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YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

411 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."

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[–] [email protected] 638 points 1 year ago (48 children)

"They're the same picture."

Also, that does not explain why:

Chrome users who use an adblocker don't get the issue
Firefox users who do not use an adblocker get the issue
FIrefox users who use an adblocker, but change User Agent to Chrome, don't get the issue

Now, if only we knew who made Chrome and YouTube... The mind boggles.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (12 children)

What do you mean by change user agent to chrome? Asking 4 a friend

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

For a specific how to, there's a bunch of firefox addons that do it, but the mozilla recommended one is this

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/

It's super easy to use, just open it and it gives a bunch of options.

This is my current (fake) user agent;

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

A few more clicks;

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; HLK-AL00) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.102 Mobile Safari/537.36 EdgA/104.0.1293.70

And finally;

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3; Trident/6.0)

Now, that last one is making it look like I'm using internet explorer... Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.

I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with "fancy" features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it's absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like "See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn't bother to support it anymore".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)

This is a good summary of this mess: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/