This is definitely the case for anything like Google or Adobe Analytics which are blocked by the default tracking protection. You can’t compare the results directly due to bots but on sites I’ve controlled our servers saw significant disparities between the server logs and the percentages commonly reported as global share.

I&#x27;m a too proud Firefox user to do that. But not all of us are fanatics like that.

I sometimes wonder if the use of Firefox is under reported just because a lot of it&#x27;s users are power users, installing extensions that spoof the user agent. I know I did for a long while, making my Firefox pretend it was Chrome on a Windows machine.

The most interesting part from the discussion was noting it&#x27;s implemented in the most basic, easily avoidable way (just spoof chrome) implying engineers unhappy with these tasks.@dang or op, wrong link. Should be: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17z8hsz&#x2F;youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17z8hsz&#x2F;youtube_ha...</a>

It&#x27;s still trivial to block ads, but the delay has recently started for me, after never happening before. So presumably a very intentional volley in the ongoing war to own your attention.

It&#x27;s weird but I saw the anti-blocker modal a week or two but them it stopped appearing and never saw it since shrug

I still use adblockers perfectly fine on Youtube. There was never a real interruption in adblocking either. You just need ublock origin + bypass paywalls.

When I ran into the adblocker-blocker (Firefox + uBlock Origin), I noticed that I could watch videos if logged out. So I just stayed logged out, and haven&#x27;t seen an anti-adblock message since. Or an ad.Added bonus, I&#x27;m less tempted to venture into the comments section...

Another way I noticed is good at skipping ads when adblocker fails is to refresh the page. When it loads again it does not play the ad.

This is interesting as I had noticed this happening to me (in Chrome) when the anti-ad-blocking started. I assumed that it was YT&#x27;s way of &quot;annoying&quot; me still while no ads were shown... It was eventually replaced with the &quot;You cant use Adblockers modal&quot; and now I just tolerate the ads.So I wonder if that 5s delay has always been there.

Without studying the minified code I wouldn&#x27;t assume malice just yet, this could be just an inexperienced developer trying to lazily fix some browser-specific bug, or something that accidentally made it to production like you say

Unlikely. Google has been breaking non-Chromium (or sometimes even just non-Google Chrome) browsers for years on YouTube and their other websites. It was especially egregious when MSFT was trying their own EdgeHTML&#x2F;Trident-based Edge. Issues would go away by faking user-agent.

&gt; Trying to be charitable here [...]There is no reason for charity with such a large power difference. For Firefox, &quot;bugs&quot; like this can really end up being a lost one-shot game.It&#x27;s like people walking by and casually reaching for your phone. It&#x27;s always meant as a joke, unless you don&#x27;t pull it away fast enough. Then suddenly it wasn&#x27;t a joke - and your phone is gone.This is not rooted in any reservation against Google in particular. If you are a mega-corporation with the power to casually crush competitors, you should really want to be held to a high standard. You do not want to be seen as the accidentally-fucking-others-up-occasionally kind of company.

If, with Youtube size, they do not test on Firefox, this is as much malice as doing this deliberately.

Trying to be charitable here: could this be a debug&#x2F;test artefact that inadvertantly got into production?

IMHO, this kind of things are not done by engineers.<pre><code> * Marketing&#x2F;Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: &quot;how slowing down impacts your revenue&quot;
 * engineer adds a flag, with different control parameters
 * Some genius in Product figures this out and updates the experiment to slow down for competitors
</code></pre>
When company gets a backlash from public: &quot;oops, we forgot to clean up all parameters of feature flag and it accidentally impacted Firefox&quot;

At least they didn&#x27;t rewrite the sleep code to do crypto mining.

Because it works.Good engineering isn&#x27;t about being obtuse and convoluted, it&#x27;s about making stuff that works.

follow the moneyemployees will follow orders, orders are made by people who control the money

Maybe the engineer that was tasked with implementing was annoyed with the task and did it on purpose this way.

You&#x27;re mad that they&#x27;re using a function for its intended purpose?

Speaking as someone who only very occasionally does browser related programming, what is the supposed sin committed here by implementing it this way?

Google employs 30000 engineers, it&#x27;s impossible for them all to be decent.

I&#x27;m more mad about the complete failure of regulators to break up an obvious monopoly than I am with the engineers (though they&#x27;re not saints either)

It is not literally a sleep though, isn&#x27;t setTimeout more like a creating a delayed event? (I am not a webdev)

Reminds me A Ticket to Tranai by Robert Sheckley where they deliberately asked to slow down robots in order for people to be angry and destroy them.

I&#x27;m not even mad about Google making my artificially wait 5s for using firefox.I&#x27;m mad that such a big company with suposelly decent engineers, are making me wait 5s with literally a sleep, how is even possible to do such thing in such a rudimentary way? I would be like damn that was smart, this feels like, seriously this is the level?

Totally possible that the minifier did this, yes.

I wonder if this actually decreases the byte over wire. 5000 compresses a lot better.... sorry for OT

Because 5E3 is shorter than 5000, just like you can often see !0 to get &quot;true&quot; in minimize code because it saves two characters.

Is the use of the &quot;E&quot; notation common in JS? I can see that it (could be) less bytes, obviously more efficient for bigger values... Looking at the script I can see it is minified or whatever we call that these days. I guess my question really is: did someone write &quot;5E3&quot; or did the minifier choose it?(Sorry this is heading into the weeds, but I&#x27;m not really a web developer so maybe someone can tell me!)

Capitalism as it exists is, at its core, anticompetitive.

How is this not blatant anticompetitive behavior?

