Comment by The Picard Maneuver@startrek.website on YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users

Is this arguably anticompetitive and illegal?

Nobody can even state that it’s actually happening “for competitive browsers” as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it’s just wild speculation and bandwagoning.

There’s been multiple posts pointing to some possibly “wait for ads to finish loading” type code. It’s quite possible that it’s just bugged in Firefox etc since browsers are horrendously inconsistent etc.

But that doesn’t make a cool headline so instead the “it’s Google being evil” story is the popular one.

it was already made public in the lawsuit some weeks ago that they are indeed slowing down youtube for firefox.

Source?

I’ve read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.

There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using…

There’s also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn’t been able to keep up.

I don’t see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there’s nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.

So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I’m not ready to jump to that conclusion until there’s actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. “Someone said they are” is not going to convince me. Especially if you can’t even point to that someone saying that thing.

You absolutely can tell what’s happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when ontimeupdate promise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.

https://pastebin.com/TqjzbqQE

I’m sorry but I don’t see how that check is browser-specific. Is that part happening on the browser side?

They don’t need to put incriminating “if Firefox” statements in their code – the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.

I don’t know, nor am I speculating. The person I was replying to said they didn’t see a browser check in the code, which isn’t enough to dismiss it.

Easy enough to test though. Load the page with a UA changer and see if it still shows up when Firefox pretends to be Chrome

The video in the linked article does just that. The page takes 5 seconds to load the video, the user changes the UA, they refresh the page and suddenly the video loads instantly. I would have liked to see them change the UA back to Firefox to prove it’s not some weird caching issue though

I guess his question is “is that happening?”

Well, at least I learned that javascript understands exponential notation. I never even bothered to try that lol

Can I have ublock block that? It seems simple enough to extract that code out.

It’s not wild speculation as there is compelling, if incomplete, evidence. And to describe everyone’s reaction as “bandwagoning” is ridiculous. Firefox and Mullvad are my daily drivers. This directly impacts me. The fediverse is going to have a disproportionate number of non-chrome users.

I also use FF solely and have no slowdowns on YT. I guess they like my copy of the browser.

I’ve duplicated it on 4 machines across 3 OS’s (windows 11, macOS, steamOS). Glad you got lucky. I’m sure you’re also familiar with A/B testing but if not I’m happy to explain it.

It is absolutely possible there is a reasonable explanation but for you to say 1) nothing is happening and 2) it’s “bandwagoning” is, again, ridiculous. Especially if your evidence is “well mine is fine,” which is not acceptable troubleshooting procedure.

Not all regions are served with the same scripts. That’s why the ad-block pop-up was shown for some users but not for others or at a later time for others. This also affected the update cycle of those anti-adblock scripts.

The reason for that is quite simple. New stuff is rolled out to only some users at first as some sort of beta testing procedure. If many people complain about functionality issues and all of those have the new version of the script, Google knows there is something wrong with it.

“works fine on my machine lol” is unhelpful and useless.

It’s very well known that Google makes heavy use of a/b testing. They did it with the adblock block and they’re doing it with this

“It happens all the time” and “they always do *” is also comically unhelpful and useless. I’m getting a pot/kettle vibe from those that seem to take offense at my comment.

Where’s the proof? Note: I didn’t read the article

no thanks… I havent had any issues… been using firefox since v1.0

I don’t really understand what you’re trying to do lol

I mean you’re saying you want proof, don’t read the article, then say you don’t care because it works for you. Do you not understand why that’s a little perplexing? Anyway, I’ve said my piece. I don’t imagine it will be a very productive discussion. Have a good week.

Then why did you ask for proof lol

Don’t worry, there isn’t proof in the article either. There’s a snippet of code out of context, and a video that, while it shows a loading delay, doesn’t show the code being executed.

Ya. This whole thing is very silly, and it’s really sad how little critical thinking is going on here.

How short are our attention spans that we make judgments based on things we didn’t read?

Get off TikTok It’s breaking your brain

You can literally see it for yourself. Download Firefox, download Chrome. It will literally take you 5 minutes to test this out

Been using Firefox since v1

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YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users(www.androidauthority.com)

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