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I think they want everyone to use user agent switcher so that Firefox share will drop and then nobody will support it and will die.
Easy: use a user agent switcher that uses blacklists. Mine only spoofs chrome for youtube.com.
Thanks, will definitely check out this unnamed extension.
Here’s one, though several others offer the same functionality.
Custom mode:
{ "www.youtube.com": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" }
Yeah I used a user agent switcher that didn’t seem to have a blacklist feature that I could find and it broke every cloudfare site.
They finally made YouTube unusable for me even with ublock. Refreshing the filters didn’t work and told me I could only watch 3 videos.
Google was always going to win the war but I didn’t expect it to be like this.
I’m now using piped for all YouTube videos.
What works for me is opening a new Private windows on Firefox, with ublock installed, and then login into YouTube. I do have to login every time I hope a private windows by so far I’ve been able to watch unlimited videos with an ad blocker installed
You are remembering to purge all caches before refreshing I hope?
I randomly stopped getting the anti-adblocking. On my gaming PC I never got them, on my laptop they went away after I disabled my adblocking for one video and then re-enabled it. Now I don’t get them at all. Did they give up on me?
I’d love they gave up on me too…
They no longer appear for me. The biggest change for me was just using uBlock Origin. Previously I also had Ghostery. If you run multiple extensions for privacy, try dropping them and only using uBlock.
Never got them for some reason, with just ghostery (and maybe privacybadger)
I wish Piped worked for me, I was trying to watch a Linux tutorial in full HD to see the commands better and Piped just refused to buffer the video.
There are other alternatives too, like invidious. The yewtu.be instance works decently well for me but limits to 720p I think. There is a list of all running instances somewhere on the github iirc. There’s other instances that allow full HD, just have a search and you should be able to find one.
Just redirect any watch page to https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=%ID% and you will get a list of instances. Can be setup with Redirector in a minute
Well, I just got Redirector last night to check it out and it took me some time to figure out how to get it to work right where I have https://youtube.com/watch?v=* redirecting to https://yewtu.be/watch?v=$1 in case there is something funky going on there that causes me to need to have that redirect active.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
My YouTube redirect rule is a bit more complex, but works for all shorts, youtu.be and regular youtube links and it supports time stamps and videos that are part of a playlist.
Set the rule to regular expression, use this one
(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:www\.)?(?:youtube\.com\/(?:watch\?v=|shorts\/)|youtu\.be\/)([^&?\/]+[&?]?.*)remove the two “amp;” at the end (Lemmy formatting is bad, it replaces an ampersand with
&even if you tell it not to…) and redirect to https://%yourinstanceofchoice%/watch?v=$1Enjoy!
Okay, what I was trying to do with Redirector is have it so I can search and browse videos on YouTube, but when I click on something that I want to watch, it forwards me to the same video on YewTu.be instead.
That’s exactly what this is doing. It captures all youtube.com/watch, youtube.com/shorts and youtu.be/ pages and redirects then to the same page on invidious. Just replace %yourinstanceofchoice% with yewtu.be.
If you don’t open videos you want to watch in a new tab, you also have to go to Advanced Options in your rule and tick “HistoryState” else it will bypass the redirect.
This should work for you:
Using an alternative front end isn’t losing
Once they get rid of front ends and you go back they’ll have won
Same here.
Try opening your subscription page as usual with your ublock, but then right-click “open in private window” the videos you want to watch. Works for me.
Why are you using YouTube at all if you don’t like it so much? Go use something else.
Rumble ftw!
Joke is on them, i only ever use NewPipe (or freetube on desktop)
I’ve been trying to get ReVanced working on WSA and it force closes at start.
Going to give newpipe a try, thanks!
Have you tried installing the MicroG package?
yeah its installed! I even downloaded the specific version of youtube the patcher wants, IDK what I’m doing wrong
Do I need to patch on my phone and then use that apk on the PC?
I think that would be better. Try a tablet version of the patches…
Stop screwing around and just get newpipe or libretube. The UI is a lot simpler and they are much more stable at the moment.
Discovering freetube was the best thing of my video browsing life. It works so well it’s incredible Feels good to not be continuously tracked while watching videos.