For the completeness, the omitted Uint8Array is the following 340-byte binary (here in base64):<pre><code> GkXfo59ChoEBQveBAULygQRC84EIQoKEd2VibUKHgQRChYECGFOAZwH&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;FUmpZpkq17GD
 D0JATYCGQ2hyb21lV0GGQ2hyb21lFlSua6mup9eBAXPFh89gnOoYna+DgQFV7oEBhoVWX1ZQOOCK
 sIEBuoEBU8CBAR9DtnUB&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;+eBAKDMoaKBAAAAEAIAnQEqAQABAAvHCIWFiJmEiD+CAAwN
 YAD+5WoAdaGlpqPugQGlnhACAJ0BKgEAAQALxwiFhYiZhIg&#x2F;ggAMDWAA&#x2F;uh4AKC7oZiBA+kAsQEA
 LxH8ABgAMD&#x2F;0DAAAAP7lagB1oZumme6BAaWUsQEALxH8ABgAMD&#x2F;0DAAAAP7oeAD7gQCgvKGYgQfQ
 ALEBAC8R&#x2F;AAYADA&#x2F;9AwAAAD+5WoAdaGbppnugQGllLEBAC8R&#x2F;AAYADA&#x2F;9AwAAAD+6HgA+4ID6Q==
</code></pre>
VLC somehow refuses to play it, but its nominal length can be verified with a short JS code like:<pre><code> v = document.createElement(&#x27;video&#x27;);
 v.src = `data:video&#x2F;webm;base64,&lt;as above&gt;`;
 await new Promise(resolve =&gt; v.onloadedmetadata = resolve);
 console.log(v.duration);</code></pre>

Why is it only trying to detect ads when the user agent is Firefox?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17zdpkl&#x2F;this_behaviour_from_google_is_beyond_disgusting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17zdpkl&#x2F;this_behav...</a>

It is still better to wait 5s without ad than with ad.

I couldn&#x27;t reproduce the 5s wait in multiple scenarios in Firefox (various combinations of being logged in &#x2F; not being logged in &#x2F; without adblocker &#x2F; with adblocker) and couldn&#x27;t reproduce a 5s wait time in any of them, it played back immediately in each case (when without adblocker, using a second video to have one start without ad). I tested on Linux.What exact combination of circumstances is required to trigger the multi second wait time?

Okay, I&#x27;m sold on the delay, but where&#x27;s the code that detects non-chrome?Do they serve different js based on the user agent header? If they delay chrome too there&#x27;s no foul.

if it’s anti-adblock, does it run even with premium?

That is not correct. The surrounding code gives some more context:<pre><code> h=document.createElement(&quot;video&quot;);l=new Blob([new Uint8Array([&#x2F;* snip *&#x2F;])],{type:&quot;video&#x2F;webm&quot;});
 h.src=lc(Mia(l));h.ontimeupdate=function(){c();a.resolve(0)};
 e.appendChild(h);h.classList.add(&quot;html5-main-video&quot;);setTimeout(function(){e.classList.add(&quot;ad-interrupting&quot;)},200);
 setTimeout(function(){c();a.resolve(1)},5E3);
 return m.return(a.promise)})}
</code></pre>
As far as I understand, this code is a part of the anti-adblocker code that (slowly) constructs an HTML fragment such as `&lt;div class=&quot;ad-interrupting&quot;&gt;&lt;video src=&quot;blob:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;</a>...&quot; class=&quot;html5-main-video&quot;&gt;&lt;&#x2F;video&gt;&lt;&#x2F;div&gt;`. It will detect the adblocker once `ontimeupdate` event didn&#x27;t fire for 5 full seconds (the embedded webm file itself is 3 seconds long), which is the actual goal for this particular code. I do agree that the anti-adblocker attempt itself is still annoying.

How&#x2F;When does that script get loaded? It’s not showing up in my network tab. Videos also load instant as usual.

This is happening to me in Chrome as well so I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s tied to the browser you use.Curiously it happens only on one profile, in another Chrome profile (which is also logged in to the same Google account) it does not happen. Both profiles run the code in your comment, but the one that does not have the delay does not wait for it to complete.The only difference I spotted was that the profile that loads slowly does not include the #player-placeholder element in the initial HTML response. Maybe whether it sends it or not is tied to previous ad-blocker usage?What does piss me off is that even if you clear cookies and local storage and turn off all extensions in both profiles it still somehow &quot;knows&quot; which profile is which, and I don&#x27;t know how it&#x27;s doing it.

From reddit discussion (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17ywbjj&#x2F;comment&#x2F;k9w3ei4&#x2F;?utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17ywbjj&#x2F;comment&#x2F;k9...</a>):&gt; To clarify it more, it&#x27;s simply this code in their polymer script link:&gt; setTimeout(function() {
 c();
 a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);&gt; which doesn&#x27;t do anything except making you wait 5s (5E3 = 5000ms = 5s). You can search for it easily in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;96766c85&#x2F;jsbin&#x2F;desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.vflset&#x2F;desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.js">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;96766c85&#x2F;jsbin&#x2F;desktop_pol...</a>

I support the enforcement of anti-trust laws against Microsoft, but I am at the same time puzzled at how much Google is allowed to get away with. They are simultaneously maintaining the biggest browser platform while also being the biggest content and advertisement provider, AND they have a major influence on the development of web standards, AND they control the development of a major OS (Android) for accessing the web, where their browser comes pre-installed. And now they are actively exploiting their position and trying to sabotage the competition.My point in highlighting it is that I think there is a lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws and&#x2F;or a lack of laws that would prevent Google behaving in this way, since I think it is so much worse than what Microsoft has been doing with Windows not allowing users to uninstall crapware.

Google, Samsung, Apple, and others have to abide by the same law, Microsoft isn&#x27;t special.I also don&#x27;t understand what this law has to do with the topic.

I hope not, but they are certainly trying. I fear they have become an uncontrollable behemoth which have failed to identify alternative business models to their unsustainable ad business, and now they are trying to perform a major power grab to basically take over the web and force people to watch ads or pay.

Is there maybe some road map or purpose statement on this? it’s not that i don’t believe that this is absolutely true (i’m sure it’s the wet dream of all SV companies…) but google’s offerings are so inconsistent that if that’s really their goal i just can’t see how they mean to get there. every answer to competition is a half baked answer in my experience and i truly just can’t see how google means to do this. google plus i thought was supposed to be this but that did not pan out well at all.and i also don’t see how they can really do this at least in EU, at least not for long until the regulators catch wind.

I hope not, but I suspect they will succeed. My observation is that the vast majority of people around me here in Europe see Google as completely trustworthy.It&#x27;s truly profound how split-second loading delays contribute to a negative impression about digital products. I guess we&#x27;re all worn out from using our devices. Most of us just want &quot;thing&quot; ASAP, and we&#x27;ll compulsively click &#x27;agree&#x27; to anything that happens to stand in the way of it.&#x27;Why don&#x27;t you switch to Chrome, it works better&#x2F;faster.&#x27; is not the sort of social pressure I can quickly respond to with my privacy concerns. And it&#x27;s not like I&#x27;m not going to get an eye-roll or tin-foil-man comments from the mom-pop-type people in my life.

