Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com2688
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The fuck?? Isn’t this anti competitive behaviour?
In a previous generation, governments would go after this blatant anti competitive behaviour.
I'm sure the EU will still.
It’s just a shame that there’s really only one government organization globally that will still stand up to corporations.
To be fair China will send you to a reeducation camp or disappear you if you try to act like a western billionaire.
China will make you disappear for many things including speaking up against the genocide of religious minorities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For now
Honestly with the speed new BS crops up I don’t think they will.
The current US Federal Trade Commission is quite agressive compared to other FTCs historically.
True. Though they have been stuck with 30 years of damage simply reverse too.
Think of it as 30 years of rent they're now claiming.
Yes, but they haven't fixed this specific problem that just broke in the last day or so, therefore the FTC is a corrupt useless organization that pours hot wax on kittens
then why do we have like 4 conglomerates making everything in the grocery store?
Some people are reporting it happens when your accounts get flagged by YouTube for blocking ads and that using a private browsing session can be used to bypass it, so it's possible this isn't a blanket thing?
Either way, they can go fuck themselves.
If you're on Firefox and using uBlock Origin (which you should), you can add the following to your filters list to essentially disable the delay:
It doesn't fully disable it, just makes it almost instant, because Google has been doing shit like looking at what gets blocked to combat ad blockers recently.
I use youtube without logging in, and it runs normally. If I use a private window, that's when I get a delay when loading videos.
Once you start watching videos, you still get recommendations based on your viewing even if not logged in. As long as I don't clear my cookies, I basically get the content I'm interested in.
I block all third-party cookies, but I do want some basic functionality out of the internet.
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Thanks I'll get back to this later
Do you want to hear about the Microsoft "bug" that affected Firefox that was only recently fixed after 5+ years of getting reported?
Corporations really hate non-profit products that are superior.
If you're networked with the right people in the US, laws don't matter
Yes. The US DOJ has a website for reporting antitrust concerns
Yes. It is. And consumers can't do a thing about it.
Is it more anti competitive than McDonald's only selling McDonald's burgers or preventing you from bringing Taco Bell tacos in from outside?
🙄 No it would be like Ford owning gas stations and pumping faster for Ford vehicles than Chevy.
Doesn't Tesla do the equivalent of that with charging stations?
Maybe. But Tesla doesn't own over 50% of the charging station market share.
True... I think even if they don't, it's still potentially anti-competitive.
(Gawd, Imagine how life would be with gas station incompatibility with your car. Holy shit that would suck).
That's less restrictive than what I said. McDonald's won't let you bring tacos in at all, doesn't just make you wait at the door for 2 minutes, etc.
Edit: and to anyone quibbling with my McDonald's example saying you can in fact bring tacos in, that was just an illustration. I can find plenty of examples of one establishment not letting people bring food in from somewhere else.
I don't feel your analogy quite captures what is going on here because both McDonald's and Taco Bell are in the same business. Maybe if you explain it more.
Google owns a major web destination, YouTube, essentially a line of business in its own right, in addition to Chrome, also its own distinct product. Firefox competes with Chrome but Google is allegedly using market dominance with YouTube to make it harder for Firefox to compete.
If a company owns two products A and B and if A is used to access B, company cannot hinder competitors to A via fuckery in B.
This is the kind of thing that MS got in trouble for -- using Windows to tip the scales in favor of Internet Explorer by tightly integrating it into the OS.
McDonald's prohibiting people from using their restaurant, which is not itself a separate product with a separate market. Nobody is clamoring to go to McDonald's restaurant spaces to sit and eat. It's just part of the restaurant offering. So there is no leverage like there is with YouTube being used against a competitor for a totally different product. And besides, Taco Bell can do the same as McDonald's. They're on equal footing.
If in your analogy there were some other product that McDonald's owned that could penalize you for going to Taco Bell your analogy would work.
Thanks for your question.
I see food preparation and dining rooms as separate industries, even if they don't appear that way at first. The most we can see this in practice is probably mall food courts. Web content like YouTube is the food and the web browser is the place or mechanism by which we consume "food".
Is being allowed to take tacos into McDonald's a hill I'm going to die on? No, of course not, it's just the first illustration I thought of. Lol. I could probably come up with a better example, that one was just easier and more visual.
