[HN Gopher] YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox
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YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox
Author : csvm
Score : 1717 points
Date : 2023-11-20 10:16 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| mighmi wrote:
| The most interesting part from the discussion was noting it's
| implemented in the most basic, easily avoidable way (just spoof
| chrome) implying engineers unhappy with these tasks.
|
| @dang or op, wrong link. Should be:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
| rsolva wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if the use of Firefox is under reported just
| because a lot of it's users are power users, installing
| extensions that spoof the user agent. I know I did for a long
| while, making my Firefox pretend it was Chrome on a Windows
| machine.
| acdha wrote:
| This is definitely the case for anything like Google or Adobe
| Analytics which are blocked by the default tracking
| protection. You can't compare the results directly due to
| bots but on sites I've controlled our servers saw significant
| disparities between the server logs and the percentages
| commonly reported as global share.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I'm a too proud Firefox user to do that. But not all of us
| are fanatics like that.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| From reddit discussion (https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments
| /17ywbjj/comment/k9...):
|
| > To clarify it more, it's simply this code in their polymer
| script link:
|
| > setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
|
| > which doesn't do anything except making you wait 5s (5E3 =
| 5000ms = 5s). You can search for it easily in
| https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/96766c85/jsbin/desktop_pol...
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| This is interesting as I had noticed this happening to me (in
| Chrome) when the anti-ad-blocking started. I assumed that it
| was YT's way of "annoying" me still while no ads were shown...
| It was eventually replaced with the "You cant use Adblockers
| modal" and now I just tolerate the ads.
|
| So I wonder if that 5s delay has always been there.
| dbspin wrote:
| It's still trivial to block ads, but the delay has recently
| started for me, after never happening before. So presumably a
| very intentional volley in the ongoing war to own your
| attention.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| It's weird but I saw the anti-blocker modal a week or two but
| them it stopped appearing and never saw it since _shrug_
| psll wrote:
| Might be because of the EU ruling, if you're in the EU.
| dave881 wrote:
| I'm in the US, and had the same experience.
|
| I got the you can't use an adblocker message, but was
| able to close and/or reload the page to watch videos
| without ads. After a week or so it stopped popping up.
|
| US, Firefox, uBlockOrgin.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Just install adblocker?
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| Or Freetube / Newpipe
| ikt wrote:
| no need to go that extreme, the fix is to just update
| ublock orgins filters
|
| Go into ublock origin addon > click filter lists > purge
| all caches then update now
|
| all done
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| Meh.. I could but I have to tolerate them on TV anyway. I
| may look to install pi-hole one day.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Pi hole doesn't help, but there are various Android TV
| apps that do block ads. I still prefer the Roku eco
| system but I switched after they started putting ads in
| the middle of music videos.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| If you have an Android TV, You can use SmartTube[1] that
| has Adblock + Sponsorblock
|
| [1] https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
| samrus wrote:
| pihole doesnt work for youtube because ads and content
| are served from the same domains.
| mlindner wrote:
| I still use adblockers perfectly fine on Youtube. There was
| never a real interruption in adblocking either. You just need
| ublock origin + bypass paywalls.
| busssard wrote:
| ABP also still works just fine. I prefer the armsrace being
| taken care of someone else
| prmoustache wrote:
| I think they only disabled adblockers to logged users
| probably because non logged users don't have to agree to
| terms of services.
| jimcsharp wrote:
| Blockers work with my throw away Google accounts that I
| use for this and that. So maybe it's restricted further
| still to very entrenched users.
| mlindner wrote:
| I'm always logged on and using adblockers. So no, that's
| not it. I also use Youtube probably every day and am a
| very active user.
| bluescrn wrote:
| When I ran into the adblocker-blocker (Firefox + uBlock
| Origin), I noticed that I could watch videos if logged out.
| So I just stayed logged out, and haven't seen an anti-adblock
| message since. Or an ad.
|
| Added bonus, I'm less tempted to venture into the comments
| section...
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I'm using Firefox + uBlock Origin logged in and it works
| totally fine. Maybe Youtube removed the anti-adblocker on
| select accounts? I remember I once entertained myself with
| writing a report in which I sounded like I'm sitting in a
| retirement home and have no clue what's going on with "ad
| block." Did perhaps someone actually read this?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It seems to be something which is randomly deployed. Not
| everybody gets the warning.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I got it in the past for weeks, though.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I think you have simply been lucky, the full story is
| that uBlock Origin and Youtube have been tying to
| outpatch the other, with uBlock rolling out a bypass to
| the filters every one-two days since late October
| (https://github.com/stephenhawk8054/misc/commits/main/yt-
| fix....).
|
| Depending on if you've set up uBlock to auto-update and
| when you've watched youtube relative to when the block
| filters got updated you might just not have been hit with
| the latest detectors while they were active. Personally I
| know I got the "accept ads or leave" modal with firefox +
| uBlock, locking me out completely on one of my devices.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Same here . No problem with anti Adblock. It was shown
| twice to me and I googled ,,YouTube alternatives" then
| tried Vimeo and it was nice. Maybe they did register this
| ? :D
| y04nn wrote:
| Same, I use Firefox + uBlock Origin + YouTube Unhook for a
| cleaner interface. I also always watch videos on private
| navigation windows (my default way of browsing the
| internet) and I manage subscriptions with the RSS feed of
| the channels, much better to track what I have watched
| since the default homepage of YouTube does not display the
| last videos of your subscriptions.
|
| Edit: I have forgotten to add sponsorblock to the list of
| extensions
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| I've been randomly getting the situation where the video
| on Firefox doesn't work, but the sound does. It says
| something like "Sorry something's gone wrong", but for a
| brief second I can see the video. I think it's connected
| to the ad-blocker changes, but it doesn't actually have a
| message about having an ad-blocker on.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| One of the benefits of ublock origin for me is blocking the
| youtube comments section, along with all of the video
| overlay elements.
| fimdomeio wrote:
| Another way I noticed is good at skipping ads when adblocker
| fails is to refresh the page. When it loads again it does not
| play the ad.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Trying to be charitable here: could this be a debug/test
| artefact that inadvertantly got into production?
| enlyth wrote:
| Without studying the minified code I wouldn't assume malice
| just yet, this could be just an inexperienced developer
| trying to lazily fix some browser-specific bug, or something
| that accidentally made it to production like you say
| vanderZwan wrote:
| You think they let inexperienced developers touch the YT
| code base without proper code review? Even if that were the
| case, which is an extremely charitable assumption, _that
| itself_ would be malice in my opinion.
| londons_explore wrote:
| lol
|
| This reply is for everyone who has ever worked on the
| codebase...
| ozim wrote:
| Should be: LOL LGTM
| sapiogram wrote:
| > You think they let inexperienced developers touch the
| YT code base without proper code review?
|
| Yes
| ric2b wrote:
| YouTube is way too stable for that to be the case.
| enlyth wrote:
| > You think they let inexperienced developers touch the
| YT code base
|
| Uh, yes? We were all inexperienced at some point. Just
| the linked file is like 300k lines of unminified code, I
| doubt it's all written by PHDs with 20 years of
| experience
| xxs wrote:
| Some would argue that owning a PhD degree does not
| necessarily guarantee half decent engineering skills.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| It's the "without proper code review" part that I
| consider malice, not being inexperienced.
| xxs wrote:
| As the saying goes: "we like naked girls, not naked sleep".
| Even the interns should know that, naked sleep is just bad
| - not fixing anything.
| asddubs wrote:
| there is such a thing as overextending the benefit of the
| doubt, to the point that malicious actors will abuse it.
| kevincox wrote:
| It could even just be a timeout as part of retry logic or
| similar. A lot of people seem to be saying that there is no
| reasonable reason to have a `sleep` in a production
| application. But there are many legitimate reasons to need
| to delay execution of some code for a while.
| neonsunset wrote:
| Unlikely. Google has been breaking non-Chromium (or sometimes
| even just non-Google Chrome) browsers for years on YouTube
| and their other websites. It was especially egregious when
| MSFT was trying their own EdgeHTML/Trident-based Edge. Issues
| would go away by faking user-agent.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It was especially egregious when MSFT was trying their
| own EdgeHTML/Trident-based Edge. Issues would go away by
| faking user-agent.
|
| Why is there more than one user-agent? Does somebody still
| expect to receive different content based on the user-
| agent, and furthermore expect that the difference will be
| beneficial to them?
|
| What was Microsoft trying to achieve by sending a non-
| Chrome user-agent?
| kevincox wrote:
| User agents are useful. However they tend to be abused
| much more often than effectively used
|
| 1. They are useful for working around bugs. You can match
| the user agent to work around the bugs on known-buggy
| browser versions. Ideally this would be a handful of
| specific matches (like Firefox versions 12-14). You can't
| do feature detection for many bugs because they may only
| trigger in very specific situations. Ideally this
| blacklist would only be confirmed entries and manually
| tested if the new versions have the same problem.
| (Unfortunately these often end up open-ended because
| testing each new release for a bug that isn't on the
| priority list is tedious.)
|
| 2. Diagnosing problems. Often times you see that some
| specific group of user-agents is hammering some API or
| fails to load a page. It is much easier to track down if
| this user agent is a precise identifier of the client for
| which your site doesn't work correctly.
|
| 3. Understanding users. For example if you see that a
| browser you have never heard of is a significant amount
| of traffic you may want to add it to your testing
| routine.
|
| But yes, the abuse of if
| (/Chrome/.test(navigator.userAgent)) { mainCode() } else
| { untestedFallback() } is a major issue.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Only option 1 is something that users, who are the people
| who decide what user-agent to send, might care about. And
| as you yourself point out, it doesn't happen.
| kevincox wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that users care that websites can fix
| bugs affecting their browser. In fact option 1 is very
| difficult to actually implement when you can't figure out
| which browser is having problems in the first place.
| tzs wrote:
| Why do you think users wouldn't care about sites
| diagnosing problems that are making pages fail to load
| (#2) or sites testing the site on the browser that the
| user uses (#3)?
| neonsunset wrote:
| It is normal practice for each browser to have its own
| user-agent, no? But the fact that Google intentionally
| detected it and used polyfills or straight up invalid JS
| at the time was insane. A similar spin today is "Your
| browser is unsupported" you see here and there. When a
| major platform such as YouTube does it, it is really
| impactful.
|
| It would never do feature detection, would give lower
| quality h264 video, etc. Back then, there was really nice
| third-party application myTube which had made this less
| of an issue but it was eventually killed through API
| changes.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| It may have been intended to be a normal practice, but as
| far back as IE vs Netscape everyone has been mucking with
| user agents for non-competitive (and counter-non-
| competetive) reasons
| fwn wrote:
| > Trying to be charitable here [...]
|
| There is no reason for charity with such a large power
| difference. For Firefox, "bugs" like this can really end up
| being a lost one-shot game.
|
| It's like people walking by and casually reaching for your
| phone. It's always meant as a joke, unless you don't pull it
| away fast enough. Then suddenly it wasn't a joke - and your
| phone is gone.
|
| This is not rooted in any reservation against Google in
| particular. If you are a mega-corporation with the power to
| casually crush competitors, you should really want to be held
| to a high standard. You do not want to be seen as the
| accidentally-fucking-others-up-occasionally kind of company.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| If, with Youtube size, they do not test on Firefox, this is
| as much malice as doing this deliberately.
| kjhgksjdfhg wrote:
| I'm not even mad about Google making my artificially wait 5s
| for using firefox.
|
| I'm mad that such a big company with suposelly decent
| engineers, are making me wait 5s with literally a sleep, how is
| even possible to do such thing in such a rudimentary way? I
| would be like damn that was smart, this feels like, seriously
| this is the level?
| throwaw12 wrote:
| IMHO, this kind of things are not done by engineers.
| * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to
| sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down
| impacts your revenue" * engineer adds a flag, with
| different control parameters * Some genius in Product
| figures this out and updates the experiment to slow down for
| competitors
|
| When company gets a backlash from public: "oops, we forgot to
| clean up all parameters of feature flag and it accidentally
| impacted Firefox"
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to
| sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down
| impacts your revenue"
|
| "Research"
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| Researching how best to fuck with your competitors.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Next: researching regulatory capture?
| Jensson wrote:
| They have done such research before, Google published
| this at a time when developers were all "100 ms more or
| less web load time doesn't matter". Since then webpages
| has gotten much more focused on performance.
|
| https://blog.research.google/2009/06/speed-matters.html
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The dog slow load times of ad infested AMP pages would
| suggest otherwise.
| Jensson wrote:
| The prevailing developer discussions going from "Load
| speed doesn't matter, stop complaining about useless
| stuff" to "load times matters, but here we choose to make
| it slow for other reasons" is a massive improvement
| though. Today speed is valued, it wasn't back then.
|
| There are many such tests being written about in blogs
| today. So now a developer can get time to optimize load
| times based on those blog posts while before managers
| would say it was worthless.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Untrue. I optimized pages pre-2000, and it had always
| mattered.
|
| It's always, always mattered. If anything, people care
| less today, with the entire ridiculous 100 loads per
| page.
| Jensson wrote:
| Of course it always mattered. But at the time lots of
| people argued it didn't matter, which is why the headline
| is "Speed matters". You thinking it did matter at the
| time doesn't mean the general community thought so.
| bbarnett wrote:
| But the general community did care about speed. Everyone
| worked towards small load times, optimized (for example)
| image size for optimal load time, everyone cared.
|
| Whomever didn't care was weird.
| xxpor wrote:
| AMP pages load way, way faster IME
| progval wrote:
| "oops" https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-
| google-has...
