this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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2653
Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away. (old.reddit.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

It's apparently not even subtle enough to make that claim, it checks the useragent and sleeps for 5 seconds if it's not Chrome.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

I was wondering why YouTube started taking a while to load pages in the last couple weeks. Fucking Google, pulling this shit.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not that I don't believe you, but do you have a source for that?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's discussed in the firefox sub (link)

EDIT: There are some claims that this is related to anti-adblock.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

If changing your user agent to Chrome on Firefox fixes it that justification won't fly

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You seem to be quite in the know, would you say that this happens often across the tech space or is this a case of web platform, and in some cases the browser developers acting out?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Oh, I have no idea. It's just something I noticed previously, and has a similar thing to this post, so I thought I'd mention it. I don't have any inside or expert knowledge here.