this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
2646 points (98.0% liked)

Technology

59708 readers
1855 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
2646
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 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
480 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not trying to defend Chrome here as I dislike their other behaviours, but just from what's presented in the video, an alternative explanation would be caching. That is, when the reloading is triggered by the switch of user-agent, the cache is reused and thus a shorter load time.

To exclude this effect, the user needs to either

  1. Spoof the user-agent and at the same time clear cache (you can disable cache when reloading through the developer's tool), or
  2. Clear cache, spoof the user-agent to Chrome. Load page, disable the spoofing, reload.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes. I'm not a frontend dev, so not familiar with JS code (let alone an obfuscated fragment), but according to this HN comment, it's used for a different ad block detection function.

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

That makes a lot of sense. It’s still exclusive to Firefox, though