| Jensson wrote:
| Google stopped testing stuff in Firefox, that is all they
| did afaik. We all should know how many bugs and "oppsies"
| you get when you don't test before releasing new
| features. Test code snippets being pushed to prod etc.
|
| Engineers tend to create paper trails on what they work
| on, code reviews and bug logs etc are everywhere, so I
| doubt there is any of those where they say "Make things
| shit for Firefox to hurt our competitors", that would net
| them an easy loss in court. But not testing in browsers
| with small userbases will hold in court.
| progval wrote:
| Firefox has a small userbase partly because of the early
| "oopses" described in the article I linked. Those
| happened a while ago, when Firefox had more users than
| Chrome.
| Jensson wrote:
| Chrome was bigger than Firefox by 2012, the accusations
| that Google intentionally made things worse for Firefox
| came many years after that.
| toyg wrote:
| But they referred to behaviour that was present pretty
| much from the start. It's just that Mozilla folks were
| extremely tolerant and assumed good faith for a very long
| time.
|
| Google have been disgustingly anticompetitive for a very,
| very long time at this point.
| acdha wrote:
| Yeah, one of the biggest examples being the HTML 5 video
| push and Chrome's claims around H.264: Google promised
| they were going all in on WebM and would remove support
| soon, but never did. That meant that Firefox users got
| more errors outright but also that for years even sites
| like YouTube would leave Firefox using 100% CPU with your
| laptop fans on high doing software WebM while Chrome
| users got hardware accelerated H.264. That became moot
| after Mozilla and Cisco struck that deal and video
| hardware acceleration for other formats shipped but there
| was a multi-year period where Firefox suffered badly in
| comparison to other browsers.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Another person is claiming that Google writes custom code
| for Firefox (or other browsers) to enable tracking,
| because of the feature difference between Firefox and
| Chrome [1]. Only one of you can be correct.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347364
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The company is big enough for both of them to be correct.
|
| I have firsthand knowledge that Cloud, for instance, did
| not test regularly directly on Firefox. Team couldn't
| justify the cost of setting up and maintaining a FF test
| suite to satisfy 1 in 50 users, so they didn't (and
| nobody up-chain pushed back on that). Testing was done
| regularly on Chrome, Safari, and Edge, as per the
| usercounts and "top three browser" guidance (at the time,
| we didn't even test regularly on mobile, since there was
| a separate mobile client).
|
| But the analytics team? I'm _sure_ they test directly on
| Firefox. They 're just testing an entirely different
| piece of the elephant and their end-to-ends won't include
| how, for example, changes they make interoperate with
| Firefox in the context of Cloud. Or YouTube. Or etc. Not
| unless they have a specific reason to be concerned enough
| to.
|
| Google's like any other megacorp in the sense that costs
| of cross-team coordination are combinatoric.
| hooverd wrote:
| Nah, they're totally incentivized to make sure tracking
| works while still having plenty of oopsies that could
| cause people to switch.
| goku12 wrote:
| This should be a top level comment on news like this.
| Everyone needs to be reminded that this is neither a new
| behavior nor something unintentional.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Very good point. It's important to recognise that
| developers in many companies are often not fully aware of
| the intended use of features they're asked to create.
|
| Another example that springs to mind is Uber, who used a
| tool called "Greyball" to avoid contact between drivers and
| authorities: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-
| greyball-idUKKBN16B0...
|
| My initial reaction was astonishment that the engineers
| would happily implement this. And maybe that is what
| happened. But the alternative possibility is that product
| and senior management assigned different parts of the
| feature to different teams e.g. one team develops a pattern
| recognition system to detect users' professions, another
| team develops a spoofing system for use in demos, etc...
| brailsafe wrote:
| Why would you be surprised that they'd implement this?
| It's their job to implement things.
| n4r9 wrote:
| They were using it to evade law enforcement while
| flouting regulations. It's highly unethical and almost
| certainly illegal.
| squarefoot wrote:
| At least they didn't rewrite the sleep code to do crypto
| mining.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Because it works.
|
| Good engineering isn't about being obtuse and convoluted,
| it's about making stuff that works.
| asddubs wrote:
| when the purpose is to abuse your monopoly to further your
| business interests in another area, being obtuse and
| convoluted to get plausible deniability is good
| engineering. This is just sloppy.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I dunno. How long has it been there without anybody
| noticing?
|
| 5 years? 7? Longer?
|
| No matter how they approached it, you could demonstrate
| the pattern through the law of large numbers regardless.
| Might as well make the implementation straight forward.
| lucideer wrote:
| I think this is a good example of corporations being made
| up of people, rather than being contiguous coordinated
| entities as many of us sometimes think of them.
|
| An engineer doing "good engineering" on a feature
| typically depends not only on them being a "good
| engineer" but also on them having some actual interest in
| implementing that feature.
| asddubs wrote:
| I would imagine that in a well coordinated company
| engaging in this kind of thing, the order wouldn't be
| "slow down firefox", but something along the lines of
| "use XYZ feature that firefox doesn't support and then
| use this polyfill for FF, which happens to be slow".
| Something that doesn't look too incriminating during any
| potential discovery process, while still getting you what
| you want.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Nah, that's got a risk profile. They could implement
| whatever your strategy is in the next release. You aren't
| going to necessarily get the longevity of the naive
| approach.
|
| Plus a Firefox dev would discover that more easily as
| opposed to this version which they can just dismiss as
| some JavaScript bug on YouTube's part
| asddubs wrote:
| that's the beautiful thing, you make the polyfill
| contingent on the browser being firefox rather than
| probing for the feature and then you forget to remove it
| once they implement the feature
| lucideer wrote:
| That's assuming a degree of engineering competency at the
| product decision making level that is usually absent in
| companies that are structured as Google is, with pretty
| strong demarcations of competencies across teams.
| legends2k wrote:
| Using an idle timer, like window: requestIdleCallback [1],
| is good engineering. If anything passes that's not good
| engineering, it's laziness.
|
| I'm not even a JS programmer but I know about timers, idle
| wait in UI programming is a common pattern. It's the
| attitude of mediocre engineers not bothering to lookup or
| learn new things.
|
| If every OS/browser/stock market dev did what they want
| "because it works" we don't have a working system. We'll
| have systemic lags making the system sluggish and
| eventually unusable as more engineers follow the same
| mantra.
|
| [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Window/requ...
| kristopolous wrote:
| Nah, then it doesn't work.
|
| "It works" is The high engineering bar and it's the hard
| one to hit.
|
| Oftentimes it's replaced these days with imagined
| complexity, ideological conformity or some arbitrarily
| defined set of virtues and then you get a really
| complicated thing that maybe works some of the time and
| breaks in really hard to understand ways.
|
| Transcompiled frameworks inside of microservices talking
| to DBMS adapters over virtual networks to do a "select *"
| from a table and then pipe things in the reverse
| direction to talk to a variety of services and providers
| with their own APIs and separate dependencies sitting in
| different microservices as it just shepherds a JSON
| string through a dozen wrapper functions on 5 docker
| containers to just send it back to the browser is The way
| things are done these days. This is the crap that passes
| for "proper" engineering. Like the programming version of
| the pre-revolutionary French Court.
|
| A simple solution, fit for purpose, that works as
| intended, easy to understand, remove, debug and modify
| with a no-bus factor, that's the actual high end
| solution, not the spaghetti stacked as lasagna that is
| software haute couture these days.
|
| Sometimes, in practice, the dumb solution can also be the
| smart one. True mastery is in what you choose Not to do.
| legends2k wrote:
| I agree with the spirit of your comment; I too hate over-
| engineering. Choose your battles is an important step in
| mastery, yes, but being lazy can't be chalked up to
| mastery.
|
| In this particular case I disagree with using `sleep`;
| using the idle timer it's not as roundabout as you put
| it: _Transcompiled frameworks inside of microservices
| talking to DBMS adapters over virtual networks_. It's a
| straight-forward callback, some lower-level timekeeper
| signals you and you do your thing: it's nowhere close to
| the convoluted jumping through hoops you explain.
|
| Mastery comes with balance: putting in the optimal
| effort, not more, not less either. Of course, depends on
| what one's trying to master: job or programming. Former
| means do the minimum and get maximum benefits from your
| job/boss, latter means enjoy learning/programming and
| arrive at the most optimal solution (for no reason, just
| because you're passionate).
| agumonkey wrote:
| follow the money
|
| employees will follow orders, orders are made by people who
| control the money
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Maybe the engineer that was tasked with implementing was
| annoyed with the task and did it on purpose this way.
| skupig wrote:
| You're mad that they're using a function for its intended
| purpose?
| vsnf wrote:
| Speaking as someone who only very occasionally does browser
| related programming, what is the supposed sin committed here
| by implementing it this way?
| another2another wrote:
| Yep, curious to know the same thing myself.
| alias_neo wrote:
| In programming in general, sleeps are generally
| considered....(I'm lacking the word)...distasteful?
|
| If your code needs to wait for something, it's better done
| with some sort of event system or interrupt or similar; the
| reason being that a 5s wait is a 5s wait, but if, say the
| thing you're waiting for returned in 10ms, if you're using
| an alternative solution you can carry on immediately, not
| wait the remaining 4.99 seconds. Conversely, if it takes
| longer than 5s, who knows what happens?
| vsnf wrote:
| Sure, but assuming we take it as face value that this is
| a straightforward attempt to force a UX-destroying delay,
| I don't see what makes this so terrible. It's meant to
| force a 5 second wait, and it does it. Problem solved.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| The 5-second wait is the issue, not the means it was
| obtained -- a fixed wait time either wastes the user's
| time (by making it take longer than necessary) or is
| prone to bugs (if the awaited task takes >5 seconds, then
| the end of the timer will likely break). The better
| question is _why_ a 5-second wait was necessary, and
| there's almost certainly a better way to handle that need
| without the fixed wait time.
| saynay wrote:
| OPs point, I think, is that wasting the user's time is
| part of the point of the code. This specific code seems
| partially meant as a punishment of the user for using an
| adblocker.
| snvzz wrote:
| *for using firefox instead of google's own browser.
| saynay wrote:
| That's somewhat in debate, the last I saw. The initial
| report was it affected a user using Firefox, and it
| didn't when they switched useragents. Since then, there
| have been reports of users not seeing it in Firefox, but
| seeing it in other (even chromium-based) browsers. So it
| seems likely they are A/B testing it, but less clear if
| they are intentionally targeting non-Chrome browsers.
|
| Their goal, quite clearly, is to prevent (or at least
| heavily discourage) adblockers. This is one attempt to
| detect them, and maybe in Chrome they have a different
| detection mechanism so it doesn't show the same behavior.
|
| It would be a particularly foolish move on their part to
| push Chrome by punishing everything else right now, while
| they are in the middle of multiple anti-trust lawsuits.
| It makes me think that is unlikely to be the intent of
| this change.
| brvsft wrote:
| I don't know if this is what was meant, but my assumption
| is that it is quite brazen and crude.
|
| But then I think of some alternative method where they send
| an ajax request to "sleep.google.com/?t=5" and get a
| response like "" after five seconds.
| meindnoch wrote:
| For one, they didn't use React.
| babypuncher wrote:
| they are a lazy man's solution to race conditions that does
| not actually solve the problem of race conditions, only
| makes them less likely to cause a problem at an often
| extreme cost to responsiveness as seen here.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Google employs 30000 engineers, it's impossible for them all
| to be decent.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I'm more mad about the complete failure of regulators to
| break up an obvious monopoly than I am with the engineers
| (though they're not saints either)
| shultays wrote:
| It is not literally a sleep though, isn't setTimeout more
| like a creating a delayed event? (I am not a webdev)
| Izkata wrote:
| You can't directly do a sleep in Javascript because it runs
| in the same thread as the UI - it would block the user from
| interacting with the page. This is effectively a sleep
| because after 5 seconds it's running the code in the
| passed-in function (not firing an event). The code in the
| function then resolves a promise, which runs other
| functions that can be specified later by what called the
| one using setTimeout.
| yencabulator wrote:
| That's Javascript for you. Don't want to block the one
| thread from doing other things in the meanwhile.
| shmerl wrote:
| Reminds me A Ticket to Tranai by Robert Sheckley where they
| deliberately asked to slow down robots in order for people to
| be angry and destroy them.
| qwery wrote:
| Is the use of the "E" notation common in JS? I can see that it
| (could be) less bytes, obviously more efficient for bigger
| values... Looking at the script I can see it is minified or
| whatever we call that these days. I guess my question really
| is: did someone write "5E3" or did the minifier choose it?
|
| (Sorry this is heading into the weeds, but I'm not really a web
| developer so maybe someone can tell me!)
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Almost certainly the minimizer
| Dumble wrote:
| Totally possible that the minifier did this, yes.
| yread wrote:
| I wonder if this actually decreases the byte over wire. 5000
| compresses a lot better.... sorry for OT
| brettermeier wrote:
| Interesting question. Has anyone tested this?
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| Because 5E3 is shorter than 5000, just like you can often see
| !0 to get "true" in minimize code because it saves two
| characters.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| In js I thought 1==true, and 1 is shorter than !0 ??
|
| Never seen the use of exponential notation for numbers in
| js though (not a surprise, I'm not really a programmer), it
| seems sensible to me from the point of shifting the domain
| from ms to seconds.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| > In js I thought 1==true, and 1 is shorter than !0 ??
|
| `1==true` but `1!==true` (`===` and `!==` check for type
| equality as well and while `!0` is a boolean, `1` is not.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Double-equals behaves differently than triple-equals.
| Minifiers probably can't swap them safely.
| neuromanser wrote:
| !0 === true, but 1 !== true. I don't recall ever needing
| the strict comparison, but it seems to tickle the fancy
| of most js programmers.
| jug wrote:
| How is this not blatant anticompetitive behavior?
