> YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.
First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.
Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.
Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.
If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.
In addition, Google is still run disorganized-bag-of-cats management style and YouTube is so indpendent from the mothership they're almost their own company.
Conspiracy is unlikely purely because Neal Mohan is empowered to tell the Chrome team to pound sand and will do so if he thinks they'd make a call that would damage YouTube's numbers.
Instead of just "stop using it" (pay isn't actually an option here, people who are paying are still getting the delay), let's force them to comply with reasonable antitrust regulation under threat of fines. Or preferably, break them up, youtube shouldn't be part of google and neither should chrome.
Not to mention, if performance with YouTube is slow, there's no clue for users that Firefox is the problem. There's no banner telling you "for faster YouTube performance use Chrome". And it's extremely unlikely that your average user is going to try to compare with Chrome, or even the thought occurs to them. They probably think their ISP just got worse or something.
If this were an actual mechanism to try to get users to switch, it would be an idiotic one.
Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.
First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.
Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.
Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.
If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.