You and me both. Have you noticed that "some" apps google has developed run like garbage when using firefox? Also, have you switched search engines as well?
Just today I noticed Google serves a different version of search to Firefox on Android when compared to Chrome. It is missing some features and harder to use. Apparently the fix is to change your useragent string so Google will give you the full version [1].
The YouTube experience is way worse for me in Firefox than in Chrome. Many times, after seeking inside a video 3 or 4 times, it just stops working. This never happens in Chrome.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but seeing this so often...
I don't think there is a single malicious force making google products sucky on browsers other than Chrome. However, I'm sure they do poor testing (any at all?) in Firefox, and are quick to adopt extensions to HTML/CSS that they are trying to push as standards. 50k people not caring about a thing is a powerful force.
That's not a conspiracy theory; it can be explained without assuming nefarious anti-competitive intent. Google has a front-end framework called Polymer, which it is using to push certain new web standards ("Web Components"). It's also pushing those by implementing them early in Chrome. Since other browsers, Firefox among them, have not yet fully implemented those standards, Polymer reproduces them in Javascript, which is slower than the browser supporting them.
A YouTube developer once said on HN that YouTube uses Polymer for non-technical reasons. One could imagine serving as a testbed for Polymer could be that reason, with slower performance on Firefox as an accepted downside.
I’m not the only one!! It simply keeps on spinning (remember buffering?) At this day and age, I can deduce it that it’s not my internet speed. It has to be google intentionally slowing it down. When I switch on over to chrome, it works like a charm.
Don't forget that ISPs have been known (at least in the past) to slow traffic down to certain sites. You shouldn't assume your bandwidth is necessarily routed fairly or anonymously.
As a personal story, a few years ago I was having trouble accessing youtube videos, buffering, timeouts, etc. I couldn't figure out why, tried upgrading my hardware, software, router, everything. But eventually I started suspecting my ISP[1].
I eventually tried using a proxy service to access the youtube videos. I think I routed my traffic through Iceland or something. Low-and-behold, perfect video streams _through_ a proxy routing traffic from another country. I had plenty of bandwidth. My ISP was just throttling my traffic.
Try a VPN, see if your ISP is messing with your traffic.
I don't trust Google either, and they already own me. But I fear my ISP more and don't believe that Google would be intentionally slowing you down. It's probably more of a function that Google optimizes for Chrome, less that they are trying to force you to change browsers.
[1] I will refrain from naming directly, but whose name starts with a 'C' and ends with an 'omcast'
I had Centurylink and I ran into the same issues with Youtube. I changed everything I could, but the only thing that worked was using a VPN or proxy. I used a different ISP at work and whenever there were youtube issues I'd hop on that and it worked fine every time.
I know that it could be any number of issues not related to youtube or centurylink, but that's been my experience 100% of the time so far.
I use Firefox on Windows as my main browser. I haven't noticed any Youtube issues. I believe I did run into them running Firefox on Linux, but it's been a while.
Most recently for me it was Google Calendar that was crazy sluggish in FF. Another time it was search results that would drive my processor to 100 percent twice or more a minute, again if I used FF. This would happen even if tjey weren't active in any way.
While I wouldn't put it past Google to do something nefarious to make this happen, I have noticed they like to take super bleeding edge features and run with them before they're standard, simply because they can. Could be the result of that.
