There seems to be a rule that startups appeal to and play by standards while those at the top disregard standards in order to toss wrenches into their competitors’ machinery. In Google’s early days it was a fan of standards. Now that it’s at the top of the pyramid, it seems like enthusiastic about them and has demonstrated a willingness to disregard them, usually when doing so appears to cause some issues for its competitors:
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.
Now that Google’s browser owns the market, it appears to be pulling the same stunt Microsoft when Internet Explorer was the dominant browser. By redesigning YouTube and having it rely on a deprecated API that is only currently supported in Chrome, Google has effectively made its browser appear faster than Firefox or Edge. Ends users who know nothing about such matters will only see that Chrome appears to load YouTube faster and use that criteria to declare it the best browser.
This is just the latest move in a series of moves that Google has taken that demonstrates that its old slogan, “Don’t be evil,” was meant only to develop goodwill with the community long enough to become the top dog. Now that it’s the top dog it’s more than happy to be evil.
Well luckily I use Opera which uses enough of the Chromium Code to still support that API and the load time difference is actually in Opera’s Favor since it is better streamlined in other aspects.