Whatever their competition will be, sign me up now. I really like their products, the company itself and their philosophy not so much

What pisses me off about this is that people are such drones for The Google via GMail (mostly) that they don&#x27;t question this since it works for them. Nevermind that Google is a user-hostile megacorp that will screw them as soon as it makes financial sense to do so.Ever talk to someone random about Google&#x27;s privacy bullshit and why Chrome is not a great browser? Nobody cares, and they think you&#x27;re an idiot.So, Google will carry on until it&#x27;s too late.

For now.Google is working on making a premium internet based on their services that permeate the whole web which they plan to serve only to &quot;trusted devices&quot; running Chrome - I do not think this is going to work out well for them.

To be fair, the IE6 problem wasn’t just massive usage, it was massive usage plus complete stagnation.Chrome has high but not massive usage, and it hasn’t stagnated. It has a separate problem though: the lack of stagnation is actually a drive towards Google’s somewhat unhealthy vision for the web.

Chrome have been the IE6 situation all over again for a while now, except this time it&#x27;s possibly too late to walk back. They are pretty much done taking over the standard.

While the EU has recently forced Microsoft to allow users to uninstall pre-installed crapware, Google is apparently unhindered in their ongoing (and succeeding) mission to take control of all layers of the consumer-facing internet.

Huh, I nearly exclusively use Brave for YouTube because it does a good job blocking ads and I haven’t noticed any slowdown.I did see the ad nag once when I accidentally went to YouTube in safari

I have been getting this same slow-down for a month or two, but using Brave - which is the same user-agent as Chrome.I would imagine changing the user-agent at all will (temporarily) fix it, rather than to a Chrome user-agent specifically.Probably targets ad blocking users rather than non-Chrome users.

Assume this is supposed to be the link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17z8hsz&#x2F;youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17z8hsz&#x2F;youtube_ha...</a>

Wait until the EU gets their hands on this..

Correct Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17z8hsz&#x2F;youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17z8hsz&#x2F;youtube_ha...</a>

I also noticed this during the weekend. I initially assumed that the new uBO filters are too blame -- guess that&#x27;s exactly what Google is going for with these hostile measures, and it kinda works.

How come this video isn&#x27;t just showing caching at work?

I haven&#x27;t noticed an issue yet.My issue at the moment is while ublock can still block ads, every video automatically pauses like 5 seconds in and I need to hit play again.

I thought it was my adblocker (uBlock) causing the issue.

Hey, Ferhat here, I want to create an alternative for Reddit. Could you help me to build a better internet? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;buQmB8VJeS" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;buQmB8VJeS</a>

Sadly there is still no alternative to Youtube. 
Same with Reddit.

The UBo team commented on the Reddit thread that they were looking into it. So it may have already been fixed.

This just... isn&#x27;t happening for me? My only extensions are UBo, Return Youtube Dislike and Sponsorblock, so I presume a UBo filter is either fixing it or the change isn&#x27;t rolled out to all users yet.

It&#x27;s been happening on Chrome as well for the past few days so I wouldn&#x27;t be so quick to jump to conclusions.

I noticed Youtube started doing this in the last couple days, and I use FF. What a silly thing to do, about as juvenile as a company can be.

Or potentially a concurrency bug trigger? &quot;One in 1000 times X takes a bit too long and causes problem Y; I&#x27;ll make X take minimum 5 seconds so I can trigger Y reliably.&quot; Then fixes Y but forgets to remove the delay.

The people working there are also just people like you.

I can&#x27;t believe billion dollar companies &#x27;solve&#x27; bugs the same way as i do

It&#x27;s timeout that&#x27;s part of loading ads. That code isn&#x27;t blocking anything. The headline here is wrong.

A 5 SECOND timeout for a concurrency issue? I doubt it.

Such fix won&#x27;t sleep for 5000 ms though. In my reading it looks like a part of the adblocker detection code. (EDIT: Relocated the actual analysis to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38346602">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38346602</a> for more visibility.)

I am not getting this behaviour in Firefox 120. Tried it, logged out as well.&gt; setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);The code looks like a silly concurrency bug fix, i.e., a lazy way to force ordering.

What do you mean by &quot;browsing&quot; Youtube? Clicking new links for the purpose of entertainment?My post was only about playing videos.

Use Invidious, Piped or any other frontend that doesn&#x27;t track and manipulate you.

In addition to Piped, and Invidious, mentioned by sibling comments, which allow you to subscribe, search, and provide recommendations, you can use a complete CLI workflow with something like ytfzf[0], or, you can use the search commands on yt-dlp[1], which are also accessibly through mpv using the ytdl:&#x2F;&#x2F; prefix.Getting familiar with such tools not only replaces the terrible UXes you have to be subjected to, but also gives you the power and freedom to be creative with how you use Youtube and other online streaming sites.I wrote various tiny scripts to replace all my needs for Youtube search, using any highlighted text, with a shortcut, Youtube Music, with a synced plain text file of song titles and a shuffle-on-read script, and more curiously, a script to help me slowly go through all thousands of my partner&#x27;s favorite songs, and then, using shortcuts, add them to my own favorites, decide on them later, add them to the &quot;what the heck do you listen to&quot; friendly banter list, or the &quot;my ears bleeding&quot; list, etc. Much better UX then anything the slow web UIs can offer, and with minimum hacking.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ytfzf.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ytfzf.github.io&#x2F;</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yt-dlp&#x2F;yt-dlp">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yt-dlp&#x2F;yt-dlp</a>

I think you’re missing the point. How can I browse Youtube in mpv?

&gt; I really don&#x27;t understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends.- Because I don&#x27;t see ads with YouTube Premium- Because I add things to my playlists- Because I more often than not find interesting things to watch there- Because I like using it on my phone or TVThere&#x27;s a lot of reasons why someone would prefer the official apps over some third party app that might break every few months.

Because I don&#x27;t want to fuck about working against the platform, opting myself into something that&#x27;ll break at any moment.I would much rather put up with Youtube than be frustrated when my &#x27;alternate frontend&#x27; one day breaks and i need to figure out a workaround.

