This seems unnecessarily passive aggressive. Everyone makes mistakes or bugs, intern or not. It makes no sense to get this salty about basic human error. Also there's nothing wrong with implementing minor UX enhancements.
If anything redirect the frustration to the leadership that doesn't prioritize fixing these kinds of errors.
I don't think there's any error to fix. It's a feature - casting light from the video onto the UI, using JS, surely takes that amount of CPU.
The question of why it is on by default stands - because it's little bit of eye candy, vs people's laptop batteries, CPU that could have been used to get other stuff done faster - so also their time, device thermals etc... I don't think it's just unnecessarily salty to point out how the choice to turn this on by default should have been more nuanced and thought through.
IMO the implementation sucks and the feature is questionable. Recently I set the browser to dark mode, which tells YT to also use dark mode, and if I haven't read here I wouldn't know that this is a toggleable feature. It's sad when we can't tell a feature and a bug apart.
How much can websites determine about the power of the device they're running on? Obviously it'd be a security issue for them to know too much, but it would be nice to be able to progressively enhance the experience for more powerful devices that can handle it, beyond just mobile vs PC. Even just knowing whether a device was running off battery power could be useful.
I don't think you really want websites to make this determination anyway. There are a million reasons why a user might want a website to use fewer resources than their machine could support.
It should just be a setting the user can select. No probing of the machine necessary.
What should be a setting? This specific youtube ambience thing? That is, but it shows the issue - you need to pick a default, and most people won't know they can change it. Having some idea of the capabilities of the device you're running on could allow you to choose sensible defaults.
But if you mean there should be a setting in the browser that websites could check, I agree that could be better.
Sensible defaults go a long way, yes! Although in the case of this YouTube thing, I think the sensible default is to have it disabled regardless of the capabilities of the machine.
It's not unreasonable to hold YouTube devs and QA engineers to a higher standard than everyone else who doesn't work for a ~trillion dollar corporation or deploy code that runs on billions of devices.
Just to be clear I was being a bit snarky, but what I meant is that this is sort of a small, fun, less important project that could be easily given to an intern.
I don’t think there is a bug? It seems like a sort of image processing thing that might take a bit of compute run. To the extent that there’s blame, I’d lay the blame at the feet of whoever decided it should be turned on by default.
This is definitely worth getting salty about when you consider the cumulative electricity wasted for something so trivial. Google should be strictly monitoring performance and CPU consumption of their changes on youtube since a screwup there is the climate change equivalent of paying for 747s to fly in circles.
If anything redirect the frustration to the leadership that doesn't prioritize fixing these kinds of errors.