Microsoft’s Edge web browser seems to be struggling for some users when they try to watch YouTube videos – and fingers are being pointed at Google, the company behind both YouTube, and Chrome, Edge’s biggest rival in the web browser space.
If Windows Central reportspeople have taken to Reddit to complain about YouTube’s performance in Edge, with one user complaining that videos have a two second delaywhile Windows Task Manager Edge showed between 50% and 90% of the PC’s CPU and memory resources being used, which absolutely should not be the case.
According to Windows Central, another user complained that Google showed a pop-up message suggesting they use Chrome instead. So what’s going on?
Is there malicious intent?
Since Microsoft Edge now uses the Chromium engine, the same technology behind Chrome, some people are suggesting something worse is going on. One suggestion is that Google is purposefully reducing performance on Edge in an effort to encourage people to drop it in favor of Chrome.
Basically one Reddit user links to another thread where users discuss a similar issue with YouTube in Firefoxwhere people suggest that Google is deliberately limiting the performance of competing web browsers.
I’m not entirely convinced this is happening. It’s not that I don’t think Google would make such an anti-competitive move, but I just don’t see how the company would benefit from it.
For starters, Chrome is by far the most popular web browser in the world. a recent report from SimilarWeb showed that Chrome’s market share was a whopping 59.65% as of December 2023, while Edge had only 5.54% and Firefox only 2.56%. There’s no point in Google doing something like that when it already has such a big lead. Sure, a few Edge and Firefox users might switch, but that will hardly change anything.
In fact, Google may have more to lose as a result. For starters, if so used to be By deliberately throttling YouTube performance in other web browsers, evidence found could lead to people dropping Chrome in protest – and it could also expose Google to legal action.
Intentionally screwing up its own service is incredibly risky, as people might blame YouTube, not the browser, and stop watching videos on YouTube instead. This could be disastrous for Google, as it makes most of its YouTube profits from advertising. If the company makes it harder to see those ads, or prevents people from seeing them at all, then those profits will drop.
A much more plausible theory, at least to me, is that the poor performance is a side effect of Google’s war on ad blockers on YouTube.
Google has been vocal about its mission to prevent people from seeing ads in videos through ad-blocking add-ons for web browsers. A trial is underway to limit the number of videos someone with an adblocker installed can see, and there are also suggestions that it reduces YouTube performance for adblock users – similar to what some Edge and Firefox users are experiencing.
This move may not be popular, but it makes sense. It should encourage people to either disable ad-blocking extensions so they see ads on videos (and thus Google makes money), or be tempted to subscribe to YouTube Premium, which offers ad-free videos for a monthly fee – again, making Google money. .
Whatever technology Google uses to identify adblock usage, it’s possible that it also incorrectly picks up Edge and Firefox and limits playback performance as if those browsers were adblock software.
It’s also likely that Edge and Firefox users are using adblocking extensions in those browsers, which would make the performance slowdown legitimate. Some users have even reported that disabling adblock extensions solves the problem.
So rather than this being some nefarious ploy by Google to get people to switch to Chrome, it seems more likely that the company is simply working on ways to protect its revenue. While this may not be popular, ad revenue allows Google to keep YouTube free and pay content creators to broadcast on the service; and if the widespread use of ad blocking software jeopardizes that, we may be left with an even less desirable alternative.
That said, Google must also ensure that whatever technology it uses correctly identifies adblock software, and that “innocent” users aren’t accidentally penalized (adblock extensions are perfectly legal, after all), especially if they use competing products.