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

The fuck?? Isn’t this anti competitive behaviour?

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.

BTW, this:

This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.

I wonder how long it'll be before google gets sued for their anti-competitive behavior.

That's an antitrust case if ever I saw one.

It could literally be a minute wait & I still wouldn't use Chrome.

Sometimes I get curious about chromium based browsers and consider giving them a shot for a while.

Then Google does shit like this and I keep mainlining Firefox out of spite. Half the reasons people experience “issues” with Firefox are just dumb garbage like this (see sites / web content being developed with Chrome-based in mind)

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.

Wow, and it's literally just "If you're using Firefox, wait five seconds."

Let's remember, fellas, that big tech is not a disease that needs to be eradicated. Let us not forget that Google is a legitimate corporation, not merely a group of professional stalkers. And let's be clear: obviously you are the crazy ones for worrying about this, naturally...

Pardon my jest; I was merely echoing the absurdities often heard.

Maybe just maybe it's time we stop with this garbage and actually stop using their services. Nothing will change if we keep using their services.

The most direct and effective strategy to inspire reform in their practices is to stop using of their platforms. Each time we use a service from Google or any similar big tech entity, we inadvertently endorse their methods.

YOU hold the power to change them by using FOSS alternatives instead.

"Do no evil¹"

¹ unless we can make money from it.

Did someone actually investigate and find the exact place in scripts where this logic takes place?

EDIT: Yes. https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-reportedly-slowing-down-videos-firefox-3387206/

Adding this to your uBlock Origin filters also makes the problem go away:

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

I've noticed that too, I just switch to Freetube when it happens.
Simply disgusting, but it's business as usual for Google.

Not noticing this change from the EU... Guess they're too afraid of pulling that shit here?

imagine sitting down to code this and thinking you're doing the right thing

you should be able to whisteblow clearly evil technology and have some sort of economic safety net

Gmail is almost painfully slow on my PC (I use Adblock on Firefox). Does anyone else experience this?

And, yes, I know Gmail is very bad, you're preaching to the choir. I am in the midst of switching over.

Did this dude really just link a Reddit post?

Bet it's done in such a way that they can claim "We're just optimizing for Chrome, not slowing down any competitors. It's not our fault our competitors don't using our web engine for their browsers."

I mentioned similar shading behavior on another post, when using Firefox with Chrome or native user agents on the plain old Google search page.

I really hope they try this in the EU. The EU regulatory agencies have been on a roll lately.

Yeah, user agent switch to chrome made YouTube vid instantly load. Real shitty google!

Ah, I was wondering why YouTube was taking so long to load recently. I thought it was just because their code was shit, and it turns out I was right, but not in the way I thought.

They are really the worst scumbags ever. They want world domination.

I smell a spicy lawsuit

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?

This cant be legal

Stop using youtube. It is made of poop.

Let's hope Europe stars investigating Google as a gatekeeper. That seemed to work miracles on Apple.

So they're doing the same thing as that time they killed Edge and stretched its skin over chromium?

So thats why it was buffering 24/7

Lately (few months) YouTube will not load whatsoever on my android phone nor tablet very often, activating a VPN fixes it instantly. Using basic YouTube app

"Ok, so blocking adblock hasn't worked" "Let's just slow them down" "That's a great idea, no-one will ever notice"

• Winning lines from the competitive glue sniffing awards

Holy fuck I hope they get the pants sued off of them

So, how to spoof chrome?

Reminds me of the "Netscape Navigator has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" errors that Windows 98 used to throw.

It would only throw one, and you could just move it out of the way and keep using Netscape.

Bruh. I thought that was uBlock bypassing the ad or something.

Time to start copying those videos, irrespective of copyright, onto PeerTube instances.

Not that I think Google is a great company, but why is this on its own proof of anything based on this single persons video evidence? In my single person test I don't see that 5 second delay when using Firefox and browsing around Youtube. Seems far more likely to be an issue with this persons browser setup than something Google did to me.

Huh, I noticed YouTube videos taking a little extra longer to load.

What’s why it sucked ass this weekend?!? Fuckers.

I noticed logging out of your YouTube account helps.

I just opened a private window in Firefox.

Not happening for me currently, but that definitely sounds like something Google would do. Good thing Firefox lets you easily change your user agent.

It's long past time to flesh out our antitrust laws to deal with these greedy tech giants.

Seems that FF is not the target:

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/17zq1jj/youtube_is_reportedly_slowing_down_videos_for/ka0utpq/

Why would they spend resources to enrage 3% (at most) of their users?

