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Comment by elaus | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Youtube doesn't run CI tests against other browsers than Chrome or if those test cases just aren't covered.

According to an analysis in the Firefox bugtracker (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1697551) it seems like the error occured because a non-standard attribute is used in the JS code that only Chromium implements.

Looks like the changes are being rolled back though. Geniunely happy to see that as Youtube hasn't such a good track record of fully suporting browsers not based on the Chromium engine. I think performance on Firefox is still pretty bad with the new UI because of some inperformant polyfills for Shadow DOM code?

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> I wonder if Youtube doesn't run CI tests against other browsers than Chrome

They have a strong financial incentive to break functionality in browsers that aren't theirs. Why would they ever care to test?

Making the web buggy on firefox means we're in the extinguish phase for alternate web engines. Soon there will only be chrome based browsers. And then once that happens, they'll make it harder and harder to build alternative browsers around chrome.

Microsoft will fork Chromium in that case.

Maybe, but it wouldn't help much: They too would be happy to get rid of ad blockers.

Not really. They have a strong financial interest to have as many eyeballs as possible watching YouTube, because only then can they show ads.

I don't see how breaking YouTube for a portion of the world population is a sensible part of that plan.

A lot of people have Chrome installed alongside Firefox or Edge or whatever and will just try the video somewhere else. So YouTube actually gets more revenue and Chrome gets free advertising. If a major website works on Chrome but doesn’t work correctly on Firefox most users will tend to blame the browser instead of the website and think “I stopped using Chrome because of the memory issues but at least it’s reliable.” The logic even sounds superficially reasonable.

For most people, if YouTube does not work in Firefox, they will not switch to a different video platform. They will switch to Chrome.

It's a trade-off. Which way do they gain more money? From showing the YouTube ads to Firefox users, or from getting users into the Chrome ecosystem for however that is monetized?

They have a history of such changes. YT has been breaking user-experience on non-chrome browsers for years now. Between 2015-2017 they were racing with the new codecs of which none were supported on Safari or Firefox, so browsers simply stopped playing videos for several days or weeks.

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