To be clear, I'm not saying there's no anticompetitiveness happening, I'm saying that all vertical integration is basically this same amount of anticompetitiveness, and vertical integration is often very good, which is why we tolerate it all the time.
I agree the comparison to MS and Internet Explorer is somewhat similar. I also think that case was not decided particularly well, and it's not as revealing as it could have been since it ended up settling out of court, and IE ended up getting crushed by Chrome just a few years later.
I wonder, if Google made a new app called YouTube that could only watch YouTube and made it the only app that could watch YouTube, sort of like Quibi, would that be more competitive or less competitive? No one is asserting that Quibi was anticompetitive at all, correct? That would be even worse for Firefox users, they'd completely lose access to YouTube unless they downloaded a 2nd app, this time YouTube instead of Chrome, but like Quibi it would seem to dodge all these competition concerns completely. I think that shows how these concerns can be selective and kind of nonsensical.
Yes. Yes, it is!
McDonald's doesn't actually give a shit if you bring in food from other places.
McDonald's probably does care, but their minimum wage employees don't.
How?
Pick a different example then. In my experience movie theaters don't let you bring food in from outside. McDonald's still won't sell a Burger King burger regardless of whether you could bring one in.
Yeah, it's more like the next time you go to Wendy's, McDonald's will follow you and try to lock the doors before you go in.
No, not really. Google can't do anything about my taking my Firefox browser and watching videos from somewhere else. There are countless other video streaming services.
There are government websites - including my state's dmv - that exclusively use youtube. You're being disingenuous when you're saying you can just use another streaming service (and I don't believe you don't know it).
The efficient solution to that problem is governments using a different platform that's actually neutral. The government has full control over where they host their videos. Using that as a reason to TRY (a likely long and drawn out process) to force Google to change its policies company-wide is silly.
I'm not being disingenuous. I watch videos on a bunch of platforms. It's easy.
First time I've heard public services called efficient, but ok.
We're not talking about you here. You're purposely ignoring the problem, and therefore being disingenuous.
Public services aren't efficient, but they can surely change themselves more efficiently than they can force a multi billion dollar company to change its ways.
I'm surprised you're not more worried about the government outsourcing its functions to a company you seem very suspicious of.
If the government decided to have vital public meetings only in a private venue you have to be a member of or something, the proper fix is not to force the club to accept everyone, it's to have the government stop having vital meetings in private places.
I also don't see a problem because everything of value these video streaming services offer is replaceable by one of the many other streaming services. The fact that YouTube is the biggest or most recognized does not change anything for me. The fact that there is some content that is only on YouTube doesn't, either. That's a normal thing that happens in an economy. Ford dealers only sell Ford cars, Coca Cola doesn't sell Pepsi, etc.
Yes except everyone knows YouTube has a massive, massive market advantage in that space. And the channel you want to watch isn't on the others. And you know this too.
How does it work, then?
I don't know what this is referring to or what it has to do with anything.
It's bizarre how blatent this is. Google has so much power over web standards that Mozilla have to work really hard to make firefox work, but YouTube don't bother being subtle or clever and just write 'if Firefox, get stuffed' in plain text for everyone to see.
this isn't much different than when microsoft added code specifically to break windows 3.1 when run under dr-dos instead of their own ms-dos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
And it cost them 280 million in the 90s ouch
Something tells me they survived.
Google has been doing this kind of thing for a while. If you try to use Google Meet in Firefox, you can’t use things like background blurring. Spoofing Chrome works in that situation as well.
And the stupid thing is that all I use Chrome for is Meets... And that's it. Do they really think they win me over?
Not you or me. But most people, yeah.
That is, as always, the problem: it works for them. The average Joe isn't going to implement a new filter into ublock...
How does one "spoof" chrome?
You can change your user agent string, the text your browser uses to tell the web site you're looking at what browser it is, either via your F12 developer tools menu or via an extension.
The most convenient way is with a browser extension that changes your user agent. You can also change it in the developer options of most browsers.
It works for me now. Only took them 8 years
In my other comment I provide a link to the US DOJ anti-trust complaint center website.