There's me thinking I had stuffed up my pFsense config. It had me duped into thinking I was responsible!

I've been using Firefox for about a year now, and I've definitely seen that 5 second loading delay in Firefox. Every time, the page partially loads like it does in the video, then sits for 5 seconds, then populates all the video thumb nails. It was driving me knows, made me think my Firefox was screwed up, or internet routing issues between me and Youtube.

Those assholes, how malicious!

Antitrust lawsuit, here we go!

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 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.

Don't be evil.

Oh, this is about the delay if you're using a full adblocker? I'd assumed this was about the awful choppy rendering performance I get in FF Mobile when it's just starting up a vid (which smooths out after about 5 seconds). I just use FF on Android to be able to run YT vids in the background or with my phone-screen locked.

Wait. Again?

Is it messing up in Smarttube too? Smarttube keeps buffering for me, or maybe it's just a bug.

sounds desperate. I'd be selling google stock if I had any, are they really so dependent on loans that interest rates are killing them or is this more AI fuelled bullshit?

I'm A YouTube Premium subscriber, and I've been noticing this delay on my TV for a few days now - a very noticeable, long pause when opening the home screen until the thumbnails are loaded. I'll explicitly check other places too now, I'm not sure if it's also happening in Firefox for me.

Did not notice it today, but I am running ublock origin and they got my back.

If Chrome is known for one thing, it's absurd User-Agent strings. Why not make it even more absurd???

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (Ahahaha; Fuck you Google; This is actually) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0

They have all the decision makers in their payrolls. They will stop at nothing !

Bro.....

I noticed a delay on Opera with uBlock. I attributed it to invisible fights between the adblock and youtube. But idk if that's relevant, I think Opera GX is chromium based.

@db0

This is starting to get into the antitrust arena. DOJ needs to take action.

Use Invidious or Piped in combination with LibRedirect, that will solve the issue

Honestly thought this was a glitch because it has happened before where youtube would freeze, usually from some backend error, and the whole page wouldn't load.

Really getting desperate lol.

i was wondering about this! very dumb.

The YouTube viewing experience on FF is terrible. I have premium no ads and still manage to break the interface occasionally by clicking a new video or seeking the video playing.

Fuck Google

I’ve been noticing a lot of ‘interesting’ behavior with data-hungry websites when I use more privacy-focused measures lately.

Gmail logs me out of Safari at least weekly now for no apparent reason, other than to inconvenience me.
Gmail also refuses to deliver any emails forwarded through hide my email. They simply do not arrive, not even to spam. I had to start using another email service for hide my email. (Additionally, every email I get from Apple gets tagged with a phishing warning, which is just petty and funny.)
Facebook sends an email every time I log in (once or twice a month) to tell me that Firefox is suspicious because I use ad-blockers and private windows.

They've done this before, a long time ago, with IE11. For those that only remember its early years, later releases of Internet Explorer were actually decently compliant - but Google still prevented them from accessing places like Google Maps for having improper support. User agent switchers caused it to display perfectly.

In addition to the fact that I remember this happening several years ago, I'm pretty sure this has been an issue for a while. When I decided to exclusively use Firefox about a year ago, YouTube as a whole would load slowly and it still does.

And I hate the fact that Google knows that they will benefit from this because, unfortunately, a majority of YouTube users are sheeple.

Where is this location in the pic?

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.

I haven't even noticed bc my internet is only 2 Mbps

I'm not seeing any delays, 5 second or otherwise, when using Firefox.

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

1. Spoof the user-agent and at the same time clear cache (you can disable cache when reloading through the developer's tool), or
2. Clear cache, spoof the user-agent to Chrome. Load page, disable the spoofing, reload.

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.

Reading the comments, It looks to be ad related, and maybe Firefox’s built in privacy tools are the root of the problem?

Once upon a time, Google wanted to kill the user-agent.

I had a feeling this was the case. Youtube has been painful for the past month now.

I feel like Reddit is doing the same shit.

No wonder why YouTube got weird for me

Does not happen for me Safari or Firefox.

What if we are already using YouTube premium and have ublock on FF. Would user agent spoof still be needed??

How annoying.

Here is a link of someone finding a Timeoutset: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/

Any extensions you'd recommend for having Firefox spoof chrome?

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.

Is this something I'm just too invidioused to understand?

I'm not seeing this issue on Firefox?

Well that sounds illegal, it also sounds like Mozilla will see them in court.

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.)

So this is way we can’t have nice things!

I’m seeing this on Safari with the AdGuard content blocker extension as well.