Google allegedly crippling Firefox's YouTube performance — company's response to five-second video delay for non-Chrome users misses the point - Reminder brave browser does the trick @ me if you want me to add suggestions for other browsers

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YouTube framed the issue as being related to ad-blockers

On Monday, a Redditor demonstrated that a recently observed five-second video loading delay, seen when using YouTube in Firefox, could be eliminated by changing the user agent to Chrome. Today, YouTube responded with a statement received by Android Authority conflating non-Chrome video loading delay issues with the use of ad blockers

“To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we’ve launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience. Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”

YouTube statement via Android Authority

If you check out the Reddit post by vk6_ you will see a succinct video capture of YouTube being tested in Mozilla Firefox. It is hard to explain why a plain vanilla Firefox install would suffer an “artificial five-second delay,” but you can see that there is one. Miraculously, the YouTube video loading delay disappears when the browser self-identifies as Chrome via an extension which facilitates these kinds of adjustments.

In an extensions-free Firefox session we tried, the video delay wasn’t observed. However, in the over 800 comments on the Reddit thread and from the YouTube statement, something is surely going on here. Perhaps, like with the ad block warnings, this Firefox throttling behavior targets a set or subset of users with a certain profile, location, or usage pattern.

If this is Google making pro-Chrome tweaks to how YouTube runs, you would also perhaps expect delays in Edge. Indeed, some Redditors have reported similar delays in Edge

www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)

The above code seems to adjust the observed artificial delay of 5,000 ms (five seconds) to a measly 0.001 ms, which is a negligible amount of anyone’s time, even for a mayfly.

History Repeats​

This isn’t the first reported slowing of YouTube in non-Chrome browsers. About five years ago, there was also some controversy when YouTube adopted the Polymer design, making the video site much faster in Chrome than Firefox or Edge.

Moreover, in 2019, ZDNet talked to a former Mozilla exec who bemoaned intentional sabotage from the Google camp over several years. Johnathan Nightingale, who worked as a GM & VP on Firefox, saw relations between Google and Firefox sour as the former grew more ambitious for browser market share. Not only did YouTube suffer, he saw "oopses" hitting functionality and performance in other popular Google properties like Gmail and Google Docs.


Similarly, in 2017, ex-Microsoft Edge developer Joshua Bakita asserted that “Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.” This cat-and-mouse game was claimed to be one of the reasons Edge moved from its own renderer to Chromium.



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brave have used it it's better than mozila and google not many functional add on though

invidious per @+30gameovers
 
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  • Informative
Reactions: MugolEx
"what do you mean by NO? why can't i have your product for free anymore? i never paid for it before so I DESERVE IT FOR FREE ,FOREVER...reeee gimme your youSLOP for free... idc who writes your paycheck I DESERVE IT FOR FREE..."
* decrease quality of a service over time *
* increase the cost of said service *
* profit *
Big Corpo Brain.
 
* decrease quality of a service over time *
* increase the cost of said service *
* profit *
Big Corpo Brain.
* the thing™️ doesn't exist *
* someone puts down capital to create it *
* acquires a sustainble userbase through subsidies (read loss) *
* finally the time comes to break even *
* communists now want to nationalize it *
welp
 
* the thing™️ doesn't exist *
* someone puts down capital to create it *
* acquires a sustainble userbase through subsidies (read loss) *
* finally the time comes to break even *
* communists now want to nationalize it *
welp
Where they fucked up was meddling with allowing organic competition. For that they deserve to perish under the weight of their own corpulence.
 
* the thing™️ doesn't exist *
* someone puts down capital to create it *
* acquires a sustainble userbase through subsidies (read loss) *
You forgot:
* Google buys it * somewhere here.

* communists now want to nationalize it *
Who said "nationalize"? I'll just go out of my way to avoid their retarded ads.
 
* the thing™️ doesn't exist *
* someone puts down capital to create it *
* acquires a sustainble userbase through subsidies (read loss) *
* finally the time comes to break even *
* communists now want to nationalize it *
welp
You just described fraud, and omitted the part where they get the government to use my tax dollars to finance it, then regulate to prevent competitors.