@scholar @db0 Buy enough of the competition and pay off enough government regulators and as a company you get to do pretty much do whatever you want.
BTW, this:
So this is part of a larger adblock checker, if the ad doesn't load within 5 seconds, it fails and triggers the adblocker warning. Since the ad should load in 3, they've set it for 5. If you have ubo, you won't see the warning that it then wants to pop up, it just seems (and is) a 5 second delay. Changing the UA probably removes this from Firefox because then the clientside scripts will attempt to use builtin Chrome functions that wouldn't need this hacky script to detect the adblock. Since they don't exist, it just carries on.
I was wondering how badly out of context the above quote must be considering the UA isn't checked in the function. Above poster is trying to construe it as a pure and simple permanent delay for Firefox.
That being said, the solution is still bullshit.
That is just the timeout function, not the call stack. It is likely called in a function that uses a UA check.
The UA check can happen before the function is called though.
This is some ultimate scumbaggery.
This should be illegal, Firefox being their competition (tangentially)
It honestly probably is
EU might hit them for it. I have no faith that the US government is going to do anything.
The thing that gets me is they think no one will ever find this stuff. There are hundreds of thousands of people (maybe more) who are actively looking ways to block ads and get around this behavior. There's no way it'll ever go unnoticed.
They could literally have used some variance in implementation, server side bandwidth limitations, etc, but THIS is just blatantly obvious
I wonder if it's a case of malicious compliance.
Exactly what I was thinking. Let's not say it too loud for the sake of our mole(s)
The world runs on the shoulders of disgruntled employees. This smells like a deliberate act backed up with a paper trail to protect the guy in charge of implementing it from taking the blame. But, I realise that also may be my imagination... It's a compelling tale regardless.
That's one hell of a phrase that should keep any CEO awake at night.
I believe that Google is just trolling people real hard. There are much better ways to disable any adblocks, but they are not even trying.
Is there something like:
If(not chrome){add_delay()}
?
No, the full context of the code snippet doesn't appear to check the browser user agent at all. Other comments have explained that it's most likely a lazy implementation of a check for ad blockers.
Ok so this is just client side I'd imagine I'd be pretty easy to make an addon that removes the code
This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.
Doesn't this break competition laws?
Couldn't Google/YouTube be sued over this?
Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.
Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I'm not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.
They really weren't that effective with Microsoft then either. The antitrust was far too late for Netscape and allowed Microsoft to hold a dominate market share with IE until they allowed the browser to deprecate and Google came in with a much better browser and took over the browser market (and are now doing the same bullshit).
As long as we keep giving these companies meaningless fines or wait until the damage is irreversible companies are going to always push the limit and look at any repercussions as just a cost of doing business.
So yeah, not much faith in anything changing.
That is why I am in favour of the financial death penalty. Fines should be 10x the damage done. If a company cannot pay it, they are required to become a non profit.
What are your monetary damages for this?
I think a better solution is one year of global revenue (not profit) as it’s really hard to determine damages in cases like this. That way, it’s legitimately a death sentence regardless of the size or scale of the company. If you set the fines at an amount not linked to profit or revenue, all you’re doing is making it extremely hard for the little guy but less hard for the big corporations - the ones you really want to go after.
I like it, much more practical.
Yeah stuff like this really needs to be percentual and fined to the CEOs and the board, not the company as an entity.
Oh, Microsoft valued at 200 bil for shareholders? Well sorry C's and boardies, you gotta scrunge up 2 bil each now, personally. Those are fines they'd at least notice.
(edit)
Come to think of it, the fined-personally-to-the-decisionmaker might really be the big thing here on its own. The company did this shit under you, CEO. It was your corporate policy and hiring practices that allowed this to happen, even if you did not press the button. You pay up. You take the blame, not the people under you just following orders.
This just ignores the reason that corporations exist in the first place, to shield people from personal liability. There is a mechanism by which you can go after that called "piercing the corporate veil" but it is an extremely high bar to hit.
Which is the problem. As parent rightly pointed out, lack of personal liability is exactly why corporations pull this kind of bullshit. The solution is to lower the bar for holding individuals, particularly executives, personally responsible for the actions of the organizations they control.