Because using the website is a better experience. None of those tools worked with Sponsorblock last time I tried, for one.I don&#x27;t want to yt-dlp every video, Piped and Invidious both have awful frontends in comparison, even the Newpipe dev admitted to using Vanced at some point, and yt-dlp needs some massaging to get the right video quality (and it can&#x27;t download some videos at all).If any of your solutions were better for the majority, the majority would be using them. Youtube&#x27;s ad blocker war is making the platform worse for everyone, but having a couple of billions of developer power behind your platform still beats any open source video players built for fun.

&gt;I really don&#x27;t understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends.I&#x27;m a technically proficient user that&#x27;s written custom bash scripts for youtube-dl combined with ffmpeg to download videos locally and I still use the official Youtube desktop web browser UI every day for several reasons:+ transcripts and close-captioning (use Ctrl+F search for text to find the section of video that starts talking about the topic I&#x27;m interested in)+ many videos have index of chapters (deep links), table-of-contents+ viewers&#x27; comments (especially valuable for crowdsourced feedback on DIY videos to point out extra tips, or flaws, etc)+ external links mentioned (Amazon links to products is especially valuable for DIY tutorials)+ convenient hot links to related videos (part 2, part 3, etc). Not every creator makes &quot;playlists&quot;+ Youtube web UI has superfast video scrubbing of the timeline. A local video player like VLC scrubbing of the timeline is very slow compared to Youtube because the youtube backend pre-analyzes the entire video and generates a bunch of timeline thumbnails at multiple intervals. This makes the Youtube web UI timeline scrubbing very fluid with responsive visual feedback.I like downloading with yt-dlp but I also lose a lot of functionality when I watch videos in VLC instead of the Youtube desktop webbrowser UI. The above points are not relevant to the terrible Youtube app on mobile and tablets.

The web frontend just works. The other frontends tend to have issues, which even if they&#x27;re not deal-breakers are annoying. I won&#x27;t put ideology over using what works best. And clicking a link, then clicking play, beats copying the URL then pasting it into a command line.Of course this only works because by default (since I have an ad blocker anyways) I don&#x27;t get bombarded with ads on the web frontend, and so far I&#x27;ve seen the adblocker nag screen once (a failure which uBlock Origin seems to have swiftly corrected).

This is the way.I really don&#x27;t understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends. You get bombarded with ads, you&#x27;re constantly tracked and experimented on, and your behavior is used to improve their algorithms in order to keep you on the site for as long as possible. It&#x27;s a hostile user experience, just like most of the mainstream web.Whenever possible, I suggest using Invidious, Piped, Newpipe, yt-dlp, and anything but the official frontends.I try to compensate the creators I follow via other means if they have an alternative income source, but I refuse to be forced to participate in an exploitative business model that is responsible for the awful state of the modern web.

I implemented downloading of youtube thumbnails for one of these scripts.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marzzzello&#x2F;mpv_thumbnail_script">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marzzzello&#x2F;mpv_thumbnail_script</a>

One feature it lacks is seek bar previews. There are thumbnail scripts but they don&#x27;t use the available youtube thumbnails.

Or use any of the many alternative YouTube frontends: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mendel5&#x2F;alternative-front-ends#youtube">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mendel5&#x2F;alternative-front-ends#youtube</a>

Thanks for this pointer--I hadn&#x27;t heard of mpv, but it works amazingly smoothly.

If you are fluent with the terminal, you don&#x27;t need to suffer from the YT Web UI. Install mpv and yt-dlp. Play videos like this:<pre><code> mpv [--no-video] &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X9zVjEZ7W8Q&quot;
</code></pre>
Option in brackets is optional.

Using firefox 118 on Mac here and seeing no issues. Videos load instantly or near instantly.

Can someone check gmail as well? It loads so slowly under firefox.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs</a>

Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles.They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That&#x27;s it!If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they&#x27;ve picked for you.If you call their support, they&#x27;ll gaslight you and mumble something about &quot;copyright&quot;, which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn&#x27;t restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you.You see, what actually happened, is that some too-smart UX guy at Netflix couldn&#x27;t make a language picker look nice for that many options so he asked a too-smart data science (lol) guy to figure out the most common languages for each region.Here in Australia they picked English, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese because we have a lot of immigrants from those countries. I&#x27;m sure they used very clever algorithms on big data clusters to figure that out. Good job, well done.Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out. Netflix and their $500K total comp Stanford or wherever graduates couldn&#x27;t. So they instructed their call centre staff to lie to their customers.Then they had someone write this idiocy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.netflix.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;node&#x2F;101798" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.netflix.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;node&#x2F;101798</a>&quot;If subtitles for a title are offered in a language but do not display on your device, try another device.&quot;Oh, oh, I&#x27;ll go do that right now! Let me try my PC... nope four languages. On the TV? Four languages. Actually, I have a phone... and... oh... four languages.PS: Thai (only!) subtitles are &quot;special&quot; and use eye-searing HDR maximum white. Like 1,600 nits white that literally leaves green after-images etched into my retina. They have a support page and a pre-prepared set of lies for the support staff to read for that piece of shoddy engineering also.

Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented version? This isn&#x27;t the future we were promised, but it sure is the future we have.

This sort of behavior should be an open-and-shut case of false advertising.  You were told that the video would be a certain resolution.  You gave money as a result of that statement.  You received an inferior product to the one that was described.

By the way, it is 480p. 420 is for something else :)

Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is that I&#x27;m capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they can only be played back at 420p.Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and there&#x27;s nothing telling you about this not being supported in your browser until you&#x27;ve made the purchase (by just allowing 420p and needing to search for why it&#x27;s broken)see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;pm0eqh&#x2F;why_are_my_movies_still_only_480p_its_been_almost&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;pm0eqh&#x2F;why_are_my_...</a>

Enhancer for Youtube allows you to select a min quality, also great for blocking shorts.

Roughly around the same time as the anti-adblocking effort, youtube started just not playing the video stream for me much of the time. I say play a video, it will start playing the audio, and the video will just be a frozen image.In unrelated news, my youtube-dl usage is way, way up.

Get the &quot;Enhancer for Youtube&quot; extension, among many adjustments, it does this clicking for you.I also had this issue, videos would frequently wobble down to like 240p or whatever, on a stable, high speed wired connection.It&#x27;s not an internet problem since I never have to buffer when using this forced setting, so it&#x27;s probably YT trying to save a few bandwidth bucks when they think people aren&#x27;t looking.

