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

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db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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scholar@lemmy.world
383 points

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.

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ares35@kbin.social
136 points

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/AARD_code

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Lmaydev@programming.dev
74 points

And it cost them 280 million in the 90s ouch

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tetris11@lemmy.ml
28 points

Something tells me they survived.

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aseriesoftubes@lemmy.world
70 points

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.

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Lemminary@lemmy.world
18 points

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?

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chiliedogg@lemmy.world
23 points

Not you or me. But most people, yeah.

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FontMasterFlex@lemmy.world
11 points

How does one “spoof” chrome?

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dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
17 points

You can change your user agent string, the text your browser uses to tell the web site you’re looking at what browser it is, either via your F12 developer tools menu or via an extension.

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scholar@lemmy.world
11 points

The most convenient way is with a browser extension that changes your user agent. You can also change it in the developer options of most browsers.

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AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
1 point

It works for me now. Only took them 8 years

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agent_flounder@lemmy.world
12 points

In my other comment I provide a link to the US DOJ anti-trust complaint center website.

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the_blackwell_ninja@mastodon.online
5 points

@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.

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