You should look into all of the anti-monopoly actions that Lina Khan has been pursuing as head of the FTC. Under her tenure the watchdogs have had more teeth than ever before. It takes time for this stuff to make a difference, but they are most decidedly doing the work (Cory Doctorow has some excellent write ups on this if you check his blog).
He lionizes her a bit much, but yes she has done far more than her predecessor.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline
https://www.axios.com/2021/01/06/shifting-baselines-syndrome-climate-change-coronavirus
And all they had to do was drag the trial out until a favorable administration took office.
Well they also dragged out the trial so long that time and costs rendered the plaintiff (Netscape) hopeless.
EU anthem intensifies
You can always count on lobbiests to enshitifiy the laws
malicious slowdowns like this are why microsoft abandoned (non chrome) edge, too. Cause they couldnt keep up with fixing the constant fuckery google was doing, and users are idiots and blamed edge for all the problems.
Microsoft was kind of getting their comeuppance there. They did the exact same billshit when they dominated the market with IE.
You're right.
Lets let google get away with murder because Microsoft did bad a decade+ ago.
I don't think that's what I said? At least it's not how I meant it.
Not in the U.S. Not as long as conservatives (incl. neo-liberals) have the power to protect them.
Our conservative politicians are bought and paid for by large anti-competitive corporations.
Bought and paid for with a pittance.
They are bribed for so little that it would be almost easier to make a dystopian sounding PAC with money raised by small dollar donations to bribe them to do what the people want instead of them doing what rich donors want.
Only if that PAC could somehow guarantee a cushy job post politics.
Yes. And you can submit your complaint here
https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-center
Well, can't hurt to try.
Yeah, the fines just aren't big enough for Google to care.
Wait for it to become equally shitty in all browsers, and then you can only watch in a special Youtube Windows app.
I wonder how long it'll be before google gets sued for their anti-competitive behavior.
That's an antitrust case if ever I saw one.
It could literally be a minute wait & I still wouldn't use Chrome.
Google heard you and have increased the Firefox delay to 1m 30s. Would you please consider using Chrome now please?
Best I can do is boycott YouTube.
Piped-bot now my best friend
I swear every time i try to use those links from the piped bot, the content either never loads or has severe buffering problems.
You need to change your instance. Next time you face this, go to preferences and try changing the instance.
I didn't know you could do that with piped, thanks
Where would one find that bot?
On here
Oh, the one that finds every YouTube link and comments a piped link in some communities? Yeah, I find that bot very useful too!
Ranting on Lemmy about a company while being addicted to (one of) their products seems to be much more effective, according to other comments in this thread. /s
Helpful comment!
The only helpful thing to do is stopping using YT, if you think they behave in an unrespectufl way. Complaining/ranting on Lemmy is going to be exactly as helpful as my previous comment. But, hey, who cares? I don't even use it. Literally, not my problem.
What are we supposed to complain about then?
I didn't say you shouldn't complain. I said that doing it is useless. Stop using YT if you want to send a message or just deal with it
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Edge would like a word
Sigma Edging
Sometimes I get curious about chromium based browsers and consider giving them a shot for a while.
Then Google does shit like this and I keep mainlining Firefox out of spite. Half the reasons people experience “issues” with Firefox are just dumb garbage like this (see sites / web content being developed with Chrome-based in mind)
the website DRM thing is one of the most blackpilled and evil uses of technology i've ever seen
the people in charge of developing that should be put in a padded room and never allowed to see sunlight again. fucking god.
Woah, woah, woah, slow down: Why do they get to have padding in their room?
I would assume so they cant easily hurt themself and have to live and suffer through it for as long as possible
But then they'll be comfortable in there, because it's soft and padded as opposed to cold and hard.
I mean this in the least condescending way:
as far as I’m aware, even after looking it up, I think you are misusing the term blackpill.
Blackpill usually refers to a manosphere/Incel or Qanon type who has given up completely and lost all hope. In the the case of an Incel it’s that there’s no hope in ever escaping Inceldom. In the case of q anon it’s that none of the predictions about the “storm” will ever arise or come true.
I looked around and couldn’t find any other contexts that it’s used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pill?wprov=sfti1#
I am willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I looked all over search results etc.