That has irked me for quite some time. I always manually select 1080p, because sometimes YT claims it&#x27;s already playing 1080p, but it&#x27;s obviously not and the video starts buffering anew when I select 1080p manually. Quite annoying

Wait, that&#x27;s a Firefox-only issue ?!

I have personally noticed this many times. I’d blink and wonder if it was just my eyes going bad but nope, soon as I select HD quality manually I can read text again.

I remember them starting to do automatic lower-quality streams when this came out[0], but I&#x27;m not sure if this is still the cause for the situation. It could be a general &quot;we see this ISP&#x2F;ASN failing more often with x many concurrent 4k streams, let&#x27;s throw some people on 720p and see if it helps&quot;.0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;398929&#x2F;youtube-defaults-to-lower-resolution-streams-in-the-us.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;398929&#x2F;youtube-defaults-to-l...</a>

I haven&#x27;t see this other than for brief periods during quality switching (it seems to play out the current buffer in lower quality but new chunks are downloaded at the displayed target quality). However for some reason it does often just load at a very low (sub-720p) resolution and I need to manually up the quality or it will never get to the highest quality (I&#x27;m watching on a 4k monitor with great internet and hardware decoding, 4k has never stuttered for me).

It doesn&#x27;t help that 720p quality seems subpar (to me) compared to some years ago.

Yeah, this has bothered me for a while. Switching to alternative youtube interfaces solved that problem :)

Oh, and they also falsely show &quot;4K&quot; in the video quality icon, but &quot;accidentally&quot; play a 720p or even worse quality stream. If you manually select the 4K stream quality, then and only then will YouTube deign to show 4K to you.

I mean it could be that the programmer wanted it to be discovered to draw attention to Google managers&#x27; shenanigans but that seems kind of far fetched.

If I was working at Google and I was tasked with doing that, I&#x27;d half ass it too

I would argue it&#x27;s a bit harder to find if the youtube backend serves files slower for certain browsers. One could even radomize it and sometimes still serve it fast or something. Since you cannot look at the backend code it would be hard to proof anything.

&gt; They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect.And that is &#x2F;not&#x2F; easily discoverable??

ah yes, the fact that they are sabotaging other browsers in a very obvious way is actually proof that they didn&#x27;t meant to sabotage other browsers!

I have a hard time believing that&#x27;s actually what&#x27;s happening. If they wanted to slow down other browsers, why would they choose this easily discoverable way? They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect. It seems more likely this is just a debug snippet that has made it into production by accident.

I noticed this one and it did come to mind that it was, ahem, targetedoverlords: I&#x27;ll give up youtube entirely rather than watch ads&#x2F;contribute towards your revenue

An up-to-date adblocker blocker blocker, most likely. Paying for Premium may also do it.

I&#x27;ve gotten that really slow UI loading almost always lately and I&#x27;ve always assumed that it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m running uBlock Origin.Although I just tried opening two videos and both opened basically instantly.

Using firefox I get &quot;instant&quot; youtube. The video starts playing before most of the rest of the UI has loaded even, definitely under 1 second.Any idea what specifically causes it to happen, rather than just &quot;firefox&quot;?

I&#x27;ve had this slow down show up for me as well. I wonder if there&#x27;s a non malicious explanation, although I&#x27;ll admit I&#x27;m unable to think of a charitable interpretation.Sometimes YouTube also disables features on my home page. For example, at the top of the home page there&#x27;s usually a filter bar with various categories. I haven&#x27;t figured out under what conditions this gets triggered, but there&#x27;s times where the filter bar just disappears.

And that is why these giant companies should be split apart.

On a completely related note, the UK&#x27;s Competitions and Markets Authority has recently been flexing its muscles on digital markets. You may wish to know of this URL, specifically for reporting anti-competitive practices: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;guidance&#x2F;tell-the-cma-about-a-competition-or-market-problem" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;guidance&#x2F;tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...</a>

It&#x27;s a bug they can&#x27;t fix and &quot;if you wait 5 seconds it works&quot;. Also , in 5 seconds, ad blockers are guaranteed to have kicked in

Code generally does not enter the YouTube code base without a lot of review namely (1) performance tests and (2) code reviews from multiple teams. Lines like this almost certainly get flagged&#x2F;increased scrutiny. It would be very hard to imagine multiple people didn’t know about this and assign the blame to a single person.

Youtube is a very toxic environment. Even &quot;informative&quot; content is often toxic, but in a very subtle manner.At google They may be not respecting the web but they are doing firefox users a favor. If you really need to see a video, five seconds won&#x27;t make a difference. If you don&#x27;t need it, five seconds may remind you that you don&#x27;t really need it.Try to see the positives

Use brave. The best youtube premium experience without paying for premium.

Hm, it does not correspond to my observations. I&#x27;m using Firefox and the videos load and start just as they usually do.A&#x2F;B testing? :)

lol, I think this ended up being one of several factors that made me switch to firefox (now vivaldi).The &quot;extra chance to consider your life choices and do you really want to watch this video&quot; was a feature not a bug.Plus now tiktok and telegram are orders of magnitude more popular than YT. Im seeing more and more creators arrive on YT as their &quot;second choice&quot; platform.

That makes sense and explains why it seemed so odd.I don&#x27;t use YouTube so the comment was more of a way to bring up the other behavior in business reviews. It seemed relevant.Edit: reviews are also broken(for me) on Firefox desktop with no extensions enabled and with ublock enabled.

The code also returns 0 if the advert loads and 1 if it doesn&#x27;t load. In other words, it detects adblockers.

That&#x27;s because it&#x27;s not actually what&#x27;s happening. I&#x27;m all for bashing bigcorps and especially ad empires but reddit folks confused correlation with causation here.The code in question is part of a function that injects a video ad (that plays before the start) and the code itself is just a fallback in case it fails to load over 5 seconds so that video page doesn&#x27;t break completely.Why was this affected by user agent change? My best guess is that on some combinations they somehow decide not to show any ads at all (for now) and therefore this function is not called and some other code path is taken. This is consistent with my own experience with the recent anti-adblock bullshit they implemented. The banner was not being shown after user agent change implying it&#x27;s one of the considered variables.You can verify all this if you click &#x27;format code&#x27; in browser debugger.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thinkwithgoogle.com&#x2F;marketing-strategies&#x2F;app-and-mobile&#x2F;page-load-time-statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thinkwithgoogle.com&#x2F;marketing-strategies&#x2F;app-and...</a>Seems odd to do something so brazen while also publishing information that (could) prove intent.Google also modifies how business information can be accessed from Firefox Mobile. You can&#x27;t read reviews easily from Firefox Mobile. At least not my install.

