The first is related to things like paying to be the default search engine on iPhone, Firefox, etc. The second is related to ad tech. Neither really directly addresses the issues that average people have with Google's behavior though, so keep filing complaints!
Actually, this isn't the first time they did it. There was a thread by a mozilla ex-employee that described how Google destroyed Firefox's market share using the same dirty trick.
YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://t.co/F5uEn3iMLR
— Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) July 24, 2018
According to that article,
Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'
while Firefox was still a Google search partner.
EDIT: Did not realize how long ago this post was made, whoops.
Makes sense and improves privacy but they're not going to win on speed, not even on Firefox, unless you host a private instance or use a nearby-hosted one.
By default, when using Invidious, your browser loads the video right from Google, you can proxy videos through the Invidious instance but it's disabled by default. Only Piped always proxies videos through the Piped server.
Why would it? I don't think your browser makes any direct connection to youtube.com when using Piped, all goes through a proxy server of your choice (hence the name).
All current conversations surrounding Net Neutrality refer to ISPs being neutral. Since this is happening at the browser level, it would not technically be a violation.
For example streaming websites aren't required to support Linux. It's a dick move, but it's not a violation to "block" users.
That isn't to say this isn't a dick move, it absolutely is, but as currently defined it isn't a Net Neutrality issue.
I don't notice this, Firefox on Mac, YouTube Premium. Do they only do this for YouTube Free? Yep, seems like it. Terrible nonetheless of course but it explains why I never experienced this.
It's a little weird because its definitely slower on my desktop but on my laptop (with the same account, browser, and extensions) it's perfectly fine. I'm guessing that there's some AB testing going on.