Now we have a monopoly of a much bigger, more user-hostile browser(s) and the web "standards" effectively under the control of a single company, which also happens to own YouTube and does things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 .
This article is actually a nice reminder that YouTube used to work in browsers as "unstandard" as IE6, and with far less processing power than computers today, was not noticeably slow either.
As much as you hate IE6, I hate the current situation far more. Those waging the browser-wars and evangelising the "push the web forward" propaganda have done nothing but contribute to the creation of a different monopoly and the waste of countless processor-hours of time and energy. My personal fuckings go out to everyone who thinks this is "progress" or in any way a good thing.
> Now we have a monopoly of a much bigger, more user-hostile browser(s) and the web "standards" effectively under the control of a single company
I’m not saying thing are great now but it was definitely worse in the IE6 days. Back then it was a literal monopoly. At least currently we do still have WebKit (Safari) and Gecko (Firefox) plus Blink is open source, which Trident (Internet Explorer) never was.
Better yet, the alternatives these days do still work 99% of the time. Whereas in the early days of Firefox and Opera, and in the later days of Navigator/Communicator, you basically had to accept that a disappointingly high number of sites didn’t render properly at all.
In an ideal world we would see Chrome’s market share much lower, but I’d still take the current ecosystem over the IE6 days in a heartbeat.
For science, I just tried loading YouTube in both Chrome and Firefox. I'd say Chrome may have been marginally faster, but you'd really have to get a profiling tool out to quantify it.
As to the rest of it, not really sure what you're talking about.
YouTube and plenty of other sites worked fine on the typical computer of the time which would have IE6.
Over a decade later, hardware is much more powerful yet the site is even slower than it used to be. I've started using Invidious exclusively because of that.
Google isn't really a monopoly though. They out-compete others for their market share, Chrome is open source, they abide by and push open standards, etc... They don't abuse their position like Microsoft did.
> Those waging the browser-wars and evangelising the "push the web forward" propaganda
Really? Thanks to this 'propaganda' the vast majority of software (ie. web apps) runs on every platform there is; Linux, BSD, Windows, OSX, Android, and iOS, kinda on the last one as Apple is dragging their feet with Safari.
> Google isn't really a monopoly though. They out-compete others for their market share, Chrome is open source, they abide by and push open standards, etc... They don't abuse their position like Microsoft did.
You must be kidding, right? If you are not, please take a look at performance problems various Google websites have in Firefox. Or how recaptcha behaves in FF. This is exactly the sort of abuse of power that MS yielded in the days of IE supremacy.
EDIT: about propaganda, Chrome was late to the party and while it sped up the IE demise, it would have happened anyway. Except we wouldn’t land in "all your data belongs to us" browser monoculture in which we are now.
Also, I'm sure they "abide by and push open standards"... the same ones they created and churn constantly.
Chrome is definitely NOT open source --- you may be thinking of Chromium, but then it doesn't matter anyway because they change it so often others can't compete.
This article is actually a nice reminder that YouTube used to work in browsers as "unstandard" as IE6, and with far less processing power than computers today, was not noticeably slow either.
As much as you hate IE6, I hate the current situation far more. Those waging the browser-wars and evangelising the "push the web forward" propaganda have done nothing but contribute to the creation of a different monopoly and the waste of countless processor-hours of time and energy. My personal fuckings go out to everyone who thinks this is "progress" or in any way a good thing.