I don&#x27;t use firefox but have noticed a strange delay occurring during the past day or two. Wondering if it&#x27;s coincidence. I use ublock origin, so maybe youtube&#x27;s detecting its presence somehow and forcing a delay? (ublock is up to date so I don&#x27;t get the message from youtube telling me to stop using adblockers - perhaps this is their next attempt to annoy people into paying&#x2F;allowing ads?).

Not sure what is specific in your setup but I have watched numerous live stream on firefox and tab never became unresponsive. Haven&#x27;t checked the ram but my laptop had half of yours and the live were running for an hour or so.

Just, ublock origin, a password manager, and the kagi extension for my search engine. ublock origin was installed on all browsers. I&#x27;m not even trying to watch it without ublock, as that would be an unreasonable thing to do in general.I know this is not normal behaviour, and it&#x27;s likely unintetional, but I&#x27;ll be damn sure google won&#x27;t bother to fix it. I&#x27;m most surprised by Edge as it&#x27;s running chromium and it should share some similarity to chrome.

I don&#x27;t know what your problem is exactly but this is not normal behavior on Firefox at least. Check your extensions to begin with, or for a quick test, try watching a video in a prvivate tab.

I had the same issue, it turned out to be some random addon I installed years ago. Check if the problem also occurs with everything but uBlock Origin disabled.

I&#x27;ve recently done a pc upgrade and am now enjoying 64 gigs of ram. Decided to watch a live stream on youtube this weekend.Firefox: 22 GB of ram usage for the youtube tab after ~15 minutes. Tab became unresponsive.Edge: Out of memory error after ~5 minutes.Chrome: working fine, the youtube tab sitting peacefully ay 400-600 MB.

Would be a bad day for the Internet. There&#x27;s no way Youtube is financially viable without being cross-subsidised by Google&#x27;s search income and running on Google&#x27;s peering agreements with ISPs. Ads would be nowhere near enough to cover the bandwidth cost, which is why sooner or later any attempt to copycat it failed or went down to utter niche content.

I hope they keep this code in YT.It will be a party for the EU to punish Google with an anti-monopoly lawsuit.Best case: google gets forced to split up chrome, youtube and search as they obviously abuse their power.

Oh, I noticed this yesterday and assumed it was ad blocker hostility. Which I guess it may well be -- are Firefox users more likely to use ad blockers? Possibly. Certainly on Android. That doesn&#x27;t strictly matter though, presumably the Youtube people try to avoid stepping on the Chrome people&#x27;s toes.Given Google is apparently going ahead with killing extensions on Chrome it&#x27;s not hard to imagine some scheme where a guy is just lookin&#x27; at&#x27;cha merchandise and happens to be carryin&#x27; a baseball bat is all -- you can&#x27;t really blame him for some spillage, right? (make using Firefox painful to try and push people to Chrome). Before crippling Chrome? Sounds ridiculous, but one can&#x27;t help but wonder...Thinking about some more, the point could actually be to make users question if its because they have an ad blocker not even actively blocking anything, but simply installed. Some number of users may uninstall their ad blocking extension to see if it makes the lag go away.

Quick note:yt-dlp + VLC speed this right up again!

Software that&#x27;s not getting any attention will be ok as it won&#x27;t get python upgrades.Software that is getting attention has a nice long warning period and fixes may not even cause any trouble at all if the code is ok and there are unit tests.New software won&#x27;t have a whole class of timezone problems because people will use the better API to remove the warnings.I cannot see what the big problem is - much more troublesome things happen in Go all the time. Python isn&#x27;t a huge for-profit company like Google or even MS which has to dedicate efforts to ensuring that games from 1992 still run in 2023.

I wrote an email to Electronic Frontier Foundation and European Digital Rights collective asking them to file a complaint against Google because of this unjustified slowdown. I advise other readers to consider doing the same.

On android NewPipe is a good alternative to watch youtube

Not only that: Google&#x27;s recaptcha will also ask you for dozens of captchas on firefox android (which is probably the best) way to watch youtube&#x2F;use google site without ads on mobile)f** google

Seems like this is an unintentional benefit to firefox users. A small amount of friction is the difference between &quot;I&#x27;m mindlessly watching&quot; vs &quot;I actually care about watching this video.&quot;

This is why you don&#x27;t let a single corporation control more than half the internet, and more than 75% of the browser market

Please send this to the Peertube developer. Consider also that until recently it&#x27;s likely that having videos load fast on peer2peer and adding features like streaming likely had a higher priority than interface polishing.But you might be asking for something impossible : the focus is on the different servers, and having a &quot;suggested videos&quot; page is seen as an anti-feature because it involves making an &quot;algorithm&quot;, at which point you are editorializing, become (legally !) responsible for what you select, and are close to become a platform yourself, something that you started out by fighting in the first place !

I don&#x27;t need it to be a competitor; I don&#x27;t even want it to be a competitor. I just need it to exist and get some quality, modest use like the rest of the fedeverse.

&gt; I&#x27;d love to see real competition to YouTube. I&#x27;m afraid this seems not, the UX isn&#x27;t great.What do you call YouTube&#x27;s UI then? Any Peertube instance I used has better UI than YouTube. Most websites have. Because YouTube UI is atrocious and one of the most user hostile UIs I have used.&gt; search results limited to 2 itemsNot sure what you are talking about. Is this an exaggeration? It is not clear via text-only to me.

I&#x27;d love to see real competition to YouTube. I&#x27;m afraid this seems not, the UX isn&#x27;t great, homepage is useless, you need to click on Browse content then enter some keywords on a blank page, search results limited to 2 items and then you need to click on &quot;Display more videos&quot;. I might be to used to youtube homepage, for me it&#x27;s perfect I get videos right away and suggestions are good. I&#x27;m pretty sure this project, Mastodon and others are in good will, but they lack great ux&#x2F;ui, it seems to me that ux isn&#x27;t even researched, how can it be a viable competitor?