Heck I use god damn duckduckgo out of spite nowadays
DDG is legit great and even sometimes better than Google search now. I also am a SearXNG enjoyer
DDG, even though apparently a Bing front end, gives legit better results than google
It's honestly good. It misses that "Algorithm profile" that Google has where it starts to "understand" what you mean but it's still pretty good.
(Example. If I type in "genocide" in Google, it knows I often look for Undertale related things and pushes "Undertale genocide route" related content. For DDG I need to be clearer about what I mean)
It took a bit getting used to but I prefer it this way now.
I think it's still possible to ethically use Chromium browsers, so long as it's one of them that's been reviewing and removing anything ludicrous Google adds. I don't even mind MS Edge on most of my computers for the most part. Firefox doesn't load well on my tablet.
I have never had a reason to switch from Firefox. I used Chrome once out of curiosity, but I didn't like it.
Google has been doing this kind of thing for years, to strangle their competition. For example, back when Windows Phone existed, Google went deliberately out of their way to cripple youTube, and maps. Apparently google will do anything they can to create lock-in and faux loyalty.
Google are completely evil. Here we're talking about them using their popular products as weapons against competitors in unrelated areas. But also have a history of copying products made by others then using advertising strength to promote their version over the original. And if that somehow doesn't work... they buy out the competitors. Both youTube and google maps are examples of this.
Wow, and it's literally just "If you're using Firefox, wait five seconds."
Elon moment
Let's remember, fellas, that big tech is not a disease that needs to be eradicated. Let us not forget that Google is a legitimate corporation, not merely a group of professional stalkers. And let's be clear: obviously you are the crazy ones for worrying about this, naturally...
Pardon my jest; I was merely echoing the absurdities often heard.
Maybe just maybe it's time we stop with this garbage and actually stop using their services. Nothing will change if we keep using their services.
The most direct and effective strategy to inspire reform in their practices is to stop using of their platforms. Each time we use a service from Google or any similar big tech entity, we inadvertently endorse their methods.
YOU hold the power to change them by using FOSS alternatives instead.
"Do no evil^1^"
^1^ unless we can make money from it.
Did someone actually investigate and find the exact place in scripts where this logic takes place?
EDIT: Yes. https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-reportedly-slowing-down-videos-firefox-3387206/
Adding this to your uBlock Origin filters also makes the problem go away:
www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)I've noticed that too, I just switch to Freetube when it happens.
Simply disgusting, but it's business as usual for Google.
I just use Freetube either way. I can't stand autoplaying videos or suggestions, popups, etc.
Is free tube just pulling YouTube’s data or it a separate site? Can you watch livestreams if it’s the former? Basically all I use YouTube for is watching a couple streamers and watching Japanese udon restaurant channels while I eat my bologna sandwich for lunch
It does play livestreams, yes.
I’ve gonna look into that then thank you
Not noticing this change from the EU... Guess they're too afraid of pulling that shit here?
imagine sitting down to code this and thinking you're doing the right thing
you should be able to whisteblow clearly evil technology and have some sort of economic safety net
Counter point: the code monkeys just do what they are being paid for. The fact it's so easy to circumvent is a testimony on how the people implementing this shit disagree with the corporation.
Hi, code monkey here - I don't work for a large company like Google, am paid less than a Google code monkey, and the products I work on are used by orders of magnitude less people. But even still, if my lead came to me and said "hey, I need the frontend to detect when a user is using 'XYZ Browser' and then introduce an artificial 5 second latency whenever they try to load a page", I'd look at him with incredulity and tell him "no, I'm not doing that. That's stupid and you should feel bad for suggesting it."
Code monkeys aren't paid to simply follow instructions given to them by someone else like some sort of robot - were paid to create applications and programs that people can use, and are usually given enough creative room to do that in a way we see as the best way.
I feel like these things are connected.
Maybe it was unclear. If I get fired for insubordination or whatever, I would be in much more pain than a Google code monkey, because I'm paid much less.
Are you thinking about it another way, where because I'm paid less, I wouldn't care if I got fired, which makes me more emboldened to push back on my higher ups?
Sadly, salary and loyalty to the corporation are often proportional is what they meant.