See: YouTube
  • Offering a product at a loss is textbook unfair competition.
  • Taking money from dominance in one market to allow operation at a loss in another as a way of killing comptitors is violating anti-trust laws.
  • Lying to the people about the cost is misrepresentation.
  • YouTube and google have been cooperating with the government and other malevolent interests to shut down competitors who actually follow copyright laws and allow freedom of expression via illicit pressure campaigns, defamation campaigns, and deplatforming campaigns.
Google does not compete in a free market, they operate a cartel with the help of the most powerful forces numerous western governments have to offer. They leverage friends in powerful governments and their own clout in the rest of the internet stack to force anyone who might threaten their dominance to either shut down or build a parallel internet from the peering level up the way Josh was forced to for this forum.
 
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You just described fraud, and omitted the part where they get the government to use my tax dollars to finance it, then regulate to prevent competitors.

See: YouTube
  • Offering a product at a loss is textbook unfair competition.
  • Taking money from dominance in one market to allow operation at a loss in another as a way of killing comptitors is violating anti-trust laws.
  • Lying to the people about the cost is misrepresentation.
  • YouTube and google have been cooperating with the government and other malevolent interests to shut down competitors who actually follow copyright laws and allow freedom of expression via illicit pressure campaigns, defamation campaigns, and deplatforming campaigns.

It doesn't matter, hes either a libertarian, underage, or someone who only understand capitalism in theory(read:libertarian)

Null should ban him and demand $500 dollars to be unbanned, which he would happily do so he can brag about how he isn't poor since he wastes money.
 
Null should ban him and demand $500 dollars to be unbanned
TBH I want to see all lolberts and ancaps subjected to this, at random.
It's what corpos do to average working people.

Who said "nationalize"?
Nobody.
I called for total corpo death.
The state has little to do with that.
(They're doing it to themselves. watching woke capital get looted by their pet diversity or a hostile public is great!)
 
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on the side of youtube on this one. free market baby
"reee give access to your proprietary database reeee"
"reeee why can't i run ea games on steam reeee anti-trust"
"reeee why can't i use hd netflix on non-widewine device reeeee"
"reeee bring imessage to android reeee"
"what do you mean by NO? why can't i have your product for free anymore? i never paid for it before so I DESERVE IT FOR FREE ,FOREVER...reeee gimme your youSLOP for free... idc who writes your paycheck I DESERVE IT FOR FREE..."

another one btw
"HAVING A SUBSCRIPTION PLAN IS ANTITRUST VIOLATION"
0.05 Google® Play Store™ credits have been deposited into your Google® Pay™ account.
 
Do you guys remember when Firefox actually stood up for the open Internet instead of taking troon cock and dick all day? Fucking Seamonkey is a better option than Firefox for customization and shit mang.
Anyway, fuck Microsoft Google and fuck Internet Explorer Google Chrome.
 
Why would anyone use trannyfox in current year? Fuck Google obviously but the answer is just to use a Chrome fork like Brave.
On a technical level, especially in terms of filtering and fingerprinting, Firefox outdoes Chrome by a significant margin, some highlights:

From Ublock Origin:
CNAME-uncloaking
HTML filtering
Response body filtering
Browser launch (prevent leaks before filters are loaded)
Pre-fetching blocking
WebAssembly for filtering (performance)
Storage compression

From Noscript:
The Injection Checker XSS filter is disabled because there's no asynchronous blocking webRequest API
The Cross-tab Identity Leak Protection (TabGuard) is unavailable (same reason as above)
The LAN protection works for numeric IPs but cannot resolve domain names (no DNS API)

From the Tor Browser:
Not going to list them, but the option to hide your true screen size and system performance timings is useful.
 
i can't confirm this
been using firefox since forever and have noticed no change or decline in youtubes site or video loading speed
also running ublock origin
Same. Also back to being YT adfree on desktop FF after using Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin in tandem.

Edit: Fucking jinxed it, YT giving me the "Using Adblockers is illegal!" spiel again as of 5 minutes ago. Good that i only watch stuff on that shit platform only once in a blue moon.
 
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  • Agree
Reactions: Instant_Pot_User
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