YouTube thinks aarch64 Firefox is… a HiSense TV!!!
Ah yes, televisions are exactly where the user wants lower resolution
User Agent String: A browser’s way of lying about what it is, in order to not trigger some server’s arcane content filtering system.
User Agents should be optional. The whole idea of the Internet was that the server should respond the same way to the same request regardless of the client’s qualities.
Bot
Bot
There are qualities that are useful for having different responses, like supported language, whether the browser accepts gzipped content, etc.
That’s in separate headers
Fuck that shit.
- You can do language codes in the URL to serve different versions of content
- If your browser can do TLS then it should be able to handle gzip content or alternatively if the internet didn’t allow cookies and scripting in your browser then it would have been safe to use TLSs built in compression
Check out the Gemini protocol if you want to see that a lot of HTTP spec stuff is completely unnecessary
The issue is that some of those techniques are only useful after the client has rendered the content rather than before.
But they are useful and completely valid ways of dealing with the problem.
It is not the end of the world if I have to click am extra once or twice to change the language. Hell most websites have much harder processes just to reject cookies.
Personally I would rather err on the side of slightly extra work the odd time I’m not on a website not in my native language than have an extra bit of information that can be used to track me.
Again take a look at the Gemini protocol, its a perfectly fine browsing experience without all the cruft.
Valid, but not standard and more inconvenient.
Additionally, you act like query strings can’t be used to track you when they certainly can.
Most of the advantages of Gemini are implemented in the client and not the protocol itself.
So if I type in “google.com” what language should the front page be in?
Some widely spoken language I imagine, Chinese, Spanish, English I don’t care. Since .com is intended for commercial use, the language of the companies biggest market makes sense here as well.
You’re also forgetting that the likes of google.ru, google.nl and google.every_other_country_code exist.
Also there are plently of websites the have language selection in the site that overrides that header, look at Wikipedia.
There are plently of sites in non english languages that cater to non English speakers only, not every site has or needs 10 different translations.
At this point we also have translation engines in the browser so for pages in languages you don’t know, that you absolutely need to access, you can use it to understand the page to a decent level and/or be able to navigate to a version in your language if available.
Who said anything about English?
I just used it as an example since it’s pretty much the lingua franca of the internet and it’s what we are currently using. The same argument applies to any other language.
My main point with that bit was that a lot of content exists on the internet without any translated versions and the world hasn’t ended because of this, look at non English Lemmy instances.
First language in Accept-Language header that server also support
I like how nobody actually bothered to read the thread and doesn’t understand this is a bug and wasn’t done on purpose.
Quite a reductive statement based on a very small obscured window into what Google is doing with user agent profiling but go off I guess since you’re so sure
Are they determining that Forefox is Hisense TV on purpose? Again, read the linked thread for a change.
It’s not. First of all, the code doesn’t check for Firefox at all. Second, it blocks 4K for all Android devices. Conclusions people came up with here just show utter ignorance.
Google has teams of highly paid expert engineers who’s entire job is to maintain and develop youTube. What do you think is more likely:
- Google’s engineers were unable to tell that performance in Firefox is degraded by their changes.
- Google sees it as advantageous to disadvantage their competitors - including Firefox. And although they might not be able to do it deliberately, for legal reasons, they can still do it by introducing platform specific changes and strategically neglecting to make it work properly.
Have you actually checked the code? It doesn’t target Firefox at all. Man…
I mean, Google’s engineers also recently lost six months worth of a lot of people’s Google Drive files, so, honestly, anything’s possible.
Shhhh. We’re hating on YouTube as we want ad free videos but don’t want to pay for it and we’re hoping that bitching about it on a tiny social media platform will somehow get Google to pivot their entire business model.
We don’t need no facts here.