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| That is not correct. The surrounding code gives some more
| context:
| h=document.createElement("video");l=new Blob([new
| Uint8Array([/* snip */])],{type:"video/webm"});
| h.src=lc(Mia(l));h.ontimeupdate=function(){c();a.resolve(0)};
| e.appendChild(h);h.classList.add("html5-main-
| video");setTimeout(function(){e.classList.add("ad-
| interrupting")},200);
| setTimeout(function(){c();a.resolve(1)},5E3); return
| m.return(a.promise)})}
|
| As far as I understand, this code is a part of the anti-
| adblocker code that (slowly) constructs an HTML fragment such
| as `<div class="ad-interrupting"><video
| src="blob:https://www.youtube.com/..." class="html5-main-
| video"></video></div>`. It will detect the adblocker once
| `ontimeupdate` event didn't fire for 5 full seconds (the
| embedded webm file itself is 3 seconds long), which is the
| actual goal for this particular code. I do agree that the anti-
| adblocker attempt itself is still annoying.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| For the completeness, the omitted Uint8Array is the following
| 340-byte binary (here in base64): GkXfo59Ch
| oEBQveBAULygQRC84EIQoKEd2VibUKHgQRChYECGFOAZwH/////////FUmpZp
| kq17GD D0JATYCGQ2hyb21lV0GGQ2hyb21lFlSua6mup9eBAXPFh8
| 9gnOoYna+DgQFV7oEBhoVWX1ZQOOCK sIEBuoEBU8CBAR9DtnUB//
| ///////+eBAKDMoaKBAAAAEAIAnQEqAQABAAvHCIWFiJmEiD+CAAwN
| YAD+5WoAdaGlpqPugQGlnhACAJ0BKgEAAQALxwiFhYiZhIg/ggAMDWAA/uh4A
| KC7oZiBA+kAsQEA LxH8ABgAMD/0DAAAAP7lagB1oZumme6BAaWUs
| QEALxH8ABgAMD/0DAAAAP7oeAD7gQCgvKGYgQfQ ALEBAC8R/AAYA
| DA/9AwAAAD+5WoAdaGbppnugQGllLEBAC8R/AAYADA/9AwAAAD+6HgA+4ID6Q
| ==
|
| VLC somehow refuses to play it, but its nominal length can be
| verified with a short JS code like: v =
| document.createElement('video'); v.src =
| `data:video/webm;base64,<as above>`; await new
| Promise(resolve => v.onloadedmetadata = resolve);
| console.log(v.duration);
| FoodWThrow wrote:
| Why is it only trying to detect ads when the user agent is
| Firefox?
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17zdpkl/this_behav.
| ..
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| I have no idea because I didn't experience anything like
| that both in Chrome and in Firefox (both with uBO though).
| But I'm confident that this particular code is not related
| to the actual slowdown, if it did happen to some Firefox
| users, because I received the same code even in Chrome.
| pgt wrote:
| I would suspect because Google can do the detection in
| Chrome itself, but not in Firefox.
| dash2 wrote:
| Does Firefox allow a wider range of plugins, including
| adblockers?
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Yes, Chrome is severely hobbled in this by comparison.
| GTP wrote:
| Yes, there are plenty. You can have a look here:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
| timeon wrote:
| This is just anecdote, but sometimes (especially when I'm
| on slower internet) Safari + AdGuard will have glitch [0]
| on YouTube. Never happened with Firefox + Ublock Origin.
|
| [0] Unable to press play and showing image with Ad instead.
| c-fe wrote:
| I experience the same glitch and i like it because you
| can just reload the page (cmd-r) and then the video
| starts so if you're used to it you can skip ads within
| less than a second and you dont get annoyed by the ad
| sound/video, just an image.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Probably because there are other methods for Chrome that
| don't apply to Firefox.
|
| Like when I noticed that some sites did some URL rewriting
| trickery on Firefox and others browsers, but not for
| Chrome. The trick is to show you the proper URL the link
| points to, but as you click, it is substituted for one that
| is a redirection, for tracking purposes (ex:
| "https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http:://actualsite..."). On
| Chrome, they don't need to use these tricks as the browser
| supports the "ping" attribute of links, so they can do
| their tracking without rewriting the URL.
| Thiez wrote:
| Wow, that is pretty disgusting behavior.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The web developer interprets missing features as damage
| and polyfills around them.
| shantara wrote:
| I've also noticed this behavior popping up a lot lately,
| but I had no idea why. The URL with tracking included was
| still blocked by uBlock Origin, but having to manually
| copy-paste the relevant portion was an annoyance.
|
| Thanks for the context!
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Check out ClearURLs extension.
| timeon wrote:
| It is still better to wait 5s without ad than with ad.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| It has to be a background check, otherwise you can't
| explain cases (like me) where the code is running but users
| never noticed any delay.
| tzs wrote:
| I wonder if it is just a coincidence that 5s is the time
| before a skippable ad becomes skippable?
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I couldn't reproduce the 5s wait in multiple scenarios in
| Firefox (various combinations of being logged in / not being
| logged in / without adblocker / with adblocker) and couldn't
| reproduce a 5s wait time in any of them, it played back
| immediately in each case (when without adblocker, using a
| second video to have one start without ad). I tested on
| Linux.
|
| What exact combination of circumstances is required to
| trigger the multi second wait time?
| Vvector wrote:
| I can't reproduce this either. YT on FF plays immediately
| for me
| rez9x wrote:
| I tested in Firefox (uBlock), LibreWolf (uBlock), Safari
| (AdGuard), and Chromium (no ad blocker), and the initial
| home page load takes a couple seconds, but I never
| witnessed a 5s delay. I would say it was actually fastest
| in Firefox for me, but that may have just been a result of
| some caching. I am a premium subscriber and have never seen
| a warning for using an ad blocker, so I'm not sure if
| premium subscribers get a pass.
| nixass wrote:
| I am experiencing delay on both Firefox and Waterfox
| kortex wrote:
| I just tested this in firefox on ubuntu. Three subsequent
| new tab tests.
|
| Load: 4.34s, 5.14, 2.96, 3.35
|
| DOMContentLoaded: 3.65s, 4.56, 2.92, 3.33
|
| Finish: 13.14s, 10.77, 8.49, 12.02
|
| So it's getting a bit faster over time, but still heinous,
| and crucially, it isn't hanging on requests. Individual
| asset GET/POST requests are taking tens of ms, worst was a
| few parallel 254ms GETs on a cold start. Usually 50-70ms.
| But there is a flurry of requests, then a period of very
| few requests until 5s after init, then another flurry.
|
| Firefox 119.0 Ubuntu 22.04 uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger
|
| Same OS, chrome 115.0.5790.170, no blockers, youtube is
| much snappier, it still definitely takes a few seconds to
| paint thumbnails, but it's basically done by 5s.
| DOMContentloaded is never more than 1.75s, finish <8s.
|
| Firefox private window with blockers off has similar time
| statistics. But actually doubleclick.net is still getting
| bounced.
| rendaw wrote:
| Okay, I'm sold on the delay, but where's the code that
| detects non-chrome?
|
| Do they serve different js based on the user agent header? If
| they delay chrome too there's no foul.
| Quot wrote:
| Just going off this tweet, it seems to be user-agent based:
| https://fixupx.com/endermanch/status/1726605997698068630
| chris_wot wrote:
| If YouTube are going to go down this path, then perhaps
| Firefox devs should set the user agent to Chrome for
| YouTube?
| dmonitor wrote:
| if it's anti-adblock, does it run even with premium?
| Semaphor wrote:
| How/When does that script get loaded? It's not showing up in my
| network tab. Videos also load instant as usual.
| alex7734 wrote:
| This is happening to me in Chrome as well so I don't think it's
| tied to the browser you use.
|
| Curiously it happens only on one profile, in another Chrome
| profile (which is also logged in to the same Google account) it
| does not happen. Both profiles run the code in your comment,
| but the one that does not have the delay does not wait for it
| to complete.
|
| The only difference I spotted was that the profile that loads
| slowly does not include the #player-placeholder element in the
| initial HTML response. Maybe whether it sends it or not is tied
| to previous ad-blocker usage?
|
| What does piss me off is that even if you clear cookies and
| local storage and turn off all extensions in both profiles it
| still somehow "knows" which profile is which, and I don't know
| how it's doing it.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| While the EU has recently forced Microsoft to allow users to
| uninstall pre-installed crapware, Google is apparently unhindered
| in their ongoing (and succeeding) mission to take control of all
| layers of the consumer-facing internet.
| bad_user wrote:
| Google, Samsung, Apple, and others have to abide by the same
| law, Microsoft isn't special.
|
| I also don't understand what this law has to do with the topic.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| I support the enforcement of anti-trust laws against
| Microsoft, but I am at the same time puzzled at how much
| Google is allowed to get away with. They are simultaneously
| maintaining the biggest browser platform while also being the
| biggest content and advertisement provider, AND they have a
| major influence on the development of web standards, AND they
| control the development of a major OS (Android) for accessing
| the web, where their browser comes pre-installed. And now
| they are actively exploiting their position and trying to
| sabotage the competition.
|
| My point in highlighting it is that I think there is a lack
| of enforcement of anti-trust laws and/or a lack of laws that
| would prevent Google behaving in this way, since I think it
| is so much worse than what Microsoft has been doing with
| Windows not allowing users to uninstall crapware.
| bad_user wrote:
| The law you're mentioning is the "Digital Markets Act", and
| it's a new law that will apply to Google, Apple, Amazon,
| Samsung and others, not having to do with any enforcement
| of "antitrust" laws upon Microsoft.
|
| https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-
| policy/priorities-...
|
| Furthermore, are we talking about the same Microsoft that:
|
| 1. forced usage of Microsoft Edge, while also actively
| blocking circumvention mechanisms;
|
| 2. that keeps hijacking searches for Chrome, or Firefox;
|
| 3. that has telemetry in Edge that can't be disabled;
|
| 4. and that, upon first opening Edge, it asks you to agree
| to data sharing with the entire advertising industry?
|
| ---
|
| You basically assert that Google is receiving preferential
| treatment from the EU, yet provided absolutely no evidence
| for it.
| nicce wrote:
| > yet provided absolutely no evidence for it.
|
| Maybe the absence of evidence is the evidence in this
| case. (No lawsuits)
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that they got preferential
| treatment, and I also didn't mean to defend what
| Microsoft has been doing, I just think what Google is
| doing is even worse. I meant that if Google is allowed to
| dominate control of the web like they do now, then I
| think there is a lack of laws to prevent them from
| continuing that dominance. This may not be because EU
| lawmakers have been bought or anything, just that they
| are ignorant towards the issue of a single market player
| gaining control of all parts of the web.
| dschuetz wrote:
| For now.
|
| Google is working on making a premium internet based on their
| services that permeate the whole web which they plan to serve
| only to "trusted devices" running Chrome - I do not think this
| is going to work out well for them.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| I hope not, but they are certainly trying. I fear they have
| become an uncontrollable behemoth which have failed to
| identify alternative business models to their unsustainable
| ad business, and now they are trying to perform a major power
| grab to basically take over the web and force people to watch
| ads or pay.
| aae42 wrote:
| Why is their ad business unsustainable? seems like they
| just print money, and recent efforts are to simply increase
| printer speed... Because why wouldn't you...
| nusl wrote:
| I suspect that the SEO scam-industry will hit a wall on how
| far they can push their top-10 lists and advertising will
| no longer be worth it. Google search results are pretty bad
| now anyway, since you'll only ever find the sites that game
| the system.
|
| Eventually users will realise this, and advertisers will
| see negative returns, and Google will lose money. But
| chances are they'll find another way to keep advertisers
| paying.
| csydas wrote:
| Is there maybe some road map or purpose statement on this?
| it's not that i don't believe that this is absolutely true
| (i'm sure it's the wet dream of all SV companies...) but
| google's offerings are so inconsistent that if that's really
| their goal i just can't see how they mean to get there. every
| answer to competition is a half baked answer in my experience
| and i truly just can't see how google means to do this.
| google plus i thought was supposed to be this but that did
| not pan out well at all.
|
| and i also don't see how they can really do this at least in
| EU, at least not for long until the regulators catch wind.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Oh yes, it's called WEI as in Web Environment Integrity -ht
| tps://www.theregister.com/2023/07/25/google_web_environmen.
| .. some of its code landed in production Chrome, leading to
| an outcry. V3 Manifest and WEI are all part of Google's
| push to make Chrome mandatory to be able to use their
| services.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's not just Google's goal, either:
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/3671132/what-is-
| manage...
|
| Ensuring you _only_ use the OEM 's recommended browser
| looks like the endgame of the internet.
| hulium wrote:
| No, WEI has already been abandoned and removed again.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I hope not, but I suspect they will succeed. My observation
| is that the vast majority of people around me here in Europe
| see Google as completely trustworthy.
|
| It's truly profound how split-second loading delays
| contribute to a negative impression about digital products. I
| guess we're all worn out from using our devices. Most of us
| just want "thing" ASAP, and we'll compulsively click 'agree'
| to _anything_ that happens to stand in the way of it.
|
| 'Why don't you switch to Chrome, it works better/faster.' is
| not the sort of social pressure I can quickly respond to with
| my privacy concerns. And it's not like I'm not going to get
| an eye-roll or tin-foil-man comments from the mom-pop-type
| people in my life.
| darkwater wrote:
| > I hope not, but I suspect they will succeed. My
| observation is that the vast majority of people around me
| here in Europe see Google as completely trustworthy.
