Google Might Be Slowing YouTube Down for Firefox Users
Google’s not been having the best of luck these past few months, considering just how many times the European Commission has jumped all over Alphabet Inc. for its anti-competitive practices. In yet another potentially malicious choice, Firefox users may be experiencing slower YouTube performance through their browser of choice than Google Chrome users depending on which company is to be believed.
Competition isn’t king for Google
It’s an odd time to be Google, considering how they seem to be slowly trending away from their old corporate motto of “don’t be evil” and instead aiming for “don’t be evil in ways that are blatantly obvious” to the layman. While that may seem melodramatic, they’ve just received their largest fine ever from the European Commission over supposed antitrust activities relating to their pre-installed apps in devices running Android firmware, so it may not be too far off the mark.
Technical program manager Chris Peterson of Mozilla recently tweeted their latest dilemma over architectural issues, citing how Google has decided to push a deprecated API for serving YouTube’s video content. It’s an API only used in Chrome due to being left behind by the rest of the browser development community, meaning this isn’t just an issue striking at Mozilla directly, but it does seem an oddly pointed choice given their recent legal troubles.
It’s enough of an issue that videos may load up to five times slower on competing browsers than in Chrome. Firefox users can install a browser extension to revert load speeds to a pre-redesign state, but this is only the kind of fix a dedicated technology aficionado is likely to notice and work towards solving; To the average users, they very well might just assume Firefox is slower than Chrome for no good reason.
While this could be written off as a design oversight, Internet Explorer 11 users are still served the pre-redesign version of the YouTube site to avoid this very issue. If the same preventative measure were taken for Edge and Firefox users it’d be a complete non-story, but this design choice points more towards a knowingly malicious edge than a simple slip-up.
Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson has stated Firefox performance metrics have been tested and shown as roughly comparable to load times from before the redesign. Microsoft has not responded to requests for a comment on the issue, so it’s hard to say if they’ve been in contact with Google over the Polymer redesign or not.
After their corporate restructure to Alphabet Inc., Google changed their long-standing “don’t be evil” motto to “do the right thing” in a move that, to most non-corporate followers, probably doesn’t mean a whole lot. That message has been muddied by their legal troubles within the EU and their recent antitrust fine might open the door for more competition from companies like Mozilla given how they’ll be forced to change up their pre-packaged app services to comply with EU regulations.
Yet they’ve also caught flak from companies like DuckDuckGo who claim Google goes out of their way to urge DuckDuckGo users to revert from their chosen search engine to instead use Google results as an alternative. On top of owning the domain of duck.com and pointing it directly to Google’s homepage instead, it doesn’t seem like the mega-giant tech company is all that interested in fostering the competition they once seemed so intent on providing.
Google already has such a massive cut of the technology market that it’s difficult to escape their grasp in some form or another; While the services they provide are often more than serviceable for daily use, the services we’ve come to rely on also harvest as much data as possible without regard for a user’s individual privacy and often do so in the face of laws designed specifically to hinder their data-grabbing reach.
It’s difficult to decry data collection and the use of outdated APIs as inherently evil, but it certainly feels like the benevolence of a company that once poked fun at other companies for exploiting their users.
Regardless, Firefox users can restore their YouTube browsing speeds via extension and there’s a chance this negative media attention will push Google towards adopting more modern APIs to remove the problem entirely. It’s just a question of what the next strange anti-competitive choice they make will be rather than whether or not they’ll play nicely, it seems.
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