Did YouTube make all of those videos? If not, then how much should YouTube get from hosting them? This whole argument that people just want free shit isn’t just wrong, it’s also annoying. People have proven time and again that we’re willing to pay for quality and convenience. And not in that order. Once again it’s an issue about access, how they’re fighting tooth and nail to gatekeep that access to continue to control the flow of capital so they can also play the kingmakers in digital media. Messages like yours are so off base that it’s hard to believe you’re not projecting your own shitty world view, but also somehow think that because you’ll gargle some shitty ads every once in a while that you have some moral high ground. AKA; one of those people who believe they’re right and that’s all that matters and you don’t actually have to think any deeper. PS: I hope I’m wrong. Please feel free to correct my own world view if I am.
Did YouTube make all of those videos?
Nobody is claiming they did
If not, then how much should YouTube get from hosting them?
Whatever the free market will pay. Like with any other product.
This whole argument that people just want free shit isn’t just wrong, it’s also annoying.
A paid option is available to those who find the ads annoying.
Those who refuse to pay and try to block the ads are freeloading. Simple as that.
People have proven time and again that we’re willing to pay for quality and convenience.
And yet here we are. Yet again on Lemmy. Yet again with the crybabies wanting ad-free and cost-free shit without considering that someone somewhere has to pay for it. Google is not a charity.
Once again it’s an issue about access, how they’re fighting tooth and nail to gatekeep that access
What? Competitors exist. YouTube is free for nearly everyone.
You are free to use the alternatives if you disagree with how YouTube works.
That’s how the free market works; nobody has a gun to your head.
Messages like yours are so off base that it’s hard to believe you’re not projecting your own shitty world view, but also somehow think that because you’ll gargle some shitty ads every once in a while that you have some moral high ground.
I pay for premium. I’m happy to pay for content I enjoy and I’m happy that the creators I enjoy watching get a cut without me having to watch annoying adverts.
I do not expect handouts. There is nothing “shitty” about paying for things.
Maybe tone down the extremism and personal attacks against a stranger, huh?
AKA; one of those people who believe they’re right and that’s all that matters and you don’t actually have to think any deeper.
🥱
And yet here we are. Yet again on Lemmy. Yet again with the crybabies wanting ad-free and cost-free shit without considering that someone somewhere has to pay for it. Google is not a charity.
I was tempted to state that I was wrong, clearly you have thought about this, but I don’t agree with this perspective at all and won’t be changing my opinion. If we’re in the business of calling things out that “nobody said,” then nobody said Google was a charity.
That’s how the free market works; nobody has a gun to your head.
The ‘nobody has a gun to your head’ approach to laissez-faire mercantilism likes to ignore how important free market access is. Lack of access can be just as bad as a gun to the head, if not sometimes worse. This is a one sided argument in favor of corporatism that doesn’t address access. The main thrust of my point.
I pay for premium. I’m happy to pay for content I enjoy and I’m happy that the creators I enjoy watching get a cut without me having to watch annoying adverts. I do not expect handouts. There is nothing “shitty” about paying for things.
I don’t think YouTube has ever left me feeling like it had any regard for me as a consumer or even valued my time. It appears, from the many complaints I’ve seen by YouTube content creators, that many of them don’t feel valued or respected either. By the time Premium came along it had long lost me as an interested customer. There’s no feeling that one should honor a one-sided social contract because that requires an actual relationship. If I felt that YouTube actually cared about anything other than being the middle-man that ensures that I get served ads, and demands–but not delivers–respect for it, then maybe I would reconsider. Until then, I will enjoy their competing products. Ad-Blockers and supporting alternative hosting sites that make me feel more valued. They’ve assisted in creating their own black-market for ad-avoidance, and that’s the free market working.
Maybe tone down the extremism and personal attacks against a stranger, huh?
🥱
I was tempted to state that I was wrong, clearly you have thought about this, but I don’t agree with this perspective at all and won’t be changing my opinion.
I guess we’re done here then.
The ‘nobody has a gun to your head’ approach to laissez-faire mercantilism likes to ignore how important free market access is.
Oh, were still going. Okay.
Erm. YouTube is free. It’s only not available where countries have blocked it.
Lack of access can be just as bad as a gun to the head, if not sometimes worse.
What? YouTube is not a necessity to human existence. It’s not food or shelter.
That’s a stunning level of entitlement on show there.