|
| Just like MS was always seen in Europe as well, outside
| (parts of) the tech-workers bubble. Governments in every
| single country at every level never had any problem
| mandating proprietary softwares and formats to their
| citizens for many, many years.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > And it's not like I'm not going to get an eye-roll or
| tin-foil-man comments from the mom-pop-type people in my
| life.
|
| That's why you don't start with the nerd explanation of the
| privacy issues, you just tell them Firefox is way better.
| You install FF + uBlock (since presumably they don't even
| have an adblocker on Chrome if they're anything like my
| parents), and tell them "Look ma, no ads!". Not even people
| who don't care about ads that much and just ignore them
| will go back to seeing them if they see the option of no
| ads existing. And if you handle all their bookmark imports
| and account logins for them so they don't have to, they
| won't even feel the difference from a UI/UX point of view
| (sans a few microscopic differences that nobody notices).
|
| As for these artificial speedbumps, I think that statistic
| about every 100ms of page load decreases visitor time is
| true to an extent, but at least if I look at the way my
| parents use websites, even 5kb plaintext ones take like 3s
| to load since they have unfathomably slow internet and
| ancient devices, so it doesn't really factor in for them if
| they click on a video on youtube they wanna watch.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| > That's why you don't start with the nerd explanation of
| the privacy issues, you just tell them...
|
| Honestly, um, no. Like I get where you're coming from and
| I used to consider it good advice. But my approach these
| days is to just keep my mouth shut.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm aware that it is quite popular, so I guess I must be
| weird, but YouTube being slow (and consuming lots of CPU
| due to that ambient mode stunt), when every other video
| site works fine in Firefox, and embedded YouTube videos on
| other sites work fine in Firefox, has just made me think
| YouTube is a pretty crappy site.
|
| I'd never dream of changing browsers because some video
| site (mostly full of low-effort distracting silliness),
| didn't work well in mine.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Whatever their competition will be, sign me up now. I really
| like their products, the company itself and their philosophy
| not so much
| nusl wrote:
| What pisses me off about this is that people are such drones
| for The Google via GMail (mostly) that they don't question
| this since it works for them. Nevermind that Google is a
| user-hostile megacorp that will screw them as soon as it
| makes financial sense to do so.
|
| Ever talk to someone random about Google's privacy bullshit
| and why Chrome is not a great browser? Nobody cares, and they
| think you're an idiot.
|
| So, Google will carry on until it's too late.
| Algent wrote:
| Chrome have been the IE6 situation all over again for a while
| now, except this time it's possibly too late to walk back. They
| are pretty much done taking over the standard.
| robin_reala wrote:
| To be fair, the IE6 problem wasn't just massive usage, it was
| massive usage plus complete stagnation.
|
| Chrome has high but not massive usage, and it hasn't
| stagnated. It has a separate problem though: the lack of
| stagnation is actually a drive towards Google's somewhat
| unhealthy vision for the web.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| People keep forgetting that Google is an ad company first,
| everything else just supports that.
|
| And what's better for distributing ads on the internet then
| controlling the software people use to view said ads - the
| browser.
| explain wrote:
| I have been getting this same slow-down for a month or two, but
| using Brave - which is the same user-agent as Chrome.
|
| I would imagine changing the user-agent _at all_ will
| (temporarily) fix it, rather than to a Chrome user-agent
| specifically.
|
| Probably targets ad blocking users rather than non-Chrome users.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Huh, I nearly exclusively use Brave for YouTube because it does
| a good job blocking ads and I haven't noticed any slowdown.
|
| I did see the ad nag once when I accidentally went to YouTube
| in safari
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| Assume this is supposed to be the link:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| Anti-Trust anyone?
| Halen77 wrote:
| Wait until the EU gets their hands on this..
| csvm wrote:
| Correct Link:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
| StrLght wrote:
| I also noticed this during the weekend. I initially assumed that
| the new uBO filters are too blame -- guess that's exactly what
| Google is going for with these hostile measures, and it kinda
| works.
| raspyberr wrote:
| How come this video isn't just showing caching at work?
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| I haven't noticed an issue yet.
|
| My issue at the moment is while ublock can still block ads, every
| video automatically pauses like 5 seconds in and I need to hit
| play again.
| leosanchez wrote:
| I thought it was my adblocker (uBlock) causing the issue.
| mbix77 wrote:
| Sadly there is still no alternative to Youtube. Same with Reddit.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| happens to me on chrome too with ublock.
| nan60 wrote:
| This just... isn't happening for me? My only extensions are UBo,
| Return Youtube Dislike and Sponsorblock, so I presume a UBo
| filter is either fixing it or the change isn't rolled out to all
| users yet.
| snowram wrote:
| The UBo team commented on the Reddit thread that they were
| looking into it. So it may have already been fixed.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I noticed Youtube started doing this in the last couple days, and
| I use FF. What a silly thing to do, about as juvenile as a
| company can be.
| Kiro wrote:
| It's been happening on Chrome as well for the past few days so
| I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
| bad_user wrote:
| I am not getting this behaviour in Firefox 120. Tried it, logged
| out as well.
|
| > setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
|
| The code looks like a silly concurrency bug fix, i.e., a lazy way
| to force ordering.
| gwd wrote:
| Or potentially a concurrency bug _trigger_? "One in 1000 times
| X takes a bit too long and causes problem Y; I'll make X take
| minimum 5 seconds so I can trigger Y reliably." Then fixes Y
| but forgets to remove the delay.
| seydor wrote:
| I can't believe billion dollar companies 'solve' bugs the same
| way as i do
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| The people working there are also just people like you.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| They just practice leetcode a lot, doesn't mean they know
| how to deal with those issues in the UI.
| petargyurov wrote:
| A 5 SECOND timeout for a concurrency issue? I doubt it.
| eli wrote:
| It's timeout that's part of loading ads. That code isn't
| blocking anything. The headline here is wrong.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Such fix won't sleep for 5000 ms though. In my reading it looks
| like a part of the adblocker detection code. (EDIT: Relocated
| the actual analysis to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346602 for more
| visibility.)
| blueflow wrote:
| If you are fluent with the terminal, you don't need to suffer
| from the YT Web UI. Install mpv and yt-dlp. Play videos like
| this: mpv [--no-video]
| "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9zVjEZ7W8Q"
|
| Option in brackets is optional.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. How can I browse Youtube in
| mpv?
| blueflow wrote:
| What do you mean by "browsing" Youtube? Clicking new links
| for the purpose of entertainment?
|
| My post was only about playing videos.
| sofixa wrote:
| Well, how do you get to the videos? How do you discover
| their links to pipe to mpv/yt-dl?
|
| One option is RSS (YouTube still supports it) subscribing
| to channels. Do you know of others?
| blueflow wrote:
| I don't, i use Youtube for listening to music or
| livestreams that i already know the title of.
| imiric wrote:
| Use Invidious, Piped or any other frontend that doesn't track
| and manipulate you.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Adding https://youtube-lite.js.org/#/ to the list.
| rozenglass wrote:
| In addition to Piped, and Invidious, mentioned by sibling
| comments, which allow you to subscribe, search, and provide
| recommendations, you can use a complete CLI workflow with
| something like ytfzf[0], or, you can use the search commands
| on yt-dlp[1], which are also accessibly through mpv using the
| ytdl:// prefix.
|
| Getting familiar with such tools not only replaces the
| terrible UXes you have to be subjected to, but also gives you
| the power and freedom to be creative with how you use Youtube
| and other online streaming sites.
|
| I wrote various tiny scripts to replace all my needs for
| Youtube search, using any highlighted text, with a shortcut,
| Youtube Music, with a synced plain text file of song titles
| and a shuffle-on-read script, and more curiously, a script to
| help me slowly go through all thousands of my partner's
| favorite songs, and then, using shortcuts, add them to my own
| favorites, decide on them later, add them to the "what the
| heck do you listen to" friendly banter list, or the "my ears
| bleeding" list, etc. Much better UX then anything the slow
| web UIs can offer, and with minimum hacking.
|
| [0]: https://ytfzf.github.io/
|
| [1]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
| imiric wrote:
| This is the way.
|
| I really don't understand why any technically proficient user
| would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends. You
| get bombarded with ads, you're constantly tracked and
| experimented on, and your behavior is used to improve their
| algorithms in order to keep you on the site for as long as
| possible. It's a hostile user experience, just like most of the
| mainstream web.
|
| Whenever possible, I suggest using Invidious, Piped, Newpipe,
| yt-dlp, and anything but the official frontends.
|
| I try to compensate the creators I follow via other means if
| they have an alternative income source, but I refuse to be
| forced to participate in an exploitative business model that is
| responsible for the awful state of the modern web.
| dewey wrote:
| > I really don't understand why any technically proficient
| user would willingly use any of the official YouTube
| frontends.
|
| - Because I don't see ads with YouTube Premium
|
| - Because I add things to my playlists
|
| - Because I more often than not find interesting things to
| watch there
|
| - Because I like using it on my phone or TV
|
| There's a lot of reasons why someone would prefer the
| official apps over some third party app that might break
| every few months.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Because I don't want to fuck about working against the
| platform, opting myself into something that'll break at any
| moment.
|
| I would much rather put up with Youtube than be frustrated
| when my 'alternate frontend' one day breaks and i need to
| figure out a workaround.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Because using the website is a better experience. None of
| those tools worked with Sponsorblock last time I tried, for
| one.
|
| I don't want to yt-dlp every video, Piped and Invidious both
| have awful frontends in comparison, even the Newpipe dev
| admitted to using Vanced at some point, and yt-dlp needs some
| massaging to get the right video quality (and it can't
| download some videos at all).
|
| If any of your solutions were better for the majority, the
| majority would be using them. Youtube's ad blocker war is
| making the platform worse for everyone, but having a couple
| of billions of developer power behind your platform still
| beats any open source video players built for fun.
| vonjuice wrote:
| https://github.com/po5/mpv_sponsorblock
| imiric wrote:
| > Because using the website is a better experience.
|
| That is debatable. I personally find that the combination
| of Piped, yt-dlp and mpv provides a far better experience
| than the official frontends. But this is a personal
| opinion, and I'm not trying to convince anyone my choice is
| better. I just didn't think other technical users would
| prefer using the official frontends.
|
| Thanks for your perspective, though I think it's a bit
| outdated.
|
| > None of those tools worked with Sponsorblock last time I
| tried, for one.
|
| Piped, yt-dlp and mpv all support Sponsorblock.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I really don't understand why any technically proficient
| user would willingly use any of the official YouTube
| frontends._
|
| I'm a technically proficient user that's written custom bash
| scripts for youtube-dl combined with ffmpeg to download
| videos locally and I still use the official Youtube _desktop
| web browser UI_ every day for several reasons:
|
| + transcripts and close-captioning (use Ctrl+F search for
| _text_ to find the section of video that starts talking about
| the topic I 'm interested in)
|
| + many videos have index of chapters (deep links), table-of-
| contents
|
| + viewers' comments (especially valuable for crowdsourced
| feedback on DIY videos to point out extra tips, or flaws,
| etc)
|
| + external links mentioned (Amazon links to products is
| especially valuable for DIY tutorials)
|
| + convenient hot links to related videos (part 2, part 3,
| etc). Not every creator makes "playlists"
|
| + Youtube web UI has superfast video scrubbing of the
| timeline. A local video player like VLC scrubbing of the
| timeline is very slow compared to Youtube because the youtube
| backend pre-analyzes the entire video and generates a bunch
| of timeline thumbnails at multiple intervals. This makes the
| Youtube web UI timeline scrubbing very fluid with responsive
| visual feedback.
|
| I like downloading with yt-dlp but I also lose a lot of
| functionality when I watch videos in VLC instead of the
| Youtube desktop webbrowser UI. The above points are not
| relevant to the terrible Youtube _app_ on mobile and tablets.
| blueflow wrote:
| > + many videos have index of chapters (deep links)
|
| In mpv, you can use PgUp and PgDown to select chapters.
|
| > + external links mentioned
|
| Video description is in audio/video file if yt-dlp gets a
| --embed-metadata. mpv prints that if present.
| imiric wrote:
| Most of those features are available in OSS tools as well.
| And for those that are not, there are alternative solutions
| that might take a bit of work to implement.
|
| I'm not claiming that the OSS tools have feature parity
| with 1st party frontends, or that they won't require some
| sacrifices, or effort adjusting. I just think that the
| trade-off of losing some of the convenience in return for
| not being tracked and manipulated is well worth it to me,
| though I can see how it might not be worth it for others.
|
| I do actually think that OSS tools provide a better UX. I
| can download the media and consume it offline, using any
| player of choice, on any device, at any time. I find
| YouTube's recommendations a nuisance, and I can turn those
| off in Invidious and Piped. Scrubbing in mpv is
| instantaneous for me for local files and even those served
| on the LAN, though there is a slight delay when playing
| directly from YT. There is also a solution for generating
| thumbnails[1], though I had some issues with it, and didn't
| end up using it.
|
| At the end of the day, it's a personal choice depending on
| what you value most, and I'm not trying to convince anyone
| my choice is inherently better. Thanks for providing your
| perspective.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/tomasklaen/uosc
| jasode wrote:
| _> Scrubbing in mpv is instantaneous for me for local
| files_
|
| Yes, I agree that scrubbing in mpv or vlc is
| "instantaneous" but Youtube's web ui is even more
| hyperfast "instaneous" than mpv.
|
| _> There is also a solution for generating
| thumbnails[1], though I had some issues with it, and
| didn't end up using it._
|
| For me, using an offline tool like thumbfast to generate
| timeline previews defeats the purpose of using Youtube's
| pre-existing timeline thumbnails that Google's datacenter
| already generated. Let me explain...
