Google slows down Firefox users when watching YouTube....

This reminds me of Elon Musk when he started artificially slowing down links to websites he doesn't like... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/15/twitter-x-links-delayed/

So much for "free speech" lol
- Every single word that comes out of Elon's mouth is a big fat fucking lie. I don't understand how people can still trust that guy with anything.
- Free speech is throttled. You might want to buy premium speech for only $19.99 per month!
Must have learned that from his role model, Putin.

I know everyone wants to be mad, and I'm no fan of Google. But this is almost certainly an unintentional bug.

Google, more than anything, wants watch hours for ad money. They don't want you frustrated by the alow ux. They want you watching advertisements.

Not a bug - they literally added a 5 second timer in the code: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
- Yes, there is a 5s timeout in youtube's code. However, it is not aimed at Firefox users.
  
  The same code shows up on a fresh chrome installation without any extensions. And the code does not check for the user agent. So the 5s timeout is not there to make Firefox a bad choice for youtube. Following response to your link goes a bit deeper into what the code could mean: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/ka08uqj/
I could believe this, but if google doesn't want me to be frustrated on youtube, why do they make it so annoying?

Pushing youtubetv in annoying new ways, putting ads in the middle of songs, serving ads with frustrating frequency, using multiple types of ads so your brain can't just tune out until you hit skip, locking basic functions like add to playlist behind premium accounts.

From their behavior it sure looks like they want me to be annoyed.
- They want you making money from them. So watching ads and paying subscription fees. If you aren’t doing either of those things, you’re causing them to lose money. So yeah, they’re gonna make it annoying.
wants watch hours for ad money

Ads which can still be blocked fairly easily on Firefox, unlike in Chrome, which is banning ublock(& likely all other blockers) browser-wide next year. They want to make the firefox experience worse so people have a reason to go back to their ad infested browser.
- Nah this doesn't make sense. You, and everyone else, will sit through five seconds of loading vs watching an ad. You know this, Google know this.
  
  Occams razor is at play here. If they want to to be conspiratorial, they have better and smarter ways to do it.
Well this rumor came from the linus tech tips forums so just by that I assume it's sensationalized bullshit.
Unfortunately not. It's intentional as someone else looked to the explanation below
If they are able to make you switch, you become a heck of a lot more profitable long term as they’re able to collect a loooot more data

Might be a very dumb financial decision but maybe it's time to rethink that whole google search contract renewal coming up in a year or so. Feeling like a toxic relationship

Edit: the time frame is just an assumption due to it being a 3 year contract made in 2020. I would try to seek a relationship with bing tbh, it sucks with privacy but would be a kick to google's balls. Plus the majority of firefox users who start giving a crap about their privacy, change to duckduckgo in the beginning of their journey so it wont be a massive shift from bing imo in terms of searching experience.

The biggest problem is the loss of users that that incurs… it would be long term damage for temporary financial boost. I think they already tried once to switch to yahoo and it was an unmitigated disaster
- Yeah I expect that would be the case but I honestly think out of all the other longterm rivals with deep pockets, bing is firefox's best chance of maintaining most of it's current userbase and maybe even growing it in the longterm especially if bing ai's features keep expanding. Else why would bard be a thing if google didn't feel a bit threatened. Again just my thoughts would like to hear what other opinions are out there.
  
  Edit: would also be a big win for microsoft since a respectable browser is now using it's search engine and not just a butt of the joke like edge is, so maybe firefox can leveage a good chunk of change from them to keep their browser running for a while unlike the deal they did with google. Think it would ultimately destroy edge though but since edge can now be user uninstalled thats bound to happen in a couple of years anyways and with this deal bing will still get some traffic so still a win for microsoft.
I would be willing to donate if they dropped ties with Google to help supplement the less of revenue
- Google paying them an absolute shitload of money (still pretty small compared to what Google pays Apple). It'd be pretty hard to get the donations to make up a missing half billion.

Has space bar stopped working for anyone else with Youtube? I keep spamming it and it sometimes doesn't work.

Us j, k, l (-10s, play/pause, +10s). Does not require player focus.
- Based vim user
Wait its not just me?
- I had a feeling this was Youtube fuckery.

Here's the actual source: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/

The link in the post is just recycling the reddit content.

Guys relax. Most of the 'research' comes from this reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/

It points out following code in youtube's polymer script:

setTimeout(function() {
    c();
    a.resolve(1)
 }, 5E3);

But exactly this code does show up on a stock installation of chrome too, and it does not check for the user agent. One of the responses goes a bit deeper into what the code above could do: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/ka08uqj/

It is rather clear, that this code is not aimed at firefox users to slow down their loading time.

Mine instantly loads. Perhaps there's some other stuff going on with hardware/software or something this person is running?

Same, I am not facing any issues too.
It's just typical sensationalized bullshit with people jumping to conclusions based off random ass Reddit threads. This apparently originated from the linus tech tips forums so it's probably straight bs.
I use YT every day and use Firefox as my main browser. I've never experienced this. Just tested out of curiosity, it loads fine.
I've experienced this issue firsthand, although it's more like 3 to 4 seconds. Changing the user agent to Chrome causes videos to load instantly, and restoring it to the original user agent causes the "lag".

Some possibly relevant information: I'm running Firefox with unlock Origin on Linux Mint. I've also received the "playback will be disabled after 3 videos" message in the past -- so it's possibly only affecting users they strongly suspect are still using ad-blockers with workarounds.
Yeah it appears on chrome as well. There isn't any evidence that it's purposely "slowing down" anything. I had a quick glance at the Reddit thread (been avoiding it as much as possible, but had to visit in incognito to confirm the source for this outrage) and it looks like it's part of a small script to check if an adblocker is present and disabling video ads from playing.

It's possible FF have a delay in playing that first video, but also the test methodology isn't super reliable because of caching.

Use Piped or Invidious, it also bypasses ads and tracking. It works best in combination with LibRedirect, which you can configure to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Piped or Invidious.

Freetube has been the biggest life improvement on how I consume YouTube. The fact that it gets better recommendations and I can list my subscriptions in an easy way, even import them is something I miss in all the rest of alternatives.
- Between FreeTube and NewPipe, I haven't visited YouTube in about a year. It makes it a bit surreal when I see so many complaints about ads.
Can I set this up so I can still browse my YouTube recommended and only redirect when I select the actual video?
- You can exclude https://youtube.com/ in the LibRedirect settings. For some reason that doesn't seem to work though, but you can always click on the LibRedirect icon in the extension toolbar and hit 'Redirect to Original'. You can also set up a keybinding for that.
Any difference between Piped and NewPipe?
- NewPipe is an Android app that allows you to watch YouTube videos without ads or tracking. It exposes your IP to Google servers though. Piped consists of a web client and a backend server, it uses the NewPipeExtractor on the server to load the video as well as all the metadata from Google servers and then serves it to you through the web client. That way, you don't have to connect to Google, only the Piped server communicates with YouTube servers.

I wonder what would happen if Google manages to destroy itself with increasing shenanigans like this.

I mean, so much of digital based stuff relies on them for some extent.

First thing that comes to mind is user agent spoofer. Anyway I say let them, it's their company with userbase content and it's based in US. They can do whatever they want with it because terms of service. I can just look at my sexy John Oliver poster on the wall for 30 min and replace their service.

First thing that comes to mind is user agent spoofer.

If we all go ahead and spoof our user agents to Chrome, Google will say 'No one uses Firefox'. Use better solutions like Invidious and Piped in combination wit LibRedirect instead.
- Yeah cheers. I've been using Invidious and NewPipe for a while now..:-)
- @netchami @middlemanSI
  
  Thank you, thank you, thank you!
  
  Piped is not blocked on my school/work wifi and looks better than invidious.
  
  LibRedirect is Awesome!
- If we all go ahead and spoof our user agents to Chrome, Google will say 'No one uses Firefox'. Use better solutions like Invidious and Piped in combination wit LibRedirect instead.
  
  Do these pass through the user agent to YouTube? Otherwise they'll have the same issue with Firefox being underrepresented.
It's actually how the discovered this, user agent was changed to chrome and it was no longer slowed down

I’m not signed in, bitches, your ploy does not work here.