I don’t think YouTube has ever left me feeling like it had any regard for me as a consumer or even valued my time. It appears, from the many complaints I’ve seen by YouTube content creators, that many of them don’t feel valued or respected either. By the time Premium came along it had long lost me as an interested customer.
Fair enough. So you’re going the ad route then?
There’s no feeling that one should honor a one-sided social contract because that requires an actual relationship. If I felt that YouTube actually cared about anything other than being the middle-man that ensures that I get served ads, and demands–but not delivers–respect for it, then maybe I would reconsider.
Ah, so you’re freeloading.
Until then, I will enjoy their competing products. Ad-Blockers and supporting alternative hosting sites that make me feel more valued. They’ve assisted in creating their own black-market for ad-avoidance, and that’s the free market working.
If you don’t want to pay, or view the ads, you should opt out and use an alternative or go without. That’s the ethical choice.
Excellent argument all around. I like that it stayed on point and didn’t devolve into something else entirely. I know you and I don’t necessarily agree, but I respect that you stood your ground and as a result, you as a person. I do feel that you could put more value into the demand-side of things, AKA, the consumer but there’s a bit of nuance there and we probably have different approaches that solve the same ideal. My follow on points would have been to argue that YouTube isn’t deserving of being given a social-contract of ethical conduct etc etc. I would also address that YouTube is central to some livelihoods and the financial well-being of others. I really wanted to highlight the sense of irony that I get that you would call a group of people crybabies and then feel personally attacked when someone took you to task and stood their ground on the counterpoint; however, I concede that if I had known you would have felt personally attacked I would have picked a softer tone and for that I apologize. I think we can both acknowledge that we’d only be arguing nuance at this point and that’s not a worthwhile use of our time. You sir (edit: or ma’am, or something in between, if it pleases), are not an NPC. (also edit; upvotes given for the statements except the original statement I disagreed with)
My local supermarket isn’t producing most of the products it has on its shelves, so fuck them too I guess.
Good counter-point, except that your local supermarket has to respect three separate market pressures that Google (edit: to be clear, I mean YouTube) clearly has no regard for:
- Tight regulations.
- Respecting its consumers.
- Robust competition that isn’t prone to monopolistic enterprise.
So no, I don’t feel that we should ‘fuck them, too I guess’ because when I go to the supermarket I feel like I’m the customer, not the product. I feel that I get what I’m paying for and that my time is respected. Nothing about YouTube leaves me feeling like that. There’s no sense that I’m a respected customer and therein no sense that there’s any value in trying to respect a clearly one-sided relationship.
Having bugs for platforms outside the walled garden is a feature of the walled garden. That’s the beauty of it, they don’t need to purposefully cripple Firefox and other engines if they just don’t take it into account when creating features.
How is Youtube a walled garden? It’s a website.
It might just be a coincidence but I’ve had a lot of trouble using Invidious or Piped lately too. Videos load and titles load, but video thumbnails don’t load for me.
Yeah, Google started blocking popular instances of Invidious and Piped in May this year: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3822
Every so often, it may start working again when those instances get a different IP address, but it usually doesn’t last more than a few days…
I’ve had issues with Invidious and Piped literally every time I’ve tried to use them. Can’t understand how people even use the public servers.
However I have disabled Piped proxy in LibreTube and been using that for a long while but for the last week or so it hasn’t been working at all.
GrayJay is still working though.
There was a problem with DASH. Now it’s fixed, it should work with the proxy enabled.
As I said, it’s never worked with the proxy enabled. And it’s still not working with it disabled, right now.
I have also had piles of trouble. I don’t get how so many people apparently have none
It’s the same with all the other frontends (LibReddit, Nitter, etc.). They never work and everyone is just like “try a different instance!”. How many dozen different instances should I try before I give up?
Shout out to Stealth (Reddit) and Squawker (Twitter), those both work the vast majority of the time without any “instances” to depend on or switch through.
I tried it and my main complaint was it was like 720p, so lower quality (noticeable to me just looking at it). But it “just worked” for me. But I’m also not interested in YouTube enough to play this game - if they block me, I stop going there. It seems like they give up blocking me every so often (or something updates IDK).
there’s a browser extension called libredirect that has a keyboard shortcut to switch between instances. you can also use freetube/newpipe/mpv.
