Technology

57453 readers

4465 users here now

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

Our Rules

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

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

2631

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 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

482 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 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] 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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 9 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 9 months ago (1 children)

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 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 9 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.