features faster, the fact that it is slowing down the service on non-Chrome browsers is bad news for the company that has just been handed not only amulti-billion dollar fine by the EUfor anti-competitive trade practices, but also aRs. 136 crore fine by the CCI(Competition Commission of India) earlier this year for ‘search bias’.
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