|
| _> I do actually think that OSS tools provide a better
| UX. I can download the media and consume it offline,
| using any player of choice, on any device, at any time. I
| find YouTube's recommendations a nuisance,_
|
| I'm guessing it's a difference in usage pattern. I'm
| often browsing a bunch of Youtube videos as a _research
| tool_. Like a "visual wikipedia" for various topics
| (especially DIY tutorials and products research). I want
| to jump in and out of videos _fast_. Downloading videos
| with yt-dlp to play in mpv isn 't the workflow here.
| That's too slow and cumbersome. Instead, I'm _sampling_ a
| bunch of videos and maybe a few of those will be
| ultimately be downloaded. E.g. Preview /scrub fragments
| of 10 related videos, read some viewer comments, scan
| some transcripts, etc... and eventually only yt-dlp 2 of
| them. This is why "mpv yt-dlp with workarounds" is not an
| acceptable substitute for using Youtube's web ui.
| imiric wrote:
| That's fair. It's indeed a difference in usage.
|
| My only usage of YT is queing up videos for short-term
| playback. So I browse a feed of my subscriptions in
| Piped, drag links of videos I'm interested in to a text
| file, and run a small script on my HTPC to download them
| with yt-dlp in parallel, and add them to a playlist. With
| a fast connection, it only takes a few minutes to
| download even dozens of videos at a time. Then I serve
| the videos on my LAN over HTTP with nginx, and watch them
| on any of my devices using any media player that can
| stream HTTP, which is usually mpv.
|
| I started a project some time ago to make this fancier,
| but honestly, this workflow does 90% of what I need, and
| I'm too lazy to change it.
|
| To each their own :)
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The web frontend _just works_. The other frontends tend to
| have issues, which even if they 're not deal-breakers are
| annoying. I won't put ideology over using what works best.
| And clicking a link, then clicking play, beats copying the
| URL then pasting it into a command line.
|
| Of course this only works because _by default_ (since I have
| an ad blocker anyways) I _don 't_ get bombarded with ads on
| the web frontend, and so far I've seen the adblocker nag
| screen once (a failure which uBlock Origin seems to have
| swiftly corrected).
| MrNeon wrote:
| One feature it lacks is seek bar previews. There are thumbnail
| scripts but they don't use the available youtube thumbnails.
| ftk_ wrote:
| I implemented downloading of youtube thumbnails for one of
| these scripts.
|
| https://github.com/marzzzello/mpv_thumbnail_script
| noname120 wrote:
| Or use any of the _many_ alternative YouTube frontends:
| https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#youtube
| mlindner wrote:
| Using firefox 118 on Mac here and seeing no issues. Videos load
| instantly or near instantly.
| gadders wrote:
| Can someone check gmail as well? It loads so slowly under
| firefox.
| agevag wrote:
| I use Firefox on Windows and I cannot reproduce this. Videos load
| instantly.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Oh, and they also falsely show "4K" in the video quality icon,
| but "accidentally" play a 720p or even worse quality stream. If
| you _manually select_ the 4K stream quality, then and only then
| will YouTube deign to show 4K to you.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is
| that I'm capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just
| fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they
| can only be played back at 420p.
|
| Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating
| part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and
| there's nothing telling you about this not being supported in
| your browser until you've made the purchase (by just allowing
| 420p and needing to search for why it's broken)
|
| see
| https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/pm0eqh/why_are_my_...
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of
| infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant
| about Netflix and subtitles.
|
| They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe
| five languages. That's it!
|
| If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so
| languages that they have available, well... no. Just no.
| Learn one of the four they've picked for you.
|
| If you call their support, they'll _gaslight you_ and mumble
| something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense.
| Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more
| translations for _their own content that they made
| themselves_. They _own_ the copyright on it, which means,
| literally, that they _have the right_ to do whatever they
| please with the copy. Including showing the associated
| subtitles to you.
|
| You see, what actually happened, is that some too-smart UX
| guy at Netflix couldn't make a language picker look nice for
| that many options so he asked a too-smart data science (lol)
| guy to figure out the _most common languages for each
| region_.
|
| Here in Australia they picked English, Italian, Vietnamese,
| Chinese because we have a lot of immigrants from those
| countries. I'm sure they used very clever algorithms on big
| data clusters to figure that out. Good job, well done.
|
| Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this
| out. Netflix and their $500K total comp Stanford or wherever
| graduates couldn't. So they instructed their call centre
| staff to lie to their customers.
|
| Then they had someone write this idiocy:
| https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101798
|
| "If subtitles for a title are offered in a language but do
| not display on your device, try another device."
|
| Oh, oh, I'll go do that right now! Let me try my PC... nope
| four languages. On the TV? Four languages. Actually, I have a
| phone... and... oh... four languages.
|
| PS: Thai (only!) subtitles are "special" and use eye-searing
| HDR maximum white. Like 1,600 nits white that literally
| leaves green after-images etched into my retina. They have a
| support page and a pre-prepared set of lies for the support
| staff to read for that piece of shoddy engineering also.
| dacryn wrote:
| is it still a thing that you have to use Edge on windows to
| get 4k HDR, but you can't on Chrome?
| sofixa wrote:
| > Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured
| this out
|
| Did they? Both Prime Video and Disney+ have very very
| narrow subtitle and audio language choices.
|
| > If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and
| mumble something about "copyright", which is patent
| nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing
| more translations for their own content that they made
| themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means,
| literally, that they have the right to do whatever they
| please with the copy. Including showing the associated
| subtitles to you.
|
| Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright?
|
| As someone who speaks multiple languages, and has the habit
| of watching with subtitles in the original language of the
| content if I speak it; otherwise default to English
| subtitles with original audio... none of the streaming
| companies have managed to handle that properly. Way too
| often the audio is only dubbed (often badly), or only my
| subtitles in my local language (French) are available,
| regardless of the original language of the content. I'd
| rather watch British movies with subtitles in English, not
| French, thank you very much.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I
| can be bothered to count, certainly.
|
| Are you saying it's some sort of challenge beyond the
| abilities of a Senior Technical Lead with total comp in
| the seven digits to figure out how to make a list of
| items more than 4 or 5 entries long? Too many megabytes
| of JSON to shove down the wire for more?
|
| > Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright?
|
| They definitely do not. That's not how work-for-hire
| translations work. You pay someone to translate your
| shows' subtitles for you, then _you own the copyright_ on
| that work that you paid for. That 's how that works. No
| weird region-locked silliness.
|
| You _can_ make other languages appear by changing the
| entire UI language of Netflix, which then shows some
| other "data driven" subset of the subtitle languages.
|
| But then, the entire UI is in another language, which not
| everyone watching may understand.
|
| Essentially there are audio-subtitle language
| combinations that are impossible to achieve, no matter
| what. That combo may not be common enough to make any
| top-5 list anywhere.
|
| So if you love someone of a sufficiently small minority,
| or have an unusual racial makeup in your household,
| Netflix would rather you weren't so weird.
|
| Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion
| of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this
| profoundly against inter-racial love. On purpose. They
| _wrote the code_ to do this.
|
| Blows my mind.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the
| bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this
| profoundly against inter-racial love_
|
| I'm on the same boat and I hear you. And since we are on
| this subject, do you know what else grinds my gears? The
| whole idea of cultural appropriation. So if your ancestry
| is X then you can't do/wear/celebrate Y.
|
| So when you ask these people something like: _Is it okay
| for my half-X, half-Y children to do this?_ they start
| feeling confused. But if you go: _What about my
| grandchildren, who are 1 /4 X and 1/4 Y and 1/2 Z?_. Some
| of them begin to realize how racist and simplistic they
| are being.
|
| Learn and enjoy other people's cultures, for goodness'
| sake. It's called being human.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| I consider this to be the answer to "cultural
| appropraition" which people seem to have made up because
| their hobby is being offended:
| https://rumble.com/v3wx1mz-is-this-outfit-offensive-
| students...
|
| I've seen similar videos with Japanese garb too. The
| offendatrons hate it. The actual Japanese people love
| that you're enjoying their culture.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Should Italians feel offended that Japanese businessmen
| adopted the western (Italian-style) suit?
| david-gpu wrote:
| _" No, because Italians are white and white people can't
| experience discrimination"_.
|
| That is an actual response I've heard more than once.
|
| To be fair, I agree with the "cultural appropriation
| folks" when they correctly point out that sometimes
| people intentionally mock other cultures and that's a
| dick thing to do. But conflating mockery and insult with
| an appreciation of other cultures is not helpful, and
| that's what they do in practice.
|
| I'm a Spaniard and when I watch a Japanese person
| practicing flamenco, I feel flattered, not insulted.
| sofixa wrote:
| > They definitely do not. That's not how work-for-hire
| translations work. You pay someone to translate your
| shows' subtitles for you, then you own the copyright on
| that work that you paid for. That's how that works. No
| weird region-locked silliness.
|
| If you skip the fact that Netflix do regional deals with
| local content houses to sell Netflix-made stuff either in
| theatres or get TV releases, in which case translations
| could be a part of the deal to be be provided by the
| local entity who's getting the rights; or the other, more
| common scenario, where Netflix acquire local content for
| wider publication (e.g. Casa de Papel/Money Heist is a
| very popular example), where again, there might be
| complications.
|
| > Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I
| can be bothered to count, certainly.
|
| I haven't found that to be the case, but had Apple TV
| only briefly because of the general poor quality (watched
| 3 series on it, all three devolved into trope after trope
| barely going below the obvious surface).
|
| > Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the
| bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this
| profoundly against inter-racial love. On purpose. They
| wrote the code to do this.
|
| Is woke in the room with us right now? Can you point it
| out and explain what it is? For the record, "races" are a
| stupid social construct that should have died out with
| the Nazis. And people can be of different ethnicities
| while speaking the same language(s), or inversely of the
| same ethnicity while speaking different languages. Being
| "woke", "inter-racial" and different languages are
| completely orthogonal topics.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Seems like they'd want people to, idk pick up to 4
| languages themselves in settings if they are really
| attached to their picker. Which makes more sense to me.
| kuerbel wrote:
| I don't know about browser options, but on the android app
| I can choose between 7 different audio languages and 29
| subtitles. Looked it up just for you with an episode of
| "The good Doctor", which is not a netflix original. I live
| in Germany. Definitely not an UI issue.
| nusl wrote:
| A common thing where I live is for local companies to buy
| streaming rights for Netflix-created media, and then we
| can't watch Netflix-created media on Netflix because local-
| company bought streaming/playback rights. Netflix doesn't
| care about the customer. They care about money, and that
| won't change. They'll max out the bullshit until customers
| push back, leave it there for a bit, wait for customers to
| get used to the new-bullshit, then add more bullshit and
| repeat.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I love this rant with a passion.
| isametry wrote:
| I have to add two adjacent subtitle-related stupidities on
| Netflix:
|
| 1. Closed captions (CC). Okay, I'm willing to accept they
| improve the experience of a show / movie for a _non-zero_
| number of people. What I absolutely don 't accept is CC
| being the ONLY VERSION OF ENGLISH SUBTITLES available.
| Either CC or nothing. I can't be the only one who prefers
| English subtitles for English-spoken media, while NOT
| needing every single sound described as [wet squelching] or
| [quirky synth music].
|
| (Bonus points for everyone who recognizes those specific
| examples |)
|
| 2. Subtitles in all-caps. For the _entire movie_. Just why?
| If I 'm able to read the text in time at all (it is widely
| known that words and sentences in all-caps are slower to
| read), then I'll just feel everyone's screaming all the
| time, even if they aren't. Whose idea was this? And also
| here, to my knowledge it only affects English. (I believe
| all Nolan movies got this "treatment" for example.)
|
| There have been several occasions where even though it was
| readily available for me to stream from Netflix, I pirated
| a show or movie anyway, specifically to avoid one or both
| of these issues.
| bambax wrote:
| Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented
| version? This isn't the future we were promised, but it sure
| is the future we have.
| chii wrote:
| > Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented
| version?
|
| in which case, why buy it at all? A torrent isn't going to
| load as fast as what you paid YT for.
| nusl wrote:
| The further time goes on toward segmented streaming
| platforms and DRM bullshit, the deeper my piracy hedge
| grows. Eventually there will be a streaming service
| aggregation service a la Cable channels and we're back at
| square 1. Add to that streaming services pushing new ad
| schemes now that they've captured enough market share for
| the risk to be worth it, and we've got a great storm
| brewing for a resurgence in piracy and media execs going
| "but y?"
|
| BTW modern piracy setups are far more streamlined and
| easier to manage/use than modern streaming platforms.
| Assuming you have some tech ability anyway.
| bambax wrote:
| Jellyfin on a NAS is just great. You don't even need a
| NAS. A Pi with a large SSD attached will do fine.
| fckthisguy wrote:
| A half decent NAS, with Dockerised *rr is the gold
| standard of torrenting. I never knew it could be so
| painless.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| >A torrent isn't going to load as fast as what you paid
| YT for.
|
| Unless you want to rewind the video without it re-
| buffering...
