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

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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] 14 points 7 months ago

The user agent is in the request header, so it's known before any response is sent from YouTube.

I don't know if that's what they're doing, because it's not possible to know what their server code is doing, making it a far better place to hide sleazy code.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

But the server outputs code for the browser to run. Doesn't matter what the server does as long as the browser gets there same output.

Server side they could stall based on the agent but it's not the case here. Whatever is happening seems to be client side.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

The client code can be modified depending on the request headers before being returned by the server

[-] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

They're looking at the code returned by the server with a chrome user-agent and it's the same.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

They only said that snippet was present, not that all of the client code was the same

this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023

474 points (98.6% liked)

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