People are innocent until proven guilty. Corporations are driven by greed and profit until proven otherwise.

I would be skeptical too if it was just a one time thing, but it wasn't. Around the same time as that HN comment, YouTube rolled out a redesign of their frontend that used the Polymer framework. At the time, Polymer depended on a deprecated web standard that was implemented in Blink and WebKit and used a polyfill elsewhere. This completely killed performance on Firefox and Edge. That isn't unsourced or anonymous information like the invisible div. You can search back and find people complaining on multiple forums that YouTube started running at a crawl out of nowhere and ID'ing Polymer as the culprit [1, 2, 3].

[1] https://hub.packtpub.com/youtubes-polymer-redesign-doesnt-li...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612139

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/91i0mc/youtube...

I have no idea if the story is true or not, hence the "if true" clause in my post. I was just pointing out that focusing on the technical aspect is missing the point of the story... the degradation could have been triggered by any number of things, the point of the story was the allegation that Google purposely triggered it and disingenuously used that degradation to claim their browser was faster.

This isn't a court room.