Is Google Slowing Down YouTube On Firefox, Edge? Big Blow To Net Neutrality!

Internet giant Google has been accused of slowing YouTube algorithms on non-Chrome browsers. As per a Mozilla engineer, the company has recently redesigned its YouTube platform to make it intentionally slow on other browsers than Chrome.

Chris Peterson, Mozilla’s software technical program manager brought up a storm on the internet by tweeting about how Google is ruining net neutrality.

As per the reports, YouTube is slowing down YouTube on non-Chrome browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge. Some videos were shared online which showed YouTube loaded at a fifth of the speed on the non-Chrome browsers due to its latest architecture.

Google’s Reply

Google is using a pre-Polymer architecture for the YouTube on Edge and Firefox, which is believed to be slower compared to the one Google uses for YouTube on Chrome.

Google responded to the tweet and said that the overall YouTube performance on both Firefox and Chrome are the same. It’s the same architecture for all after Google recently redesigned the YouTube site based on the latest metrics.

Google said, the new redesign will help the site to run faster at lower bandwidth speeds. The company has been repeatedly working on several metrics to make YouTube faster, regardless of any browser you use.

The Battle For The Best Browser – Mozilla & Google

Google added, that company is not perfect with everything and recently fixed some bugs that will help it to speed up the Firefox performance. The current situation with the performance of bugs may be impacting the users for the speeds.

For Mozilla, the company said that it will continue to work on its standard Shadow DOM and Custom Elements APIs.

Mozilla spokesperson added that the company is working with the Google YouTube team, as the Firefox browser will be migrating the standard APIs and how they will be optimised with Firefox. The company further said that the Firefox community will continue focusing on how the browser can keep improving the overall user-visible performance for all the sites, including YouTube.

YouTube Stats

Last month, YouTube reported that the company has grown phenomenally in the last few years. The video streaming company registered 1.8 billion viewers every month with over 400 hours of video were uploaded to the site every minute in the last quarter.

Being one of the most visited sites in the world, the service performance of YouTube is a vital factor for users to choose and use a browser.

Google Chrome is Winning

Coming to web browsers all around the world, Google Chrome is winning by a huge margin. It’s the most popular web browser in the world which holds for 59 per cent of the total website usage worldwide.

Whereas if compared to Chrome, Firefox only holds for 5 per cent of the total usage, and Edge only has 2 per cent.

So, What About Net Neutrality?

Starting with Apple, they are known to make their Safari browser run as fast as possible on the Mac. And if Google is doing the same with YouTube by making it run slow on the non-Chrome browsers, it would be a massive blow to net neutrality.

Everyone is working hard to make their products better to make them run smoothly irrespective of any platform one uses.

As a user, we should stand together to support net neutrality which will enhance our overall online experience by providing an equal platform to all and making the Internet a better place.