Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away.
Posted in r/youtube by u/vk6_ • 2,933 points and 264 comments
The fuck?? Isn’t this anti competitive behaviour?
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:
undefined
! Bypass 5 seconds delay added by YouTube www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), 5000, 0.001)
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.
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.
Anti trust that evil Google
Yes.
Is it more anti competitive than McDonald's only selling McDonald's burgers or preventing you from bringing Taco Bell tacos in from outside?
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/AARDcode
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.
In my other comment I provide a link to the US DOJ anti-trust complaint center website.
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.
This is some ultimate scumbaggery.
Ok so this is just client side I'd imagine I'd be pretty easy to make an addon that removes the code
That's not the point.
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.
This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.
.
That's not what net neutrality is about. NN is about carriers and ISPs treating all services and websites equally. Don't feature creep NN. It weakens the arguments for why why we need NN.
Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act might stop any attempt to undermine browser performance.
If anything we need more laws around the tech space as a whole
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.
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).
EU anthem intensifies
You can always count on lobbiests to enshitifiy the laws
Yes. And you can submit your complaint here
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.
Oh I imagine the papers are being filed as we speak, because this is blatantly illegal.
It is being currently being sued by Epic Games for Anti-Trust behavior. Google offered millions of dollars to Epic so that Fortnite would be available in the Play Store and not in Epic's own store.
Been there, done that, and came on top.
They are already in one anti-trust trial for search engine shenanigans.
Cost of doing business
Trying to convince people to use your product by crippling other people's stuff really needs to stop. Did they not do an analysis on the issue of diminishing returns?
That's an antitrust case if ever I saw one.
EU be like: aw shit here we go again
Just like that time that one operating was made to stop shipping with that one browser.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone should remember that Google itself isn't really as evil as the people who work for it, those "people" are the only thing keeping this shitty company going. They go to work every day to try and make this world a worse place, those people who enable evil need to start to be recognized for who they truly are, the ones who want total enshittification and love watching you suffer. At what point do we start to look at thr root of this problem?
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.
The most direct and effective strategy to inspire reform in their practices is to stop using of their platforms.
The whole "the free market could fix it" is just neoliberal bullshit. The most hated companies in the world continue to bring in record profits and its not because people prefer their chocolate is harvested by child slaves.
They're fully aware that it never works, but they just keep suggesting it over and over again, growing richer with successive failure, all the while blaming consumers for not preventing them doing sleazy, greedy things.
The actual most direct and effective strategy is regulations. That's why they hate them and why there are so many of them in politics.
Thank you. I'm tired of hearing "it's the consumer's responsability" when we have governments and various regulatory bodies for this exact reason
Yes, but the problem is the convenience.
Google has made their services convenient, which is why everyone I like to watch content of posts their stuff on YouTube. Both alternive websites and the content on them is often of inferior quality and difficult to find.
which is why everyone I like to watch content of posts their stuff on YouTube
I'm not sure this is exactly true - like, first off, I am not a YouTuber and I only watch a very specific kind of content there (breadtube), so idk if my opinion is valid, but
From what I've heard creators say, it's not that YouTube is great, in fact it kind of sucks in a lot of ways, it's just that the alternatives don't do it better, and obviously don't have the size & reach. All the things that YouTube does badly or not at all, the competition doesn't do well either, so why bother.
You're 100% right tho that Google's success at this point hinges almost entirely on their convenience. Google drive/docs/sheets/etc are kinda garbage, but they'te fast, simple to use, and the integration is incredibly smooth. If there was any alternative that was as simple to transition into from email or whatever, I'd jump ship in a second.
Actually, the main problem isn't that they've made their services convenient. Most of them are inconvenient in multiple ways.
The really big problem, the absolutely INSIDIOUS shit is how extremely inconvenient they've made using alternatives.
Example: Google the search engine straight up sucks from an end user perspective now. Yet because it's where over 90% of all search engine searches happen, it's MORE inconvenient to use any other one, no matter how much better the algorithms and what have you.
Same with YouTube: the user experience becomes worse and worse, but since it has a de facto near-monopoly of certain types of content from certain creators, best you can do is a custom frontend. Which they're of course trying to make impossible ever since they removed the "Don't" from their original informal slogan.
You described a straight up better product. That's not convenience. You said it yourself: alternatives have worse quality.
good old fosstube
"Do no evil1"
1 unless we can make money from it.
There's a reason that doesn't appear on their site or in their docs any more. It was a canary clause.
Any organisation that needs to remind themselves not to be evil is already intrinsically evil.
I feel like there's scales of evil here Google starts to need to highlight on a whiteboard
Actually, their slogan was "Don't be evil." But they revised it recently by adding a comma after the first word.
