YouTube page load times are five times faster on Google Chrome than they are on Firefox and Microsoft Edge, a Mozilla exec has claimed.
Furthermore, Chris Peterson, Mozilla’s engineering program manager, has suggested that Google could fix the issue if it really wanted to.
Related: YouTube Music
“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,” he wrote in a Twitter update first spotted by MSPoweruser.
The Google-owned video site was treated to a big makeover in May 2017. “The site design is built on a new, faster framework named Polymer, which enables quicker feature development from here on out,” the search giant said at the time, while introducing new features like Dark Theme to the video platform.
However, Peterson believes the firm is damaging the YouTube user experience for people that don’t use Google 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 added.
“I assume Google has metrics showing that the Polymer redesign increases Firefox and Edge user engagement more than the slow polyfills hurt it. YouTube still serves the pre-Polymer design to IE11 by default so they could choose to serve it to Firefox and Edge too.”
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix.
Firefox users can boost YouTube page load speeds by installing the YouTube Classic extension, while Edge users can do the same by installing the Tampermonkey extension and the YouTube − Restore Classic script.
Are you a Firefox or Edge user? Have you noticed a slowdown in page load speeds since the redesign? Share your thoughts with us @TrustedReviews.
