The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
Can you please share sources regarding this? I'm not familiar with any instance like this.
I lived through that as a user. (I was one of the like 5 Edge Spartan users, I know, lol.) I could see the dumb animation in dev tools and manually delete it for better performance. It was a nice thing I had some technical skills. I know for mainstream users the solution was "watch YouTube in Chrome".
It's hard to find to other sources because Microsoft intentionally broke the SEO on the Edge brand and you know Google is the only other major search engine. Not that they'd intentionally down-pagerank bad news about a Google property, I'm sure.
IIRC the story was, when Youtube was redesigned a while ago they used an early spec for Web Components, that they were pushing to be standardized and was fully implemented in Chrome. But they had to add Polymer as a polyfill for other browsers. Then the version of Web Components we actually got wasn't entirely compatible with that early spec, so Polymer is still in use for non-Chrome browsers.
I don't know how much of that's changed since then, but the complaints are basically the same as when that happened.
The only glitch I reliably get is watching videos at 1.5x sometimes freezes video (but audio still plays). Expect that's more hardware and memory pressure related tho.
Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. Although possibly whatever is lagging others experiences too...
That would be the point of an ad-block add-on wouldn't it?
Unrelated to that, but on a Ubuntu laptop I have Firefox tabs regularly stop working entirely. They just won't load anything, and the only fix is to open a new tab and that loads fine most of the time. Other times I have to restart Firefox. I've tried searching for others experiencing this problem and even asked in Mozilla channels on Matrix, but even then I didn't come up with any answers. The laptop's hinge broke last year so I haven't used it since then, so likely never going to figure out what was going on.
What a strange confusion, as if all people must have the same "workflow". Sorry, no intent to sound negative, but why not give it some thought at least. It's "6 tabs", not "6 videos playing at the same time".
This seems intentionally YouTube's UX design fault, they too heavily try to push you to "auto-play". YouTube has a "Watchlist" feature where you can build a playlist. When it works it is exactly what I want, but it feels like every so many months it mysteriously breaks for a while or they hide the button for it behind some new hidden gesture or menu they expect you psychic out of their UI. (If you've never heard of "Watchlist", no wonder. It seems intentionally hard to discover.) Lately I've been complaining that YouTube adds random "auto-play" videos even to a manually curated "Watchlist" if you don't pay enough attention or watch past the end of the list (even with auto-play and recommendations entirely off).
I’m still using Watch Later, but for long videos I have no time for.
I expect YT is probably doing some preloading or heavyweight running in a loaded-but-not-playing tab.
Convert that to load-on-click, and you'll likely fix your issue.
The fact is, it doesn’t happen in Chrome for “magical” reasons, according to a comment few levels up. And regular non-tech users won’t debug this with click to play or whatever. We expect that YT does it absolutely intentionally.
It bends userbases however it wants due to its multi-dimensional reach, and we’re like “hmm maybe extension would help prevent accidental preloading issue”. I just don’t get it.
I have over 1200 tabs open at the moment, including at least 100 youtube tabs, and mine runs fine even with a bunch of other stuff running.
I do find that if I go over 150 windows open then things start to become problematic, but I think that's because my GPU is only 8Gb.
CPU is usually at about 10% on an i7-12900k.
Update your firefox now and the issue is gone.
It was basically the whole reason for the update.
Google changed their code to create a bunch of objects over time, and those objects didn't get cleaned up. It was just a standard memory leak issue.
Except it heavily impacted users who kept a youtube tab open or pinned.
The bug was reported and a fix released in a little under 2 weeks.
I think what's actually happening is that they are targeting uBlock + Firefox on desktop for punishment.
I mean if you care enough to not use the default mobile browser, surely you found out about newpipe and the myriad of other youtube frontends.
While using firefox mobile + ublock its easier to be logged into a youtube account and dig through favorites, etc.
Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.