Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away.

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.
- The current US Federal Trade Commission is quite agressive compared to other FTCs historically.
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:

! 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.
- 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.
- deleted
- 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.
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?
- 🙄 No it would be like Ford owning gas stations and pumping faster for Ford vehicles than Chevy.
- Yes. Yes, it is!
  McDonald's doesn't actually give a shit if you bring in food from other places.
- Is it more anti competitive than McDonald's only selling McDonald's burgers
  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.

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
- And it cost them 280 million in the 90s ouch
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?
- How does one "spoof" chrome?
- 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.
This is some ultimate scumbaggery.
- This should be illegal, Firefox being their competition (tangentially)
- 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.
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).
- deleted
- EU anthem intensifies
- Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.
  And all they had to do was drag the trial out until a favorable administration took office.
- 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.
- You can always count on lobbiests to enshitifiy the laws
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.
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.

Oh I imagine the papers are being filed as we speak, because this is blatantly illegal.
- Well you typically need standing in order to file a lawsuit, who would do it? Mozilla are probably the only ones. Why would this cause them to do it when past similar practices haven’t?
- What law are they breaking? Not trying to defend Google or anything, just curious what law is blatantly being broken here because I don't know of one
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.

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.
- Edge would like a word

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 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
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.
- Then use alternative youtube clients, like piped or freetube.
  Or even better: spend money (if you can afford it) to host a peertube instance that automatically rips the videos off of youtube.
  That's an even stronger message that you'd rather spend money than use their crappy free services.
- 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.
- Offering a free convenient service is the first step of enshittification.
  [Side eye at Bluesky]
- 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.
- Very overtly and loudly claiming a quality which should be self-evident in oneself, one's company or one's nation invariably means it's not really there.
- I think they changed it didn't they?
- Right - "Do no evil" uhhh... Is that not your default setting?
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.
Actually, their slogan was "Don't be evil." But they revised it recently by adding a comma after the first word.
I feel like there's scales of evil here Google starts to need to highlight on a whiteboard

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.
- Is that easy to do?
- When they decide to do tricks in the backend differently between browsers, there will be ways to overcome that.
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?
- it's part of their anti-adblock code. without going into too much details, they can instantly find out whether ad-block is trying to do anything on chrome, but on firefox they need a 5 sec delay
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
- not saying we should worry for them, but youtube is run at a loss so they do actually need money from SOMEWHERE to maintain youtube. youtube still sucks and this is definitely not the way to win over users but thems the facts

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.

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 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.

Fear not friend, you are not alone. I too am slowly switching over, and these things take time. We are truly victims of a great bait and switch, with our digital lives held hostage. We never asked for this.
- What are you switching to ?
- Seize the means of technology
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.
- I was wondering why YouTube started taking a while to load pages in the last couple weeks. Fucking Google, pulling this shit.
- Not that I don't believe you, but do you have a source for that?
- If changing your user agent to Chrome on Firefox fixes it that justification won't fly
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!

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.

"Don't be evil."
- Hasn't been their motto for some time... and it shows.
- xd

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?

This cant be legal

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.

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?

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

Likely just a network-related issue
- Using a VPN on a shitty network won't magically make your network connection better.
just use ReVanced?

"Ok, so blocking adblock hasn't worked" "Let's just slow them down" "That's a great idea, no-one will ever notice"

Winning lines from the competitive glue sniffing awards

So, how to spoof chrome?

Use agent switcher plugin
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

Spoofing the agent only makes it look like Firefox is being used less, and websites will care even less about it.
Use extensions that change your user agent
You can find them in add-ons store

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.

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.

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

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!

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!

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.

Antitrust lawsuit, here we go!

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.
- Or, they could use an A/B architecture because it makes good design sense when you are dealing with a change that will impact millions/billions of people. But the conspiracy theory's sure are a lot more fun to wallow in I will admit.
- They use an incremental rollout system for essentially every feature. Are you suggesting every feature of every product Google makes has some nefarious purpose?
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.
- The point is, it has to be reproducible. On a clean FF install on linux, I cannot replicate this. Changing user agent does not affect the page load speed. So there has to be some another aspect, maybe iser's OS configuration or smth that affects this, too.
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.
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.

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.

~~Don't be evil.~~

~~Don't~~ be evil

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?

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?

I'd be selling google stock if I had any
If you did, you probably wouldn't. Unfortunate as it may be, Google is an unfathomably massive business that continues to generate value for their shareholders. Any stock sales by an average individual as a protest are meaningless. Even if you sold a million dollars worth of stock, it wouldn't mean anything to them.
Alphabet's market cap is currently 1.7 trillion dollars. With a T. $1,700,000,000,000.
We can extrapolate from there just how much money would need to move for them to pay even a little attention. For example, $170 million dollars is just 0.01%. Granted a move that large from a single investor might cause a brief drop as others sell as well, but investors are just gonna buy it all up at a discount. They'll call it a market correction and keep on going.
I'm not saying you should just roll over and accept their shit, but money is not the way to do it unless you can move more than a billion dollars.
- Its possible one of the problems plaguing most countries today is that tech companies are greatly overvalued. I think musk made this obvious with twitter but across the board you see almost identical playbooks by every major tech company. This is maybe because they aren't as profitable as they've been saying.

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.

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/119.0

I 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.

@db0

This is starting to get into the antitrust arena. DOJ needs to take action.

i was wondering about this! very dumb.

They have all the decision makers in their payrolls. They will stop at nothing !

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.

Bro.....

I'm not seeing any delays, 5 second or otherwise, when using Firefox.

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.

I haven't even noticed bc my internet is only 2 Mbps

This is antitrust worthy

Use Invidious or Piped in combination with LibRedirect, that will solve the issue

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.

No wonder why YouTube got weird for me

I was wondering the same. Thought it was something on my end.

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.

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.

says he has a privacy focus
uses facebook
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.

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.

I wonder if this affects Safari too. Videos do seem to have more problems getting started to the point where I usually give up, but I assumed it was my ancient iPad conflict8 g with ever increasing code related to ads

What is the extension they use in the video to spoof Chrome?

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.

Fuck Google

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?

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.

Firefox is great for YouTube. Don't support google via premium - those guys aren't exactly short of a dime. Addblockers are flawless.
Must be the premium experience then. I have zero issues on Firefox, on Linux, with adblocker. 👌

Once upon a time, Google wanted to kill the user-agent.

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

Spoof the user-agent and at the same time clear cache (you can disable cache when reloading through the developer's tool), or
Clear cache, spoof the user-agent to Chrome. Load page, disable the spoofing, reload.

Have you seen this?
https://feddit.it/pictrs/image/0e13c670-4966-4073-89df-f042fe9cc6de.webp
- Yes. I'm not a frontend dev, so not familiar with JS code (let alone an obfuscated fragment), but according to this HN comment, it's used for a different ad block detection function.

I can confirm this. I signed up for the free trial of YT Premium (which I immediately cancelled, but I'll take the three months) but YT seems to be detecting that I'm on Firefox and have Ublock installed, so I'm getting the occasional 5 second forced delay, even though I'm a premium user. (They may not count the trial as being a "true" premium user, I'd suspect.)

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 feel like Reddit is doing the same shit.

Where is this location in the pic?

Crab island.
- Is that a thing?
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

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.

Mozilla's funding comes from Google (not all of it but enough that all their other finding source's wouldn't even cover the bulk of the CEO's salery). I doubt Mozilla is going to do much.
We can hope it doesn't bode well for their ongoing anti trust case though

What, is something happening at Twitter? I spent all weekend focused exclusively on the Game of Thrones episode happening over at OpenAI.

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.