SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Google denies altering YouTube code to break Microsoft Edge
A former Microsoft intern has revealed details of a YouTube incident that has convinced some Edge browser engineers that Google added code to purposely break compatibility. In a post on Hacker News, Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern at Microsoft, lays out details and claims about an incident earlier this year. Microsoft has since announced the company is moving from the EdgeHTML rendering engine to the open source Chromium project for its Edge browser.
[...] The claims are surprising if they're genuine, and they come months after a Mozilla program manager claimed a separate YouTube redesign made the site "5x slower in Firefox and Edge." That incident led Edge, Safari, and Firefox users to revert to scripts to improve the YouTube experience. Google was also at the center of claims it intentionally blocked access to Google Maps for Windows Phone users years ago.
[...] Google disputes Bakita's claims, and says the YouTube blank div was merely a bug that was fixed after it was reported. "YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when they're discovered," says a YouTube spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies, the Web Platform Tests project, the open-source Chromium project and more to improve browser interoperability."
Previously: Is Google Using an "Embrace, Extend..." Strategy?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @03:00PM
Why yes, an empty div is all it takes. Thats because of how hardware and software works.
There is a hardware accelerator in the CPU for rendering graphics, which makes it a lot faster and more energy efficient to do as compared to doing it in software. However, it only can be safely used when you know that video is being displayed. An empty div is a placeholder which can have any arbitrary content entered in later, so it forces an HTML-compliant browser to not use the hardware renderer. In effect, Google can cheat by not following the HTML spec because they (and only they) can guarantee the div will be empty.
By analogy, imagine Google had tens of thousands people trying to enter a stadium, and they all need to be security checked. They also give them backpacks. Now Edge and Firefox security guards need to slow down to check each person's backpack, whereas Chrome guards just waives them through as Google internally knows each backpack is empty.
So yes, "an empty backpack is all it takes to dramatically slow down a properly-run checkpoint." (And yes, this also means that Google's Chrome is not fully following standards.)