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| Not youtube specifically, but I wanted to watch the wheel
| of time series on my ipad and:
|
| #1 You cannot stream in a browser on iPadOS anymore. Amazon
| won't let you, you must use their app.
|
| #2 They don't seem to give a fuck about making sure you're
| getting a quality stream in their app. Full of artifiacts
| and horrible compression way more often than is warranted
| on my symmetric gigabit connection.
|
| So I added it to my Sonarr instance (pirated it legally)
| and watched it in a browser from there with perfect quality
| and no pre-stream ads.
|
| Once again: A paid service so bad that it couldn't compete
| with the pirate experience _even if it was free_.
|
| Which once again confirms Gabe Newell's statement to be
| true: "piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue"
| MereInterest wrote:
| This sort of behavior should be an open-and-shut case of
| false advertising. You were told that the video would be a
| certain resolution. You gave money as a result of that
| statement. You received an inferior product to the one that
| was described.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Isn't that fraudulent? Its amazing how an individual can
| commit fraud one time and its FRAUD! But a company can do
| the exact same thing en masse as like a business model over
| and over and its only ever a misunderstanding that they get
| a chance to correct and a gentleman's handshake. aAnd even
| if they didn't, it seems impossible to adjust the dial from
| civil to criminal as its often left in the consumers hands.
| Its not like there are attorneys that, like, represent the
| State that could exercise their legal authority to protect
| consumers.
| MereInterest wrote:
| To my not-a-lawyer understanding, it is fraudulent. Fine
| print is allowed to clarify an offer, but may not
| substantially alter the offer as originally made.
|
| I could see an argument made that a reasonable person
| would know an offer to be limited to supported platforms,
| and that the fine print clarifies which platforms are
| supported. To me, though, I'd draw a line between
| unsupported due to underlying limitations (e.g. can't
| serve 4k video on a NES) and unsupported due to seller-
| side limitations (e.g. won't serve 4k without remote
| attestation). I'd see the former as a reasonable
| clarification of the offer, and the latter as an
| unreasonable alteration of the offer.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Even if it doesn't technically apply here, the larger
| point remains that people get handcuffs and corporations
| get handshakes...
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Same deal with deferred prosecutions which is a bullshit
| designation because the company's legal is basically
| going to ensure that it becomes a nolle prosequi at that
| point
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's crappy behavior but I think screaming fraud is
| taking things a bit far. If you buy a Blu-ray from a
| website you don't come back screaming fraud because the
| browser or computer you you used doesn't play Blu-rays
| due to the DRM requirements. A refund request fits the
| scenario much better and the company's response tells you
| whether they are worth doing business with, not whether
| you were the victim of fraud. Some responsibility still
| lies with the buyer that they will understand what it
| takes to use the thing they are buying and not expect to
| rely 100% on the seller to verify everything for them
| beforehand.
|
| At the same time... I think the behavior is pretty
| shitty, just not illegal, in that it takes minor up front
| effort to resolve. An explicit message along the lines of
| "You won't be able to watch in higher quality on this
| browser/device combination. Do you still want to purchase
| the high quality version for use on another device?
| You'll still be able to watch either version on this
| device, just always in low quality" goes a long way.
| Voultapher wrote:
| Enhancer for Youtube allows you to select a min quality, also
| great for blocking shorts.
| TheLML wrote:
| That has irked me for quite some time. I always manually select
| 1080p, because sometimes YT claims it's already playing 1080p,
| but it's obviously not and the video starts buffering anew when
| I select 1080p manually. Quite annoying
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Roughly around the same time as the anti-adblocking effort,
| youtube started just not playing the video stream for me much
| of the time. I say play a video, it will start playing the
| audio, and the video will just be a frozen image.
|
| In unrelated news, my youtube-dl usage is way, way up.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Wait, that's a Firefox-only issue ?!
| IshKebab wrote:
| No, it does it on Chrome too.
| vGPU wrote:
| I have personally noticed this many times. I'd blink and wonder
| if it was just my eyes going bad but nope, soon as I select HD
| quality manually I can read text again.
| kevincox wrote:
| I haven't see this other than for brief periods during quality
| switching (it seems to play out the current buffer in lower
| quality but new chunks are downloaded at the displayed target
| quality). However for some reason it does often just load at a
| very low (sub-720p) resolution and I need to manually up the
| quality or it will never get to the highest quality (I'm
| watching on a 4k monitor with great internet and hardware
| decoding, 4k has never stuttered for me).
| judge2020 wrote:
| I remember them starting to do automatic lower-quality
| streams when this came out[0], but I'm not sure if this is
| still the cause for the situation. It could be a general "we
| see this ISP/ASN failing more often with x many concurrent 4k
| streams, let's throw some people on 720p and see if it
| helps".
|
| 0: https://www.pcworld.com/article/398929/youtube-defaults-
| to-l...
| conradfr wrote:
| It doesn't help that 720p quality seems subpar (to me) compared
| to some years ago.
| rsolva wrote:
| Yeah, this has bothered me for a while. Switching to
| alternative youtube interfaces solved that problem :)
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I have a hard time believing that's actually what's happening. If
| they wanted to slow down other browsers, why would they choose
| this easily discoverable way? They could have easily slowed down
| serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to
| a similar effect. It seems more likely this is just a debug
| snippet that has made it into production by accident.
| sebstefan wrote:
| If I was working at Google and I was tasked with doing that,
| I'd half ass it too
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I mean it could be that the programmer wanted it to be
| discovered to draw attention to Google managers' shenanigans
| but that seems kind of far fetched.
| amelius wrote:
| > They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and
| other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect.
|
| And that is /not/ easily discoverable??
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| I would argue it's a bit harder to find if the youtube
| backend serves files slower for certain browsers. One could
| even radomize it and sometimes still serve it fast or
| something. Since you cannot look at the backend code it would
| be hard to proof anything.
| asddubs wrote:
| ah yes, the fact that they are sabotaging other browsers in a
| very obvious way is actually proof that they didn't meant to
| sabotage other browsers!
| udev4096 wrote:
| Hilarious
| blibble wrote:
| I noticed this one and it did come to mind that it was, ahem,
| targeted
|
| overlords: I'll give up youtube entirely rather than watch
| ads/contribute towards your revenue
| denkmoon wrote:
| Using firefox I get "instant" youtube. The video starts playing
| before most of the rest of the UI has loaded even, definitely
| under 1 second.
|
| Any idea what specifically causes it to happen, rather than just
| "firefox"?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| An up-to-date adblocker blocker blocker, most likely. Paying
| for Premium may also do it.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I've gotten that really slow UI loading almost always lately
| and I've always assumed that it's because I'm running uBlock
| Origin.
|
| Although I just tried opening two videos and both opened
| basically instantly.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I've had this slow down show up for me as well. I wonder if
| there's a non malicious explanation, although I'll admit I'm
| unable to think of a charitable interpretation.
|
| Sometimes YouTube also disables features on my home page. For
| example, at the top of the home page there's usually a filter bar
| with various categories. I haven't figured out under what
| conditions this gets triggered, but there's times where the
| filter bar just disappears.
| octacat wrote:
| And that is why these giant companies should be split apart.
| azalemeth wrote:
| On a completely related note, the UK's Competitions and Markets
| Authority has recently been flexing its muscles on digital
| markets. You may wish to know of this URL, specifically for
| reporting anti-competitive practices:
| https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...
| seydor wrote:
| It's a bug they can't fix and "if you wait 5 seconds it works".
| Also , in 5 seconds, ad blockers are guaranteed to have kicked in
| manjalyc wrote:
| Code generally does not enter the YouTube code base without a lot
| of review namely (1) performance tests and (2) code reviews from
| multiple teams. Lines like this almost certainly get
| flagged/increased scrutiny. It would be very hard to imagine
| multiple people didn't know about this and assign the blame to a
| single person.
| toldyouso2022 wrote:
| Youtube is a very toxic environment. Even "informative" content
| is often toxic, but in a very subtle manner.
|
| At google They may be not respecting the web but they are doing
| firefox users a favor. If you really need to see a video, five
| seconds won't make a difference. If you don't need it, five
| seconds may remind you that you don't really need it.
|
| Try to see the positives
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Use brave. The best youtube premium experience without paying for
| premium.
| alentred wrote:
| Hm, it does not correspond to my observations. I'm using Firefox
| and the videos load and start just as they usually do.
|
| A/B testing? :)
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| lol, I think this ended up being one of several factors that made
| me switch to firefox (now vivaldi).
|
| The "extra chance to consider your life choices and do you really
| want to watch this video" was a feature not a bug.
|
| Plus now tiktok and telegram are orders of magnitude more popular
| than YT. Im seeing more and more creators arrive on YT as their
| "second choice" platform.
| iinnPP wrote:
| https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and...
|
| Seems odd to do something so brazen while also publishing
| information that (could) prove intent.
|
| Google also modifies how business information can be accessed
| from Firefox Mobile. You can't read reviews easily from Firefox
| Mobile. At least not my install.
| gear54rus wrote:
| That's because it's not actually what's happening. I'm all for
| bashing bigcorps and especially ad empires but reddit folks
| confused correlation with causation here.
|
| The code in question is part of a function that injects a video
| ad (that plays before the start) and the code itself is just a
| fallback in case it fails to load over 5 seconds so that video
| page doesn't break completely.
|
| Why was this affected by user agent change? My best guess is
| that on some combinations they somehow decide not to show any
| ads at all (for now) and therefore this function is not called
| and some other code path is taken. This is consistent with my
| own experience with the recent anti-adblock bullshit they
| implemented. The banner was not being shown after user agent
| change implying it's one of the considered variables.
|
| You can verify all this if you click 'format code' in browser
| debugger.
| iinnPP wrote:
| That makes sense and explains why it seemed so odd.
|
| I don't use YouTube so the comment was more of a way to bring
| up the other behavior in business reviews. It seemed
| relevant.
|
| Edit: reviews are also broken(for me) on Firefox desktop with
| no extensions enabled and with ublock enabled.
| nomilk wrote:
| I don't use firefox but have noticed a strange delay occurring
| during the past day or two. Wondering if it's coincidence. I use
| ublock origin, so maybe youtube's detecting its presence somehow
| and forcing a delay? (ublock is up to date so I don't get the
| message from youtube telling me to stop using adblockers -
| perhaps this is their next attempt to annoy people into
| paying/allowing ads?).
| quantum_state wrote:
| If that's true, it is pure evil.
| laserbeam wrote:
| I've recently done a pc upgrade and am now enjoying 64 gigs of
| ram. Decided to watch a live stream on youtube this weekend.
|
| Firefox: 22 GB of ram usage for the youtube tab after ~15
| minutes. Tab became unresponsive.
|
| Edge: Out of memory error after ~5 minutes.
|
| Chrome: working fine, the youtube tab sitting peacefully ay
| 400-600 MB.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Not sure what is specific in your setup but I have watched
| numerous live stream on firefox and tab never became
| unresponsive. Haven't checked the ram but my laptop had half of
| yours and the live were running for an hour or so.
| jug wrote:
| I don't know what your problem is exactly but this is not
| normal behavior on Firefox at least. Check your extensions to
| begin with, or for a quick test, try watching a video in a
| prvivate tab.
| laserbeam wrote:
| Just, ublock origin, a password manager, and the kagi
| extension for my search engine. ublock origin was installed
| on all browsers. I'm not even trying to watch it without
| ublock, as that would be an unreasonable thing to do in
| general.
|
| I know this is not normal behaviour, and it's likely
| unintetional, but I'll be damn sure google won't bother to
| fix it. I'm most surprised by Edge as it's running chromium
| and it should share some similarity to chrome.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I had the same issue, it turned out to be some random addon I
| installed years ago. Check if the problem also occurs with
| everything but uBlock Origin disabled.
| welzel wrote:
| I hope they keep this code in YT.
|
| It will be a party for the EU to punish Google with an anti-
| monopoly lawsuit.
|
| Best case: google gets forced to split up chrome, youtube and
| search as they obviously abuse their power.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Would be a bad day for the Internet. There's no way Youtube is
| financially viable without being cross-subsidised by Google's
| search income and running on Google's peering agreements with
| ISPs. Ads would be nowhere near enough to cover the bandwidth
| cost, which is why sooner or later _any_ attempt to copycat it
| failed or went down to utter niche content.
| qwery wrote:
| Oh, I noticed this yesterday and assumed it was ad blocker
| hostility. Which I guess it may well be -- are Firefox users more
| likely to use ad blockers? Possibly. Certainly on Android. That
| doesn't strictly matter though, presumably the Youtube people try
| to avoid stepping on the Chrome people's toes.
|
| Given Google is apparently going ahead with killing extensions on
| Chrome it's not hard to imagine some scheme where a guy is _just
| lookin ' at'cha merchandise_ and happens to be _carryin ' a
| baseball bat is all_ -- you can't really blame him for some
| spillage, right? (make using Firefox painful to try and push
| people to Chrome). Before crippling Chrome? Sounds ridiculous,
| but one can't help but wonder...
|
| Thinking about some more, the point could actually be to make
| users question if its because they have an ad blocker not even
| actively blocking anything, but simply installed. Some number of
| users may uninstall their ad blocking extension to see if it
| makes the lag go away.
| baz00 wrote:
| Quick note:
|
| yt-dlp + VLC speed this right up again!
| t43562 wrote:
| Software that's not getting any attention will be ok as it won't
| get python upgrades.
|
| Software that _is_ getting attention has a nice long warning
| period and fixes may not even cause any trouble at all if the
| code is ok and there are unit tests.
|
| New software won't have a whole class of timezone problems
| because people will use the better API to remove the warnings.
|
| I cannot see what the big problem is - much more troublesome
| things happen in Go all the time. Python isn't a huge for-profit
| company like Google or even MS which has to dedicate efforts to
| ensuring that games from 1992 still run in 2023.
| agluszak wrote:
| I wrote an email to Electronic Frontier Foundation and European
| Digital Rights collective asking them to file a complaint against
| Google because of this unjustified slowdown. I advise other
| readers to consider doing the same.
| FrenchDevRemote wrote:
| Not only that: Google's recaptcha will also ask you for dozens of
| captchas on firefox android (which is probably the best) way to
| watch youtube/use google site without ads on mobile)
|
| f** google
| boudin wrote:
| On android NewPipe is a good alternative to watch youtube
| everdrive wrote:
| Seems like this is an unintentional benefit to firefox users. A
| small amount of friction is the difference between "I'm
| mindlessly watching" vs "I actually care about watching this
| video."
| dinckelman wrote:
| This is why you don't let a single corporation control more than
| half the internet, and more than 75% of the browser market
| ploum wrote:
| Another "Youtube is doing shit" thread and yet not a single
| mention of Peertube.
|
| https://joinpeertube.org/en
|
| So for all people uploading videos, please have a look at
| Peertube. It is to Youtube what Mastodon is to Twitter. (and
| more: it is compatible with Mastodon, one can subscribe to your
| Peertube channel through his/her mastodon account).
|
| I'm not arguing to leave Youtube completely but to offer an
| alternative to your audience. Please join peertube.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| I'd love to see real competition to YouTube. I'm afraid this
| seems not, the UX isn't great, homepage is useless, you need to
| click on Browse content then enter some keywords on a blank
| page, search results limited to 2 items and then you need to
| click on "Display more videos". I might be to used to youtube
| homepage, for me it's perfect I get videos right away and
| suggestions are good. I'm pretty sure this project, Mastodon
| and others are in good will, but they lack great ux/ui, it
| seems to me that ux isn't even researched, how can it be a
| viable competitor?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Please send this to the Peertube developer. Consider also
| that until recently it's likely that having videos load fast
| on peer2peer and adding features like streaming likely had a
| higher priority than interface polishing.
|
| But you might be asking for something impossible : the focus
| is on the different servers, and having a "suggested videos"
| page is seen as an anti-feature because it involves making an
| "algorithm", at which point you are editorializing, become
| (legally !) responsible for what you select, and are close to
| become a platform yourself, something that you started out by
| fighting in the first place !
| ploum wrote:
| Like Mastodon, Peertube should not aim to "Do everything
| people think will be good to get audience". It should
| create a philosophy.
|
| I'm quite sure that lot and lot of people are tired by all
| those algorithmic suggestions. People are sad to see
| creators doing videos to get likes/subscribers/views
| instead of really creating.
|
| This is a new model. And the winners of the old models will
| either adapt or not be winners any more. And that's good if
| the premise is that the old model is broken in the first
| place.
| beej71 wrote:
| I don't need it to be a competitor; I don't even want it to
| be a competitor. I just need it to exist and get some
| quality, modest use like the rest of the fedeverse.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > I'd love to see real competition to YouTube. I'm afraid
| this seems not, the UX isn't great.
|
| What do you call YouTube's UI then? Any Peertube instance I
| used has better UI than YouTube. Most websites have. Because
| YouTube UI is atrocious and one of the most user hostile UIs
| I have used.
|
| > search results limited to 2 items
|
| Not sure what you are talking about. Is this an exaggeration?
| It is not clear via text-only to me.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| https://rumble.com - "The free speech alternative to Youtube"
| even
| noirscape wrote:
| YouTube's market hold is unfortunately circular; no uploader on
| the platform will risk splitting their audience to a platform
| nobody goes to, and because of that, new platforms are unable
| to grow.
|
| That aside: I also doubt most peertube instances can withstand
| the bandwidth costs of seriously hosting a few moderately
| succesful YouTube channels.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Content makers already do multi uploads on various platforms
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > no uploader on the platform will risk splitting their
| audience to a platform nobody goes to
|
| _cough_ nebula _cough_
| hersko wrote:
| I think Rumble [1] is the most valid competitor at the moment.
|
| [1] https://rumble.com/
| dtjb wrote:
| That's some off-putting content to show new users. I suspect
| they're an ideologically driven platform?
|
| *edit, their press release section removes all doubt.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| If "free speech is good" is the ideology you're referring
| to, then yes.
| insanitybit wrote:
| The second I saw reddit as the source I knew this was going to be
| incorrect.
| nixass wrote:
| Time for EU to slap them in the face again
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| People on reddit have posted videos of this happening in chrome,
| I think it's possible this is actually just a bug and not an evil
| scheme.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| As a JavaScript Dev, around 2010-2012 it was not uncommon to see
| `setTimeout(..., n)` hacks, often with n=0 but sometimes even
| n=1000, n=5000 into a codebase. This could workaround some bugs,
| and given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back
| then, often a last-resort.
|
| And yes, am guilty too of committing this to prod back then. I
| think I haven't had a case where this was deployed in the last
| decade, but in the ugly SPA days pre angular v1 (and even during
| angular v1), where you code was this big glued-together
| conglomerate of various 3rd party UI libraries, this was common.
| Its ugly as hell, and you really had to be there at that time to
| understand this. But often it was just a cheap alternative, while
| debugging and fixing the truly underlying cause would be several
| man-days or even weeks.
|
| My point being: It might have slipped their QA cracks and was at
| some point intended to workaround a bug of some obscure Firefox
| behavior. For a company at youtube's scale this is however pretty
| embarrassing.
| asylteltine wrote:
| > given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back
| then
|
| As opposed to now?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I'm getting such a pause also in Chrome since a few days, I was
| assuming that it's fallout from the adblocking wars though (I use
| uBlock Origin and don't get the nag screen anymore since around
| the time that pause appeared)
| christop wrote:
| Yup, same here -- I see the same delay in Chrome now and then.
|
| I guessed it was due to the cat-and-mouse adblocking prevention
| between YouTube and adblockers (I'm also using uBlock Origin).
| nbittich wrote:
| Glad I dropped chrome for Firefox at the beginning of 2022. It
| took some time to get used to it but eventually it's now my main
| browser. Tired of Google being such a piece of shit. Hopefully
| 2024 will be the year of Linux on mobile.
| pcf wrote:
| I use Firefox on macOS Ventura, and here the video pages load
| instantly.
|
| I do have YouTube Premium (paid for in India to reduce the cost),
| but also in an incognito window where I'm not logged in, the
| video pages load immediately.
|
| Maybe it's because I use the extensions uBlock Origin and/or
| Disable Autoplay For YouTube?
| nottorp wrote:
| * Meanwhile, reddit asks me to sign up or log in to see the
| thread. *
|
| Oh wait. Who thought it's a good idea to post this with a link to
| a login page instead of the actual discussion thread?
| katsura wrote:
| The mentioned issue that can be seen on the video has been
| happening to me for a day or two while using Chrome.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| I've also noticed mysterious buffering in the iOS app for YouTube
| for at least a few months. Even on a Google Fiber connection many
| videos will take a number of seconds to start, and sometimes
| buffer in the middle. I also have YT Premium, so anti ad blocking
| shouldn't come into the picture. Videos load right away in Safari
| though.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Delete the iOS app and install the Vinegar Safari extension. It
| will replace the hostile video player with a native HTML5
| <video> element. I never see any ads, I can select the stream
| quality, and Picture-in-Picture works as my OS intended it to.
| foob wrote:
| I use Firefox, and Google's sites are literally the only ones
| where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a
| month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken
| for me, the map wouldn't update at all when attempting to search
| or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail
| had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript
| code spinning the CPU nonstop. It's literally gotten to the point
| where I keep a Chrome window open and use it exclusively for
| Gmail, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Maps.
|
| It's pretty obvious from the outside that supporting Firefox is
| not a product priority for Google. It also seems clear that it's
| in their best interest to have users choose Chrome over Firefox.
| My guess is that this likely emerges from a lot of very
| reasonable sounding local decisions, like "prioritize testing on
| browsers with the most market share," but it is convenient how
| those align with the anti-competitive incentives.
| joelanman wrote:
| Gmail has recently become extremely slow for me in Safari on a
| well specced M1 max
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Same here on Firefox, for both my laptop running Windows 11
| on Alder Lake, and my desktop running Ubuntu on Zen 2.
| vmfunction wrote:
| These sounds like classic MS behaviour. It is kind of thing
| that ought to addressed in anti-trust case.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I've posted this here on HN numerous times over the years,
| and it's been a while since I last posted it:
|
| Google is the new "Microsoft", they embrace, they extend,
| then extinguish. Look at their email offering, messaging
| offerings, they built on top of XMPP, then they pulled the
| plug eventually. Android is Linux based, but insanely
| proprietary, the app store is not open by any means, you're
| fully at their whims to get your apps on there. Chrome is
| basically the IE of old, implementing proprietary things or
| APIs that are not yet standard for Google products, and
| pushing out competing browsers.
| f4c39012 wrote:
| don't forget the old Microsoft is still here. We have two
| Microsofts now!
| da_chicken wrote:
| The old, old Microsoft is still here, too. IBM is still
| there, a dinosaur in the mist.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Using Google sites with a VPN on Firefox has been really
| annoying for the past couple of months as well.
| orbisvicis wrote:
| Recently, play store images don't load (about 60% - 80% missing
| per app) in Firefox.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is fascinating, how the simplest things on websites can be
| made arbitrarily involved, convoluted, over-complicated. And
| how those over-complications can then serve as a credible
| deniability.
| whalesalad wrote:
| bigquery console in ffx has like +120 latency potion
| taylodl wrote:
| It's clear Google is only testing for chrome engine and safari:
| which comprise 97% of the browsers being used. Would you
| increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test for 3% of the
| market?
| beej71 wrote:
| _I_ would in their shoes because I'm not just in it for the
| money and I care about the craft.
|
| But clearly I am not them. :-) Mathematically it doesn't make
| sense for Google. It _might_ make sense from an anti-trust
| perspective...
| taylodl wrote:
| It's hard to argue anti-trust when all these browsers are
| based on Chromium - which is maintained in part by Google,
| Microsoft, Opera, Vivaldi, Intel, ARM, and Canonical plus
| several volunteers.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Google is the largest contributor. The others chose
| Chromium because making a browser that's compatible with
| all the bloated standards invented by Google would
| require too much effort.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > hard to argue anti-trust
|
| Makes me wonder if it's the wrong strategy and what an
| alternative might be. In context, one might assume that
| Google will use the Chromium monoculture to... _ahem_
| more assertively deliver advertisements, which would be
| "a real dick move" as it goes. I don't know how a
| concerned citizen might bring attention to or possibly
| prevent the actualization of such a strategy by Google.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| In most companies, when 3% represents an in-fact huge number
| because you have a very successful product, you absolutely do
| test for that 3%.
|
| It's tiny companies that may ignore 3% as too expensive to
| worry about.
| foob wrote:
| As I said, the decisions are locally reasonable. However, if
| not supporting Firefox potentially exposed my company to
| scrutiny over anti-competitive behavior, then, yes, I would
| absolutely invest in testing procedures to mitigate that.
|
| It's also worth emphasizing that it isn't difficult to
| support Firefox. I'm pretty sure that many of the sites that
| I visit do so largely by accident. I do a fair bit of web
| development, and Firefox/Chrome compatibility has never been
| an issue in the slightest for me. You almost have to go out
| of your way to choose Chrome-specific APIs in order to break
| compatibility. How does virtually every other website on the
| internet manage it--from my bank to scrappy startups with
| junior developers coming straight out of bootcamps--while
| Google with all of their engineering talent and $100+ billion
| cash on hand just can't seem to make it work?
| taylodl wrote:
| Serious question - does anti-competitive behavior even
| apply to open source? Also, it's the open source chromium,
| not necessarily the browser Chrome, that dominates the
| browser market. The largest players in the industry, except
| for Apple, have lined-up to support chromium. Firefox is
| going against the grain. Is it Google's job to help them
| with their mission? Loosely speaking, in anti-competitive
| scenarios you have to show how a significant faction of the
| consumers are being harmed. You're going to have a tough
| time with that one.
| foob wrote:
| _you have to show how a significant faction of the
| consumers are being harmed. You 're going to have a tough
| time with that one._
|
| I'm not a lawyer and can't speak to what qualifies as
| anti-competitive behavior in a legal sense.
| Qualitatively, Web Extensions Manifest v3 and Web
| Environment Integrity are clearly harmful to consumers in
| my opinion. The first significantly hinders ad blockers,
| and the second kicks down the ladder on building search
| engines and hinders competition in that space. Other
| browsers using Chromium as a base doesn't change the fact
| that Google almost unilaterally controls it, and Google
| has made it extraordinarily clear that they're interested
| in making decisions that prioritize their own best
| interests over those of their users. I don't see why
| Chromium being open source would absolve any
| responsibility here, especially when the open source
| project in question primarily exists to serve the
| interests of the profit center of a mega-corp. I deeply
| support open source software, and I'm glad that Chromium
| is open source, but being open source doesn't excuse
| behavior that is against the interests of users whether
| it qualifies as illegal or not.
| taylodl wrote:
| I think you're going to have a tough time with Chromium
| seeing as how the likes of Microsoft and Canonical are
| contributing to the project. You're also going to have a
| tough time showing anti-trust when Google is working with
| Apple. I'm old enough to remember some famous anti-trust
| lawsuits where the plaintiffs had a much more solid case
| and still lost. In this case Google is literally working
| with the industry's largest companies. You're going to
| have a really hard time with that.
| davemp wrote:
| > Would you increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test
| for 3% of the market?
|
| I don't think you get to make these kind of cost cutting
| decisions when you're a vertically integrated mega-corp who
| also owns the browser with 65% of the market.
| frob wrote:
| At a company at the scale of Google or Facebook, yes. 3% x N
| billion people = a central European country or two.
| emddudley wrote:
| This is exactly the same situation that web developers faced
| with Internet Explorer 5 and 6, and it sucked for end users!
| sgift wrote:
| Since they throw me "Google recommends Chrome!" adverts in my
| face for various of their services, even when using a chrome-
| based browser it's not a case of only testing for
| Chrome/Safari. It's active work against others.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| Isn't that a good deal? 50% more testing in a way that can
| surely be parallelized to some extent does not seem a very
| steep price at youtube scale.
| acdha wrote:
| Here's another way to answer that question: do Vimeo, Twitch,
| Netflix, Amazon Prime, Instagram, TikTok, etc. say "let them
| use Chrome" or do they manage to do entry-level browser
| testing? The cost increase is nowhere near 50% and clearly
| they aren't willing to write off millions of users - only the
| company with a direct financial incentive does that.
|
| Yes, Firefox's market share has been declining but that's
| substantially because Google spent billions of dollars
| marketing Chrome and promoted it heavily on YouTube, Gmail,
| Search, etc. Deciding not to test or optimize fits neatly
| into the same pattern.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| A few weeks ago I posted on here about the maps lag, and it
| literally felt like it was fixed after the comment got some
| attention.
|
| There's 100% targeted de-optimization for firefox users and the
| burden of finding it is on the users it seems.
| gbraad wrote:
| i believe for anything non-Chrome? Even Vivaldi has issues
| with some Google products.
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| Not to diminish the other sketchy stuff Google's doing, but I
| think the maps lag issue might actually be Firefox's fault.
| Whenever it happens to me WebGL stops working across all
| websites and restarting the entire browser fixes it. It's
| almost like when Firefox has been open a long time it just
| forgets how to use graphics acceleration.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| The thing that bothered me is it didn't always happen, at
| one point there was performance parity, and things changed
| in a way that specifically worked worse in firefox.
|
| Which means:
|
| A) Firefox had bad webgl implementations(I didn't
| experience what you did, but I wont say it doesn't happen)
| and google added features that regressed the experience on
| other browsers.
|
| B) Google knowingly made performance worse on Firefox,
| regardless of webgl implementations.
|
| C) Google leverages its own browser to only test on their
| browser, to influence the market to have to use googles
| browser in order to use their services(not the same as the
| IE/Windows monopoly lawsuit, but sure smells like it).
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Spotify web doesnt work good on Firefox.
|
| Need to call out them.
|
| I'm basically forced to use Chromium on Linux.
| waveBidder wrote:
| dupe?
| spicykraken wrote:
| I use Firefox across Windows, Mac, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu. I've
| not seen any specific issues with Google sites at all. I only
| really use Docs, Maps, and Youtube with any regularity but I've
| not really seen any of these issues.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yea, I also haven't noticed any speed issues, but I do use
| noscript exclusively on Firefox.
| ikidd wrote:
| I had the same Gmaps issue, I disabled LocalCDN for the site
| and panning etc worked again. Apparently the addon must be
| fixed to account for whatever they were doing.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You're basically looking at testing being done on Chrome
| (because it is Google's, and because of its large market
| share), Safari (because it runs on a large percentage of
| completely exclusive platforms where the customer _can 't_
| switch, and because of its large market share), and Edge
| (because there are still many corporations that do "Nobody ever
| got fired for choosing Microsoft" and lock down browser options
| to just Microsoft's offering).
|
| At this point, Firefox is very much an also-ran on two axes:
| market share is tiny and nobody forces it on their captive
| audiences. We may as well ask why Google isn't optimizing
| testing on Opera, or Samsung Internet.
|
| (There is also the issue of under-the-hood engine. Since so
| many browsers have converged on a few core and JS stacks,
| testing on one exemplar of that stack has a tendency to suss
| out bugs in the other stacks. Firefox still being its own
| special snowflake in terms of JS engine and core means it has
| more opportunities to be different, for good or for ill. So
| there's a force-multiplier testing the other browsers that one
| lacks testing Firefox).
| varispeed wrote:
| I don't understand this. If people don't want to or need to buy
| anything and they don't want to see ads, because this is pure
| simply a distraction and won't sway them into buying anything,
| then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads?
|
| Furthermore, I wish regulators have gone at YouTube like a ton of
| bricks. The ads they show are mostly from various kind of scam
| artists. My friend is a bit naive, but fortunately she asked me
| for an opinion whether she should invest her savings into the
| programme offered by one of "gurus" advertising on YT. She even
| gone on a few of their webinars and became as you would say,
| brainwashed. The kind of way you see in a cult. Fortunately there
| was still some worry running around her and she asked me to check
| before transferring PS20k. You can't imagine how much effort it
| took to tell here these guys are fraudsters. Now she is onto
| another scheme and now she tells me that I just don't want her to
| invest the money, because I think everyone is a fraudster and
| these are the good guys! Then she showed me testimonials from
| apparent "clients" how they got rich. One person looked familiar
| and I actually found them on Cameo. She tried to say maybe this
| is just that person's side gig etc. and she does not talk to me.
|
| I really really hope someone or some organisation get to the
| bottom of this kind of harmful and dangerous content.
|
| YouTube is a scammers paradise and YouTube wants more people to
| fall for these things.
| bool3max wrote:
| > I don't understand this. If people don't want to or need to
| buy anything and they don't want to see ads, because this is
| pure simply a distraction and won't sway them into buying
| anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads?
|
| Age-old question. It's not that simple. Those ads have an
| effect on you whether you "want to or need to buy anything" or
| not.
| chatmasta wrote:
| The point of forcing ads onto users who don't want to see them
| and won't buy anything from them, is that the advertisers will
| still pay Google. In the long run, their CTR will suffer, but
| it will be consistent across advertisers. If they're paying per
| click then nobody loses except the user, who Google is betting
| actually _will_ click on some ads (meaning they 're basically
| engaging in psychological warfare, or at least rewarding the
| advertisers who do). And if they're paying per impression, then
| advertisers will see conversions go down in the long run, but
| Google might think the increased volume will make up for it.
| dncornholio wrote:
| Can we have some fucking facts already? We have seen other
| reports of this same issue but people were using Chrome. This
| seems like an over-reaction. And the Reddit herd is known for
| being unstoppable over false-assumptions.
| Kiro wrote:
| HN is no better. We love to jump to premature conclusions. Just
| look at this thread. It doesn't even link to anything (right
| now the submission link is
| https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/) and yet people are
| automatically bringing out the pitchforks.
| theyeenzbeanz wrote:
| It's been like this for years on Firefox for me, even before they
| cracked down on adblockers and such. I've also noticed it messes
| with the history functionality and often breaks the back button.
| Getting sick of googles nonsense.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Chrome has been the new Internet Explorer for a bunch of years
| already.
|
| And even people who lived the horror days of "We need to support
| IE6 because the client wants so" and "ActiveX is a good choice
| for web pages" are complacent.
|
| Please, for the love of all that's good in the world, use
| ANYTHING but a Chromium-based browser if at all possible.
| mnd999 wrote:
| They're gonna start rickrolling anyone not using Chrome next.
|
| Unexpected side effect - Rick is now number 1 in all the
| streaming charts.
| Kiro wrote:
| Why are people upvoting a submission without a proper link?
| Really shows that people are always just commenting on the
| headline and not the content.
| Kiro wrote:
| It has been changed now but it was the wrong link
| (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/) for 3 hours with 900
| upvotes.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Just yesterday people on here were talking about how using
| Adblock instead of paying for Youtube was unfair to Google and
| basically stealing. Is this the type of behavior you want to
| reward?
| lou1306 wrote:
| I really hope the next Next Generation EU package will be
| entirely funded by the fines we will inflict on Google for its
| blatant abuse of market dominance
| danhau wrote:
| I haven't tested this thoroughly, but I have a feeling that
| YouTube also forces worse codecs on Firefox. Codecs that can only
| decoder on the CPU, making Firefox seem sluggish and wasteful.
| This is a reason why I switched to Safari on macOS.
| blacklight wrote:
| I said it already several times, but it's worth repeating.
|
| Stop using the youtube.com frontend entirely. It's enshittified
| beyond redemption. If they could replace it with a big ads
| billboard with no added value while leaving their profits intact,
| they'll do it.
|
| If you really have to watch some content that it's only on
| YouTube, use Piped, Invidious, or one of the many tools based on
| youtube-dl or any of its forks.
|
| Google deserves piracy now because a big loss of revenue
| resulting from their hostile practices is the only thing that can
| stop this enshittification process. Google will stop only when
| users say that it's gone too far. Scraping them, pirating them
| and financially damaging them is a moral duty at this point.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Is this what has been making Firefox crash when I load videos
| lately?
| arzig wrote:
| I would need to see a Firefox UA warm cache reload in the same
| video before I put any stock in this. This aligns to perfectly
| with the "But Google evil" narrative for me to believe it
| uncritically. Alas, I don't trust the internet anymore.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Wait, so this is about the delay loading, but not why FF mobile
| has really poor frameretes at the start of most (non-ad) videos?
| malermeister wrote:
| This seems like a pretty clear-cut antitrust case. The EU
| Commission better go after it.
| scotty79 wrote:
| YouTube company should be split into two. One for client, one for
| infrastructure. And they should ban them from your exclusive
| deals with each other.
| darklycan51 wrote:
| They did this for years in the past, I really despise google
| mendyberger wrote:
| Seems relevant to the discussion here.
|
| How Google is building a browser monopoly.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig
| vGPU wrote:
| setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
|
| The actual code. They went and actually hardcoded a 5 second
| delay.
| eli wrote:
| or it's a background process that waits until other assets have
| had time to load
| Covzire wrote:
| Pretty sure Apple does something similar with iTunes on Windows.
| It's amazing how slow the UI is in general and how poorly the
| Movie watching experience is with it being incredibly slow to
| seek or take any inputs while playing a video.
| supermatt wrote:
| I have experienced similar delays when clicking links from google
| search.
| Havoc wrote:
| Oh wow. I've been feeling this but had ascribed it to the new ad
| blocker war thing.
|
| Surely this is straight to court for anti-competitive behaviour?
| yencabulator wrote:
| Because this wasn't visible enough:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9...
| setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1)
| }, 5E3);
| s3p wrote:
| I use Firefox and I have never had issues with Google sites. I
| don't know if they are picking and choosing users but I just
| checked and my load times for youtube are ~2 seconds for both
| Chrome and FF. no difference in load times.
| valeg wrote:
| Google's play in order to force Mozilla to adopt new Manifest V3
| and cripple adblocking.
| exxos wrote:
| Maybe not intentional.
|
| Virtually everybody is using an engine based on Webkit or Blink
| these days. This is naturally what websites are optimized for.
| err4nt wrote:
| Just being real here for a moment - Firefox probably wouldn't
| exist if Google didn't give them millions, so the continuing
| existence of Firefox is thanks at least in part to Google taking
| them on as a project.
|
| Now secondly, Firefox does have some very real performance
| bottlenecks that other browsers do not have. This means (and has
| been my experience already) that you can build experiences in all
| other browsers that are buttery smooth and nice, but that will
| cause crashes in Firefox. In my own work, to get around this I
| ended up making my product inferior in all browsers so it would
| not crash Firefox. But if I was big enough and had a team of more
| than 1, could I have implemented a solution that worked in
| Firefox and another that worked in other browsers, and delivered
| the best experience I could to all users of all browsers?
|
| There's no need to jump to malice on Google's part if what
| they're doing is legitimately in an attempt to ensure that
| Firefox users have the best experience overall.
| yifanl wrote:
| I don't like to jump to conclusions, but I'm going to jump to
| malice if their purported solution for user experience is
| time.sleep(5) based on a user agent lookup, and conditional on
| when their antiadblock fails to work.
| lupire wrote:
| Evidence for your claims?
| kmoser wrote:
| Maybe it played more quickly the 2nd time because assets were
| already cached? It doesn't look like the person doing the testing
| cleared cache between tries.
| lupire wrote:
| Post was deleted, possibly because it's simply not true.
| iscrewyou wrote:
| I recently got a new Mac and didn't install Chrome. I now only
| run Firefox and Safari. For a company so big, it's embarrassing
| to see their websites and products be some of the poorest run on
| my computer now. It's quite obvious that they at least optimize
| it for Chrome if not de-optimize it for other browsers.
| daeros wrote:
| Well now i'm using a user agent switcher to lie to Google about
| what browser i'm using. Telling them chrome, it's Firefox. Thanks
| for the heads-up.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| yt-dlp and VLC. Problem solved :@]
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Still not watching ads, Youtube.
| cvan wrote:
| garbage. just use invidious.io as a mirror. +1 to privacy. +1 to
| minimal javascript.
| nishantk wrote:
| Just tested this out myself. Firefox loads noticeably slower than
| chrome, even when loading same video side-by-side.
| duringmath wrote:
| > For me, YouTube works equally well across Chrome, Firefox, and
| Edge. Other team members also could not replicate this delayed
| behavior across browsers.
|
| "Reportedly" also known as: "unable to confirm but we saw it on
| reddit so it must be true"
| jahsome wrote:
| I am so damn sick of "news" articles summarizing social media
| posts. Worse, the posts are seemingly chosen at random without
| even going to the effort of contacting the poster, not that
| such an interview would improve anything.
|
| If I wanted to read what random Twitter users thought about a
| topic, I'd just read Twitter. I read news articles to learn
| from experts I wouldn't otherwise have access to, not random
| Reddit trolls, Instagram moms, and Russian Twitter bots.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Google is constantly running "experiments" in their products so
| even if you and your friends can't replicate it, doesn't mean
| that it's not happening.
| duringmath wrote:
| Doesn't mean it is happening either especially since the code
| in question is still present.
|
| At any rare you should probably confirm/disconfirm these
| kinds of allegations before you decide to publish it
| verbatim.
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