Content makers already do multi uploads on various platforms

&gt; no uploader on the platform will risk splitting their audience to a platform nobody goes tocough nebula cough

YouTube&#x27;s market hold is unfortunately circular; no uploader on the platform will risk splitting their audience to a platform nobody goes to, and because of that, new platforms are unable to grow.That aside: I also doubt most peertube instances can withstand the bandwidth costs of seriously hosting a few moderately succesful YouTube channels.

That&#x27;s some off-putting content to show new users. I suspect they&#x27;re an ideologically driven platform?*edit, their press release section removes all doubt.

I think Rumble [1] is the most valid competitor at the moment.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rumble.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rumble.com&#x2F;</a>

Another &quot;Youtube is doing shit&quot; thread and yet not a single mention of Peertube.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinpeertube.org&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinpeertube.org&#x2F;en</a>So for all people uploading videos, please have a look at Peertube. It is to Youtube what Mastodon is to Twitter. (and more: it is compatible with Mastodon, one can subscribe to your Peertube channel through his&#x2F;her mastodon account).I’m not arguing to leave Youtube completely but to offer an alternative to your audience. Please join peertube.

The second I saw reddit as the source I knew this was going to be incorrect.

Time for EU to slap them in the face again

People on reddit have posted videos of this happening in chrome, I think it&#x27;s possible this is actually just a bug and not an evil scheme.

&gt; given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back thenAs opposed to now?

As a JavaScript Dev, around 2010-2012 it was not uncommon to see `setTimeout(..., n)` hacks, often with n=0 but sometimes even n=1000, n=5000 into a codebase. This could workaround some bugs, and given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back then, often a last-resort.And yes, am guilty too of committing this to prod back then. I think I haven&#x27;t had a case where this was deployed in the last decade, but in the ugly SPA days pre angular v1 (and even during angular v1), where you code was this big glued-together conglomerate of various 3rd party UI libraries, this was common. Its ugly as hell, and you really had to be there at that time to understand this. But often it was just a cheap alternative, while debugging and fixing the truly underlying cause would be several man-days or even weeks.My point being: It might have slipped their QA cracks and was at some point intended to workaround a bug of some obscure Firefox behavior. For a company at youtube&#x27;s scale this is however pretty embarrassing.

Yup, same here — I see the same delay in Chrome now and then.I guessed it was due to the cat-and-mouse adblocking prevention between YouTube and adblockers (I&#x27;m also using uBlock Origin).

I&#x27;m getting such a pause also in Chrome since a few days, I was assuming that it&#x27;s fallout from the adblocking wars though (I use uBlock Origin and don&#x27;t get the nag screen anymore since around the time that pause appeared)

Glad I dropped chrome for Firefox at the beginning of 2022. It took some time to get used to it but eventually it&#x27;s now my main browser. Tired of Google being such a piece of shit. Hopefully 2024 will be the year of Linux on mobile.

I use Firefox on macOS Ventura, and here the video pages load instantly.I do have YouTube Premium (paid for in India to reduce the cost), but also in an incognito window where I&#x27;m not logged in, the video pages load immediately.Maybe it&#x27;s because I use the extensions uBlock Origin and&#x2F;or Disable Autoplay For YouTube?

* Meanwhile, reddit asks me to sign up or log in to see the thread. *Oh wait. Who thought it&#x27;s a good idea to post this with a link to a login page instead of the actual discussion thread?

The mentioned issue that can be seen on the video has been happening to me for a day or two while using Chrome.

Delete the iOS app and install the Vinegar Safari extension. It will replace the hostile video player with a native HTML5 &lt;video&gt; element. I never see any ads, I can select the stream quality, and Picture-in-Picture works as my OS intended it to.

I’ve also noticed mysterious buffering in the iOS app for YouTube for at least a few months. Even on a Google Fiber connection many videos will take a number of seconds to start, and sometimes buffer in the middle. I also have YT Premium, so anti ad blocking shouldn’t come into the picture. Videos load right away in Safari though.

Same here on Firefox, for both my laptop running Windows 11 on Alder Lake, and my desktop running Ubuntu on Zen 2.

Gmail has recently become extremely slow for me in Safari on a well specced M1 max

I&#x27;ve posted this here on HN numerous times over the years, and it&#x27;s been a while since I last posted it:Google is the new &quot;Microsoft&quot;, they embrace, they extend, then extinguish. Look at their email offering, messaging offerings, they built on top of XMPP, then they pulled the plug eventually. Android is Linux based, but insanely proprietary, the app store is not open by any means, you&#x27;re fully at their whims to get your apps on there. Chrome is basically the IE of old, implementing proprietary things or APIs that are not yet standard for Google products, and pushing out competing browsers.

These sounds like classic MS behaviour. It is kind of  thing that ought to addressed in anti-trust case.

Using Google sites with a VPN on Firefox has been really annoying for the past couple of months as well.

It is fascinating, how the simplest things on websites can be made arbitrarily involved, convoluted, over-complicated. And how those over-complications can then serve as a credible deniability.

Recently, play store images don&#x27;t load (about 60% - 80% missing per app) in Firefox.

bigquery console in ffx has like +120 latency potion

_I_ would in their shoes because I&#x27;m not just in it for the money and I care about the craft.But clearly I am not them. :-) Mathematically it doesn&#x27;t make sense for Google. It might make sense from an anti-trust perspective...

In most companies, when 3% represents an in-fact huge number because you have a very successful product, you absolutely do test for that 3%.It’s tiny companies that may ignore 3% as too expensive to worry about.

As I said, the decisions are locally reasonable. However, if not supporting Firefox potentially exposed my company to scrutiny over anti-competitive behavior, then, yes, I would absolutely invest in testing procedures to mitigate that.It&#x27;s also worth emphasizing that it isn&#x27;t difficult to support Firefox. I&#x27;m pretty sure that many of the sites that I visit do so largely by accident. I do a fair bit of web development, and Firefox&#x2F;Chrome compatibility has never been an issue in the slightest for me. You almost have to go out of your way to choose Chrome-specific APIs in order to break compatibility. How does virtually every other website on the internet manage it—from my bank to scrappy startups with junior developers coming straight out of bootcamps—while Google with all of their engineering talent and $100+ billion cash on hand just can&#x27;t seem to make it work?