I know what apps you can use. The apps are not the problem. The proxies are.
Google is blocking popular instances these days, so yeah, you basically need to find an unpopular instance, which usually means it’s new and may not live for long, or it will quickly become popular, because it works, which will cause Google to block it.
Good to know about Stealth. Thanks!
Yeah I might try the others a couple more times before giving up but it’s not gone well for me thusfar. Libreddit and invidious worked for me for like 4 days last time, both crapped out about the same time. It’s annoying to have to repeatedly troubleshoot what used to be something you could basically count on working
Do you have a link for Stealth? Libreddit was working for me up until two days ago.
It’s on FDroid
Switched to Freetube/Invidious. Like the sun, I’m never looking directly at Youtube.com ever again.
The more bullshit like this I read about YouTube the more I despite them. I already use GrayJay on mobile and I’m using ublock Origin + ublock Matrix on Librewolf to control cookie usage on desktop. So far I’ve been able escape the video player block by clearing cache.
I’m just waiting for the day they “force” me onto another frontend.
im using librewolf too. i keep seeing the adblocker active warning instead of a video, in the video-box on youtube Plays just fine in private window though…
Even after clearing the cache from the ublock filter settings?
doesnt ublock origin already block youtube’s anti adblock?
It sort of does for me. I used ublock to block the popup and the overlay that prevents you from using the site. Sometimes a video will stop playing for a moment, but it resumes as soon as I hit play.
Nope, I still got it after a while
If you get it, purge and update your cache. It still works.
Then your uBlock Origin filters aren’t working properly. See this thread for instructions on how to purge and update your filters to block YouTube’s ads and YouTube’s adblocker blocker.
I mean after clearing the cache it disappears. But I’ve seen the “your video player will be blocked” 3 or 4 times during the past few months maybe.
Those 3 or 4 times may have been after Google had updated their anti-adblocking stuff and before uBlock Origin had updated their anti-anti-adblocking stuff.
Also, do you have any other adblockers installed? Does your browser have its own adblocker? Either of those can cause interference with stuff like this.
Nope, I use Librewolf with uBlock Origin, uMatrix and BitWarden. Nothing else.
But yes, I haven’t seen it in quite some time now.
Someone, light the EU signal!
Lawsuit intensifies in the distance
Disgusting!
From what I can understand from the thread, they aren’t deliberatly crippling FF.
Oh, they also do that. Just not based on architecture. https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23970721/google-youtube-ad-blocker-five-second-delay-firefox-chrome
Which turned out to also have nothing to do with FF but is targeting adblockers.
The way I read it is Chrome gets a pass on the architecture crippling, the others don’t.
Someone correct me if I got the wrong idea.
So Google is saying out loud they are trying to be Microsoft and abuse its near monopoy to push their other products.
Got it.
It looks like also this was against adblocker so, again, not specifically Firefox. Quote from the article itself:
The issue was initially reported as targeting Firefox users, but users online have said they’re seeing the delay in Chrome and Edge, too. Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use. Mozilla’s senior brand manager Damiano DeMonte wrote in an email to The Verge that “there’s no evidence that this is a Firefox-specific issue.
Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use
That means nothing, this check could be done on the server side and noone would know
I mean… We can we can invent a thousand conspiracies if we want to…
Except that the delay and ad blocker check is literally in the JavaScript code, you can see it.
Indeed, but google can just transmit different javascript to different users/browsers/regions etc (that’s why browsers have useragents, so websites can improve browser compatibility according to the circumstances). It can be decided on a whim and noone would know except some coders at google
Except everyone would know. Multiple people across the globe testing different browsers have looked at the same JavaScript code that is being sent to the browser. The check is there, client-side, google isn’t sending a different JavaScript payload for different browsers. Like you said, they could, but that’s not how it currently functions
Hmm, anti competitive practices.
If only there was some kind of legislation that protected an open and fair internet…
No
Yes.
No.
Yes.
No.
Stupid question, what about 2 in 1 tablets?
Asking logical questions in a thread about a conspiracy theory? We don’t do that here.
its all flabergasted bro its their servers their rules
