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YouTube is five times faster on Google Chrome over Firefox and Edge according to Mozilla executive

YouTube’s user interface has changed a lot over the past year, both on mobile devices and on the desktop. Apparently, though, that redesign is causing issues with some browsers…

According to Chris Peterson, a Technical Program Manager at Mozilla, YouTube’s performance on Mozilla’s own Firefox as well as Microsoft Edge is about 5 times slower compared to that of Google Chrome (via Neowin). He explains in a thread on Twitter that this can be attributed to Google’s recent redesign of the service using the Polymer library.

Peterson further points out that the specific reason for the slower performance in other browsers is due to this design relying on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API. That API is only implemented in Chrome.

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

Google could revert Firefox and Edge users to an older version of the YouTube interface, as it does for some Internet Explorer users, but the Material refresh has proved popular for many. For those who are annoyed by the slower performance, though, there are workarounds available. On both Firefox and Edge, browser extensions can be used to revert YouTube to an older design, as Peterson points out.


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