Also, it is Firefox on the desktop. 90% of YouTube views come from mobile, and Firefox only has about 5% market share on the desktop. So desktop Firefox is a half a percent of the overall users of youtube.
Is it any surprise that maintaining support for a browser that delivers less than a percent of the total users is deprioritized or just forgotten about?
Despite those stats, if Google wants to avoid being called a monopoly they need to support it, and it needs to receive the same level of support as their own product.
I'd argue the opposite. You need to be a monopoly and have basically every eyeball in the country on your website for it to be worth spending the engineering hours optimizing a browser that only delivers a fraction of a percent of your viewers.
It’s not monopolistic to not support shitty browsers with little user base. This isn’t even the basis for the current antitrust ruling against Google, for what it’s worth.
As the parent comment points out, if YouTube isn’t buggy for most of their users, why do they have to worry about it? We don’t expect either Microsoft or game devs to ensure their stuff works well with wine on Linux.
Web standards are open but that doesn’t mean you can’t build on top of them. YouTube is not an open standard. If Google wanted to end web support for YouTube and force everyone to use some sort of YouTube app even on desktop, they could do that. They’re not obligated to make sure YouTube works on EVERY browser especially when an insignificant amount of their users come from there.
A game running on windows isn’t a false equivalence either. A lot of games are built on open standards and open source (e.g. OpenGL, various game engines, etc) and still won’t work on wine/linux. If a bunch of people are using windows in order to play their games, that’s not too different from a lot of people using chromium browsers to use YouTube.
If they're doing it to intentionally damage firefox because they feel it is competition, that's an argument for Chrome to be severed from google.
If they're inadvertently doing it because firefox is so insignificant as not to be worth thinking about, that's an argument for Chrome to be severed from google.
In a vacuum, it's not. The market is completely dominated by Google though, and they exercise that authority and mindshare brazenly, to the point that it's easy to see how it affects Firefox. Firefox functions great. It doesn't function great with Google products/services such as YouTube in this case, which has no real competition. What's someone to do? Switch to Chrome. One might even make the assumption that the repeat offenses over time, across various services, across various fields, demonstrates... malice.
Not demonstrates, hints at. In each of these cases, Google is very careful that you can easily come up with an alternative plausible explanation. It's hard to use the en masse argument if each of these problems can be accounted for.
These guys are not stupid - they're happy with the current status quo where they have a de facto monopoly but they can pretend they don't.
Sorry, it is absolutely hard-core malice. No hinting, after we found out last year that a deliberate sleep was introduced with a user agent check. This is bald-faced murder. Its like shooting someone in public and stomping on the body. No need to dance around it.
You should actually read the link you posted. That had nothing to do with Firefox and has everything to do with ad blockers. Looks like YouTubes goal was to bring parity between those using ad blockers and those not, as to not incentivize ad blocker usage, not to cripple Firefox.
And ? It is part of the anti-adblocker code which is clearly targeted at Firefox. What sort of extra-ordinary bar are you keeping for malice if not this ?
If you knew the amount of project changes, reorgs, CEOs, products, executives, etc we’ve went through you’d realize Googles behavior had little do with it. In fact, if it weren’t for their corporate generosity we’d be finished by now.
We’re basically run by a bunch of lawyers and ex-McKinsey people now (and have been for some time). We’re not victims of Google, we’re victims of our own hiring practices.
Is it any surprise that maintaining support for a browser that delivers less than a percent of the total users is deprioritized or just forgotten about?