&gt; Would you increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test for 3% of the market?I don&#x27;t think you get to make these kind of cost cutting decisions when you&#x27;re a vertically integrated mega-corp who also owns the browser with 65% of the market.

At a company at the scale of Google or Facebook, yes. 3% x N billion people = a central European country or two.

This is exactly the same situation that web developers faced with Internet Explorer 5 and 6, and it sucked for end users!

Since they throw me &quot;Google recommends Chrome!&quot; adverts in my face for various of their services, even when using a chrome-based browser it&#x27;s not a case of only testing for Chrome&#x2F;Safari. It&#x27;s active work against others.

Isn&#x27;t that a good deal? 50% more testing in a way that can surely be parallelized to some extent does not seem a very steep price at youtube scale.

Here’s another way to answer that question: do Vimeo, Twitch, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Instagram, TikTok, etc. say “let them use Chrome” or do they manage to do entry-level browser testing? The cost increase is nowhere near 50% and clearly they aren’t willing to write off millions of users – only the company with a direct financial incentive does that.Yes, Firefox’s market share has been declining but that’s substantially because Google spent billions of dollars marketing Chrome and promoted it heavily on YouTube, Gmail, Search, etc. Deciding not to test or optimize fits neatly into the same pattern.

It&#x27;s clear Google is only testing for chrome engine and safari: which comprise 97% of the browsers being used. Would you increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test for 3% of the market?

i believe for anything non-Chrome? Even Vivaldi has issues with some Google products.

Not to diminish the other sketchy stuff Google&#x27;s doing, but I think the maps lag issue might actually be Firefox&#x27;s fault. Whenever it happens to me WebGL stops working across all websites and restarting the entire browser fixes it. It&#x27;s almost like when Firefox has been open a long time it just forgets how to use graphics acceleration.

A few weeks ago I posted on here about the maps lag, and it literally felt like it was fixed after the comment got some attention.There&#x27;s 100% targeted de-optimization for firefox users and the burden of finding it is on the users it seems.

Spotify web doesnt work good on Firefox.Need to call out them.I&#x27;m basically forced to use Chromium on Linux.

Yea, I also haven&#x27;t noticed any speed issues, but I do use noscript exclusively on Firefox.

I use Firefox across Windows, Mac, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu. I&#x27;ve not seen any specific issues with Google sites at all. I only really use Docs, Maps, and Youtube with any regularity but I&#x27;ve not really seen any of these issues.

I had the same Gmaps issue, I disabled LocalCDN for the site and panning etc worked again.  Apparently the addon must be fixed to account for whatever they were doing.

You&#x27;re basically looking at testing being done on Chrome (because it is Google&#x27;s, and because of its large market share), Safari (because it runs on a large percentage of completely exclusive platforms where the customer can&#x27;t switch, and because of its large market share), and Edge (because there are still many corporations that do &quot;Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft&quot; and lock down browser options to just Microsoft&#x27;s offering).At this point, Firefox is very much an also-ran on two axes: market share is tiny and nobody forces it on their captive audiences. We may as well ask why Google isn&#x27;t optimizing testing on Opera, or Samsung Internet.(There is also the issue of under-the-hood engine. Since so many browsers have converged on a few core and JS stacks, testing on one exemplar of that stack has a tendency to suss out bugs in the other stacks. Firefox still being its own special snowflake in terms of JS engine and core means it has more opportunities to be different, for good or for ill. So there&#x27;s a force-multiplier testing the other browsers that one lacks testing Firefox).

I use Firefox, and Google&#x27;s sites are literally the only ones where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken for me, the map wouldn&#x27;t update at all when attempting to search or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript code spinning the CPU nonstop. It&#x27;s literally gotten to the point where I keep a Chrome window open and use it exclusively for Gmail, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Maps.It&#x27;s pretty obvious from the outside that supporting Firefox is not a product priority for Google. It also seems clear that it&#x27;s in their best interest to have users choose Chrome over Firefox. My guess is that this likely emerges from a lot of very reasonable sounding local decisions, like &quot;prioritize testing on browsers with the most market share,&quot; but it is convenient how those align with the anti-competitive incentives.

&gt; I don&#x27;t understand this. If people don&#x27;t want to or need to buy anything and they don&#x27;t want to see ads, because this is pure simply a distraction and won&#x27;t sway them into buying anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads?Age-old question. It&#x27;s not that simple. Those ads have an effect on you whether you &quot;want to or need to buy anything&quot; or not.

The point of forcing ads onto users who don&#x27;t want to see them and won&#x27;t buy anything from them, is that the advertisers will still pay Google. In the long run, their CTR will suffer, but it will be consistent across advertisers. If they&#x27;re paying per click then nobody loses except the user, who Google is betting actually will click on some ads (meaning they&#x27;re basically engaging in psychological warfare, or at least rewarding the advertisers who do). And if they&#x27;re paying per impression, then advertisers will see conversions go down in the long run, but Google might think the increased volume will make up for it.

I don&#x27;t understand this. If people don&#x27;t want to or need to buy anything and they don&#x27;t want to see ads, because this is pure simply a distraction and won&#x27;t sway them into buying anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads?Furthermore, I wish regulators have gone at YouTube like a ton of bricks. The ads they show are mostly from various kind of scam artists. My friend is a bit naive, but fortunately she asked me for an opinion whether she should invest her savings into the programme offered by one of &quot;gurus&quot; advertising on YT. She even gone on a few of their webinars and became as you would say, brainwashed. The kind of way you see in a cult. Fortunately there was still some worry running around her and she asked me to check before transferring £20k. You can&#x27;t imagine how much effort it took to tell here these guys are fraudsters. Now she is onto another scheme and now she tells me that I just don&#x27;t want her to invest the money, because I think everyone is a fraudster and these are the good guys! Then she showed me testimonials from apparent &quot;clients&quot; how they got rich. One person looked familiar and I actually found them on Cameo. She tried to say maybe this is just that person&#x27;s side gig etc. and she does not talk to me.I really really hope someone or some organisation get to the bottom of this kind of harmful and dangerous content.YouTube is a scammers paradise and YouTube wants more people to fall for these things.

YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox