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!
Elon Musk was good, but after a failed experiment for the good of mankind he was deviated… now he is misunderstood, like Frankenstein’s Monster
WTF did I just watch?
Don’t ask me, one day a shit worse than that (the spongebob video) popped up in my feed and I watched it… now I’m cursed to spread the curse too, so I won’t suffer alone
Must have learned that from his role model, Putin.
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.
you spent 20 minutes going through this while i just ran a ping test in 30 seconds
it’s real
I know that you are memeing - but some ppl probably don’t have the background to see the difference.
A ping does not contain a http header containing a user agent. The response to a ping is not a webpage - and even if it was, your console won’t execute the JS.
It is rather clear, that this code is not aimed at firefox users to slow down their loading time.
alternatively it’s just well designed
That’s borderline persecution fetish.
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.
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That is not their official website btw. The maintainer of uBO has stated that he doesn’t want a website
He doesn’t want a forum or a website, thus he won’t have any costs and he won’t have to accept donations meaning he doesn’t have to deal with the administrative workload and that way he has more time to develop uBlock Origin.
Source: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don’t-you-accept-donations%3F
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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 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.
Google is declared “too big to fail” and get a multi-million dollar bailout
“But you see, capitalists take on a risk…”
Tax dollars are paying for that right?
I’m Dutch myself, but i know a lot of people who can’t afford another increase in cost of living…i’m quite certain America has many more people in the same situation.
we get a lot of people learning what “digital sovereignity” means
just kidding, the state is going to pay every business affected gajillion dollars to buy more google
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.
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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.
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.
Bot, you are useless in this case
its trying its best.
Any difference between Piped and NewPipe?
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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.
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.
Then I use someone else’s laptop or phone and see the amount of ads everywhere and how much time is taking away from them.
How can one put up with that…I’d use FreeTube, but the quality was not as good as on YouTube itself, has that changed?
I don’t know. For any given video? I’ve seen high res options, but TBH I don’t watch much on YT - certainly not movies, or anything that’d really matter - and don’t pay much attention to it.
It’s free, if you want to check out how the current version works.
Yeah, just gave it a shot. I’m just too accustomed to YTs quality that the drop just isn’t worth to me, at least while I’m still not ad-block blocked.
What’s the drop in quality you see? Is there an example video? I can’t detect a difference.
It only supports up to 1080p/60fps, most videos I watch these days have 1440p or more, so the increased bitrate immediately makes the videos look a lot more crisp. For just a side to side 1080p comparison, there isn’t much difference, just some more artifacting on the edges of things (not really that noticable). Maybe due to the YT stream being VP9 and FreeTube AVC? I don’t really know to be honest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i’ve got some irrational nerd rage going on right now reading this
less about google, more about the individuals who programmed this. holy hell