Right, gotcha. In my experience, software developers are a bit more principled (maybe fickle is a better word lol) than that. Sure there are some dedicated "company man" types, but for the most part software devs are more loyal to the work/end product than the company
Of course my experience doesn't speak for anyone else's, take all this with a grain of salt, etc, etc
I mean they need money to live
Google developers can easily find a job elsewhere. If they stay at Google the chose to.
Isn't it one of Google's 'creeds' to "Don't be evil"?
I heard they quietly dropped that as their motto several years ago.
Gmail is almost painfully slow on my PC (I use Adblock on Firefox). Does anyone else experience this?
And, yes, I know Gmail is very bad, you're preaching to the choir. I am in the midst of switching over.
I really hope they try this in the EU. The EU regulatory agencies have been on a roll lately.
They are doing it here to.
Bet it's done in such a way that they can claim "We're just optimizing for Chrome, not slowing down any competitors. It's not our fault our competitors don't using our web engine for their browsers."
I mentioned similar shading behavior on another post, when using Firefox with Chrome or native user agents on the plain old Google search page.
Yeah, user agent switch to chrome made YouTube vid instantly load. Real shitty google!
Ah, I was wondering why YouTube was taking so long to load recently. I thought it was just because their code was shit, and it turns out I was right, but not in the way I thought.
They are really the worst scumbags ever. They want world domination.
I smell a spicy lawsuit
They do the same shit for Google search results. Search weather or stock tickers with a Chrome user agent* and you get a rich, interactive chart of the weather forecast or stock history. Search with another mobile user agent and you get a static snapshot of the weather or stock price at an instant in time.
There's even an extension for Firefox for Android which changes the user agent for Google searches to Chrome, to get the rich content.
* just a user agent, not an actual browser, which proves that it isn't about browser capability, but rather abusing their monopolistic market position in search to further their web browser's market share. Sound familiar, Microsoft from the 90's?
I didn't see it, I guess ublock again saved my ass before I could realize it.
This cant be legal
Let's hope Europe stars investigating Google as a gatekeeper. That seemed to work miracles on Apple.
Did this dude really just link a Reddit post?
In this case you could be neutral about the source.
Nah, Reddit source. Wait 5 seconds.
Stop using youtube. It is made of poop.
So they're doing the same thing as that time they killed Edge and stretched its skin over chromium?
"Ok, so blocking adblock hasn't worked" "Let's just slow them down" "That's a great idea, no-one will ever notice"
Lately (few months) YouTube will not load whatsoever on my android phone nor tablet very often, activating a VPN fixes it instantly. Using basic YouTube app
So, how to spoof chrome?
Reminds me of the "Netscape Navigator has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" errors that Windows 98 used to throw.
It would only throw one, and you could just move it out of the way and keep using Netscape.
Bruh. I thought that was uBlock bypassing the ad or something.
Holy fuck I hope they get the pants sued off of them
Best we can do is 0.001% of their profit from last fiscal year and no prison time.
Time to start copying those videos, irrespective of copyright, onto PeerTube instances.
I've tried to use peertube before but I don't see a lot of stuff. How do I find content on there? I probably don't understand how it works
I noticed logging out of your YouTube account helps.
I just opened a private window in Firefox.
Huh, I noticed YouTube videos taking a little extra longer to load.
What’s why it sucked ass this weekend?!? Fuckers.
It's long past time to flesh out our antitrust laws to deal with these greedy tech giants.
Seems that FF is not the target:
https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/17zq1jj/youtube_is_reportedly_slowing_down_videos_for/ka0utpq/
Why would they spend resources to enrage 3% (at most) of their users?
There's me thinking I had stuffed up my pFsense config. It had me duped into thinking I was responsible!
I noticed the YouTube website sometimes has a 5 second delay or so before properly loading in with Vivaldi recently. Not sure if that's related in any way.
Not happening for me currently, but that definitely sounds like something Google would do. Good thing Firefox lets you easily change your user agent.
I've been using Firefox for about a year now, and I've definitely seen that 5 second loading delay in Firefox. Every time, the page partially loads like it does in the video, then sits for 5 seconds, then populates all the video thumb nails. It was driving me knows, made me think my Firefox was screwed up, or internet routing issues between me and Youtube.
Those assholes, how malicious!
Not that I think Google is a great company, but why is this on its own proof of anything based on this single persons video evidence? In my single person test I don't see that 5 second delay when using Firefox and browsing around Youtube. Seems far more likely to be an issue with this persons browser setup than something Google did to me.
Antitrust lawsuit, here we go!
Don't be evil.Don'tbe evilIs it messing up in Smarttube too? Smarttube keeps buffering for me, or maybe it's just a bug.
Ignoring all the other obvious reasons, FF is always superior to Chrome for YT because of its simple PIP.
This is a must have, especially if I’m at work and want to keep up with any myriad of live events.
Wait. Again?
Oh, this is about the delay if you're using a full adblocker? I'd assumed this was about the awful choppy rendering performance I get in FF Mobile when it's just starting up a vid (which smooths out after about 5 seconds). I just use FF on Android to be able to run YT vids in the background or with my phone-screen locked.
I'm A YouTube Premium subscriber, and I've been noticing this delay on my TV for a few days now - a very noticeable, long pause when opening the home screen until the thumbnails are loaded. I'll explicitly check other places too now, I'm not sure if it's also happening in Firefox for me.
sounds desperate. I'd be selling google stock if I had any, are they really so dependent on loans that interest rates are killing them or is this more AI fuelled bullshit?
If Chrome is known for one thing, it's absurd User-Agent strings. Why not make it even more absurd???
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (Ahahaha; Fuck you Google; This is actually) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0I noticed a delay on Opera with uBlock. I attributed it to invisible fights between the adblock and youtube. But idk if that's relevant, I think Opera GX is chromium based.
Did not notice it today, but I am running ublock origin and they got my back.
They have all the decision makers in their payrolls. They will stop at nothing !
@db0
This is starting to get into the antitrust arena. DOJ needs to take action.
Bro.....
Honestly thought this was a glitch because it has happened before where youtube would freeze, usually from some backend error, and the whole page wouldn't load.
Really getting desperate lol.
I haven't even noticed bc my internet is only 2 Mbps
They've done this before, a long time ago, with IE11. For those that only remember its early years, later releases of Internet Explorer were actually decently compliant - but Google still prevented them from accessing places like Google Maps for having improper support. User agent switchers caused it to display perfectly.
I regret being complicit in allowing these silicon valley behemoths to reach a point where they're indelibly linked to practically every aspect of the average person's digital life.
At least the Fediverse and Lemmy are showing the way forward.
This is antitrust worthy
I’ve been noticing a lot of ‘interesting’ behavior with data-hungry websites when I use more privacy-focused measures lately.
Gmail logs me out of Safari at least weekly now for no apparent reason, other than to inconvenience me.
Gmail also refuses to deliver any emails forwarded through hide my email. They simply do not arrive, not even to spam. I had to start using another email service for hide my email. (Additionally, every email I get from Apple gets tagged with a phishing warning, which is just petty and funny.)
Facebook sends an email every time I log in (once or twice a month) to tell me that Firefox is suspicious because I use ad-blockers and private windows.
Press 'F' to suspect...
In certain parts of the world, you quite literally do not have a choice. For example: I'm in a rural community on an island. No one uses any other website to post anything, from local classified ads to events to important city/community stuff. The choice isn't to use a better alternative but whether a person here has social contact with anyone locally at all.
No, moving is not a realistic option, especially not moving as far as we'd have to move; even the biggest city in the province doesn't use anything else.
I wasn’t sure if the first boring, low-effort comment was going to call me an Apple fanboy, or comment on the Facebook account I haven’t posted to since 2016, but it looks like Facebook won.
Your combative, yet somehow insubstantial comment reminds me of the same hollow, thoughtless comments that made Reddit so easy to abandon once they’d shown their hand.
But I didn’t have friends on Reddit. When I got to know people there, we moved our interaction off the site, to other services, or we became IRL friends. (One of them even moved across the country and married me!)
And that’s sort of the difference, right? What made Reddit easy to walk away from doesn’t hold for Facebook. The friends I’ve added on Facebook are still on the platform. They still share tidbits about their life that they may not want to individually message every single person they know, they still send me messages, and they still invite me to gatherings. I’ll deign to log in with email accounts that are not tied to my identity for them. I get significantly more satisfaction out of those interactions than I do from sparring with people who write as if their entire ability to relate to others is restricted to cheap jabs.
No wonder why YouTube got weird for me
I was wondering the same. Thought it was something on my end.
I started noticing how sometimes youtube just seemingly refused to load fully on my phone. I thought it was just my crap internet. But since I use Iceraven, a fork of firefox, it seems that may be why.
Fuck Google
What if we are already using YouTube premium and have ublock on FF. Would user agent spoof still be needed??
How annoying.
It does happen even with YouTube premium, so I guess yes
I had a feeling this was the case. Youtube has been painful for the past month now.
In addition to the fact that I remember this happening several years ago, I'm pretty sure this has been an issue for a while. When I decided to exclusively use Firefox about a year ago, YouTube as a whole would load slowly and it still does.
And I hate the fact that Google knows that they will benefit from this because, unfortunately, a majority of YouTube users are sheeple.
What is the extension they use in the video to spoof Chrome?
Spoofing = setting user agent
The title says so, and the video shows it.
Once upon a time, Google wanted to kill the user-agent.
Does not happen for me Safari or Firefox.
They may not be deploying this to all users
What does that mean? If you logout and go anonymous do you still have the issue?
It's probably limited to regions rather than user accounts.
This is testable with vpn
Possibly. It's impossible to know how they keep track of who to roll it out to. It could be IP-based, or they could put a cookie on your browser that could stick around even after you log out.
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The YouTube viewing experience on FF is terrible. I have premium no ads and still manage to break the interface occasionally by clicking a new video or seeking the video playing.
Any extensions you'd recommend for having Firefox spoof chrome?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
This is what I use and it's worked great so far.
Not trying to defend Chrome here as I dislike their other behaviours, but just from what's presented in the video, an alternative explanation would be caching. That is, when the reloading is triggered by the switch of user-agent, the cache is reused and thus a shorter load time.
To exclude this effect, the user needs to either
I feel like Reddit is doing the same shit.
Here is a link of someone finding a Timeoutset: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
Bless you for the old.reddit link.
If this is true the crowd on here that often says Firefox is really owned by Google because Google pays Mozilla to have their search engine be the default search engine on Firefox really need to look at their claim and rethink their understanding of how Mozilla and Google interact.
I'm not seeing this issue on Firefox?
I’m seeing this on Safari with the AdGuard content blocker extension as well.
Well that sounds illegal, it also sounds like Mozilla will see them in court.
Where is this location in the pic?
Crab island.
Is that a thing?
It’s from the Crab Rave music video.
Noisestorm, the artist who made Crab Rave, is also working on a game currently called Crab Champions. It’s in early access on steam, super fun
Is there an actual tangent between this pic and that video/song/work?
So, this is not a picture of a place. It is a computer generated graphic of an island which was made for the music video.
The reason you’re seeing it now is simply because the person demonstrating the load time discrepancy chose to use this video in particular. The video was most likely chosen arbitrarily and due to it being popular (270m views and counting)
It's often used by the channels of Linus Media Ground for audio demonstrations of the hardware they showcase.
Like other said, no lol i'm just pulling your leg
But there's Christmas Island where the crab is protected, and every mating season they will travel toward the sea to spread their egg and they swarm like ant. Interesting creature, look up some video you'll love it.
It doesn't exist.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
It doesn't exist
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Is there any place thats roughly analagous or...it must be inspired by something?
Breath of the Wild? Lol
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What did you say aha, missed it
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So this is way we can’t have nice things!
Is this something I'm just too invidioused to understand?
?
https://docs.invidious.io/instances/
that's not my experience. same perf on both browsers.
Reading the comments, It looks to be ad related, and maybe Firefox’s built in privacy tools are the root of the problem?
If that was the case, then a user-agent switch wouldn't fix it
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ka0myef/
It's a Google problem, Firfox's built in privacy tools are working as intended.
🙄 and they sometimes break sites by accident. I’m not saying it’s Firefox’s fault to fix. If you read the comments on the reddit post, there are several users looking at the code and finding what’s happening and it’s not tied to user agent.