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_ • 7,555 points and 689 comments
It would be nice if FTC or someone would sue them for anticompetitive behavior.
There are two US antitrust cases against Google right now:
The first is related to things like paying to be the default search engine on iPhone, Firefox, etc. The second is related to ad tech. Neither really directly addresses the issues that average people have with Google's behavior though, so keep filing complaints!
Google gets sued for this shit all the time, but do you think you're going to hear about this on Google or Youtube?
Case in point, very few people know that they got sued for protecting multiple pedophiles as they were grooming kids on their platform.
Small government has entered the chat
I’m not sure I follow.
Wanting to archive the resources I found:
uBlock Origin has managed to reduce the delay in loading by a bit
I've been noticing this for a while now. I chalked it up to YouTube having ugly code, but now I see that it is simply malicious code.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence*.
Ugh, Google just gets worse and worse...
Actually, this isn't the first time they did it. There was a thread by a mozilla ex-employee that described how Google destroyed Firefox's market share using the same dirty trick.
Thread can be read on this article.
YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://t.co/F5uEn3iMLR
— Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) July 24, 2018
According to that article,
Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'
while Firefox was still a Google search partner.
EDIT: Did not realize how long ago this post was made, whoops.
Adblocks are really fucking them over and it's gratifying seeing chrome uninstalls peaking rn.
Invidious and Piped fix this issue. You can use LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Invidious or Piped.
there's no slowdowns on freetube either
FreeTube is great but I personally prefer a browser-based solution
Yeah. Going with freetube desktop app (flatpak) on Linux.
No slowdown here.
and UntrackMe on android!
Makes sense and improves privacy but they're not going to win on speed, not even on Firefox, unless you host a private instance or use a nearby-hosted one.
By default, when using Invidious, your browser loads the video right from Google, you can proxy videos through the Invidious instance but it's disabled by default. Only Piped always proxies videos through the Piped server.
Just install the chameleon add on and set it to chrome. Problem solved.
This doesn't have any impact on video load times on Piped, does it?
Why would it? I don't think your browser makes any direct connection to youtube.com when using Piped, all goes through a proxy server of your choice (hence the name).
Just checking
Is this a violation of net neutrality? They are effectively not treating all traffic equally.
All current conversations surrounding Net Neutrality refer to ISPs being neutral. Since this is happening at the browser level, it would not technically be a violation.
For example streaming websites aren't required to support Linux. It's a dick move, but it's not a violation to "block" users.
That isn't to say this isn't a dick move, it absolutely is, but as currently defined it isn't a Net Neutrality issue.
Hmm, perhaps not net neutrality then, but it could be anti competitive maybe. Like the Internet Explorer fiasco from back in the day.
I don't notice this, Firefox on Mac, YouTube Premium. Do they only do this for YouTube Free? Yep, seems like it. Terrible nonetheless of course but it explains why I never experienced this.
It's a little weird because its definitely slower on my desktop but on my laptop (with the same account, browser, and extensions) it's perfectly fine. I'm guessing that there's some AB testing going on.
