Comment by darkwater
9 hours ago
> That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem.
No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.
When it comes to video it’s not only the browser. It’s also your gpu, your OS and your gpu drivers.
Notably, YouTube these days prioritize AV1 codec even if you don’t have gpu acceleration for it, making lots of systems fall back to CPU decoding and making it completely unusable. Install the h264ify extension to force h264 during content negotiation and get your gpu decoding back.
Even if you can make a matrix of all those combinations, it’s even more complex than that to test in practice. Take my laptop for example, it starts off good and manages the cpu decoding for a while, a few minutes into a video it overheats and throttles, causing stutter.
What YouTube should do on the other hand, and I’m sure they already do, is to collect metrics from all playbacks. That should show black on white how many users struggle with each codec.
I don’t think I’m in any minority here given how many million installations the h264ify extension has. Google simply care more about their bandwidth cost than the user experience.
So you're expecting Google engineers and managers to prioritize adding broad cross-browser support, which adds more work for them, when the same company is also developing a competing browser?
No, Firefox always been a second-rate guest at Google properties, and I'm not expecting it to change soon either. Why would they make it better when status quo means more Chrome users (in their mind)?
It's not 2003, the browser isn't the battle.
I would expect YouTube managers to pressure the Chrome managers, because YouTube brings in billions of dollars every month. Likewise I would expect the trend to move in favor of YouTube, because the browser loses money at an increasing amount and YouTube generates money at an increasing amount. 70% of YouTube happens on Mobile, and in the US more people are now watching on TVs than phones. Source: Nielsen, the old-school company that has huge influence over ads.
The site pops a literal warning saying "having problems? turn off your ad blocker" so I'm not sure where the mysteries lie here.
They're testing on thousands of devices. And they're probably even testing against ad-blockers on your bro-browser. But they're certainly not motivated to optimize that experience, so you get what you get.