Not anymore: they ditched it for "do the right thing (for my wallet)" a couple years back
I mean... "evil" is arbitrary, right?
Not arbitrary enough that they thought they could keep saying it. They ditched that about a decade ago.
"It's evil not to make as much money as possible", Google founders. C-suite and board, probably.
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/
This sounds like something that would be in the back end so likely not. But if spoofing user agents fixes the problem then I'd say it's evidence enough to warrant a deeper look.
it's pretty inconclusive if there's no context for how that code is called. I'm kinda confused why the article wouldn't have provided any additional detail other than a single line of code. why bother digging at all?
Have you read past that screenshot of the code, though? It says the problem was not limited to Firefox, it seems Edge users reported problems as well. Anecdotally, I did experience that delay problem on Thorium this weekend as well. I have seen a variation of this problem almost a month ago, where sometimes the video would take a long time (like, over a minute, sometimes) to load, or often just not load at all. So I just chalked it up to Youtube having done something stupid on their end.
that half sentence in the aa article though
"That move makes sense in many ways, as the platform needs to make money to survive..."
should we also start a gofundme for youtube, i am suddenly worried for them /s
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.
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 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.
Google Streetview is also ubgodly laggy. I have to refresh constantly to bring it to normal speed, and that lasts a few mins.
I can recommend mail.com. 14 USD for a full year. but you can also use it for free. I just payed for it last month.
No slowdowns here. Using Gmail since it's inception. Fi customer with a backup service. We have YouTube premium maybe I'm getting away with something. No ads and no buffering.
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.
It's apparently not even subtle enough to make that claim, it checks the useragent and sleeps for 5 seconds if it's not Chrome.
You seem to be quite in the know, would you say that this happens often across the tech space or is this a case of web platform, and in some cases the browser developers acting out?
Oh, I have no idea. It's just something I noticed previously, and has a similar thing to this post, so I thought I'd mention it. I don't have any inside or expert knowledge here.
Yeah, user agent switch to chrome made YouTube vid instantly load. Real shitty google!
They are really the worst scumbags ever. They want world domination.
"Don't be evil."
Hasn't been their motto for some time... and it shows.
xd
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.
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.
"Ok, so blocking adblock hasn't worked" "Let's just slow them down" "That's a great idea, no-one will ever notice"
So, how to spoof chrome?
Use agent switcher plugin
Spoofing the agent only makes it look like Firefox is being used less, and websites will care even less about it.
Change browser user-agent https://www.whatismybrowser.com/
Bruh. I thought that was uBlock bypassing the ad or something.
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.
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.
As long as you host the instance yourself or use a special interest instance. Keep in mind that most Peertubes are ran by regular community folks and it's not very nice to paint a target for Google on them.
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.
This actually helps with a lot of things on YouTube lately. It is slowly devolving into a truly crappy site.
blocking youtube cookies makes a lot of their shenanigans go away :)
But yeah, any site that tells me what browser I have to use instantly goes on my shitlist. That isn't how this works.
Huh, I noticed YouTube videos taking a little extra longer to load.
I did too... In Chrome on Linux. I'll check my use agent, it might be set to something else because I use it to check some stuff with developers.
It's long past time to flesh out our antitrust laws to deal with these greedy tech giants.
What’s why it sucked ass this weekend?!? Fuckers.
There's me thinking I had stuffed up my pFsense config. It had me duped into thinking I was responsible!
Seems that FF is not the target:
Why would they spend resources to enrage 3% (at most) of their users?
Don't try to bring logic into today's two minutes of hate.
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.
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 happening for me currently, but that definitely sounds like something Google would do. Good thing Firefox lets you easily change your user agent.
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.
And this is precisely why they use an A/B architecture to implement these sorts of changes. "It's not happening on mine, must be in your setup." delays/prevents people from recognizing the bad behavior, and instead of them being called out on it or forced to behave properly, the users they abuse just give up and switch back to Chrome because it "works better", then the A/B lists are shuffled again and the process repeats.
This would be a good point if the problem did not immediately go away completely by simply spoofing the user agent. As soon as youtube thinks that the browser accessing it is Chrome, it behaves perfectly well. Note that the actual web engine used to render the page is not different, just the reported web engine.
Yeah haven't experienced any issues either. Never saw the ad block blockers as well. Almost seems more like there are power users who have conflicting extensions and are not realizing it.
I started getting the 5 second delay 2 weeks ago as well. Started out of nowhere and I thought it was my connection at first, but nope, only YouTube has this issue for me, and only in Firefox.
Antitrust lawsuit, here we go!
Don't be evil.
Don't be evil
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.
Is it messing up in Smarttube too? Smarttube keeps buffering for me, or maybe it's just a bug.
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.
Wait. Again?
