Technology

I’ve been noticing a lot of ‘interesting’ behavior with data-hungry websites when I use more privacy-focused measures lately.

Gmail logs me out of Safari at least weekly now for no apparent reason, other than to inconvenience me.
Gmail also refuses to deliver any emails forwarded through hide my email. They simply do not arrive, not even to spam. I had to start using another email service for hide my email. (Additionally, every email I get from Apple gets tagged with a phishing warning, which is just petty and funny.)
Facebook sends an email every time I log in (once or twice a month) to tell me that Firefox is suspicious because I use ad-blockers and private windows.

No wonder why YouTube got weird for me

Does changing the user agent fix this? Anyone tried? I keep forgetting to try it myself.

I started noticing how sometimes youtube just seemingly refused to load fully on my phone. I thought it was just my crap internet. But since I use Iceraven, a fork of firefox, it seems that may be why.

Does not happen for me Safari or Firefox.

Any extensions you'd recommend for having Firefox spoof chrome?

The YouTube viewing experience on FF is terrible. I have premium no ads and still manage to break the interface occasionally by clicking a new video or seeking the video playing.

Once upon a time, Google wanted to kill the user-agent.

Here is a link of someone finding a Timeoutset: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/

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.

Shatter this monopoly.

And no, 'but competitors exist' doesn't make them not a monopoly. Take a second economics course.

If this is true the crowd on here that often says Firefox is really owned by Google because Google pays Mozilla to have their search engine be the default search engine on Firefox really need to look at their claim and rethink their understanding of how Mozilla and Google interact.