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.)
They have all the decision makers in their payrolls. They will stop at nothing !
i was wondering about this! very dumb.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Seems that FF is not the target:
Why would they spend resources to enrage 3% (at most) of their users?
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There are none.
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One is based on Mozilla, another one barely works.
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But the title explicitly talks about FF.
I mean, safari exists
Don’t try to bring logic into today’s two minutes of hate.
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 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 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.
That makes a lot of sense. It’s still exclusive to Firefox, though
Let’s hope Europe stars investigating Google as a gatekeeper. That seemed to work miracles on Apple.
