Google slows down Firefox users when watching YouTube…
This reminds me of Elon Musk when he started artificially slowing down links to websites he doesn’t like… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/15/twitter-x-links-delayed/
So much for “free speech” lol
Every single word that comes out of Elon’s mouth is a big fat fucking lie. I don’t understand how people can still trust that guy with anything.
Free speech is throttled. You might want to buy premium speech for only $19.99 per month!
Elon Musk was good, but after a failed experiment for the good of mankind he was deviated… now he is misunderstood, like Frankenstein’s Monster
WTF did I just watch?
Don’t ask me, one day a shit worse than that (the spongebob video) popped up in my feed and I watched it… now I’m cursed to spread the curse too, so I won’t suffer alone
Must have learned that from his role model, Putin.
I know everyone wants to be mad, and I’m no fan of Google. But this is almost certainly an unintentional bug.
Google, more than anything, wants watch hours for ad money. They don’t want you frustrated by the alow ux. They want you watching advertisements.
Not a bug - they literally added a 5 second timer in the code: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
Yes, there is a 5s timeout in youtube’s code. However, it is not aimed at Firefox users.
The same code shows up on a fresh chrome installation without any extensions. And the code does not check for the user agent. So the 5s timeout is not there to make Firefox a bad choice for youtube. Following response to your link goes a bit deeper into what the code could mean: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/ka08uqj/
That doesn’t explain why it stops happening when you change your user agent in Firefox.
I could believe this, but if google doesn’t want me to be frustrated on youtube, why do they make it so annoying?
Pushing youtubetv in annoying new ways, putting ads in the middle of songs, serving ads with frustrating frequency, using multiple types of ads so your brain can’t just tune out until you hit skip, locking basic functions like add to playlist behind premium accounts.
From their behavior it sure looks like they want me to be annoyed.
They want you making money from them. So watching ads and paying subscription fees. If you aren’t doing either of those things, you’re causing them to lose money. So yeah, they’re gonna make it annoying.
wants watch hours for ad money
Ads which can still be blocked fairly easily on Firefox, unlike in Chrome, which is banning ublock(& likely all other blockers) browser-wide next year. They want to make the firefox experience worse so people have a reason to go back to their ad infested browser.
Nah this doesn’t make sense. You, and everyone else, will sit through five seconds of loading vs watching an ad. You know this, Google know this.
Occams razor is at play here. If they want to to be conspiratorial, they have better and smarter ways to do it.
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I think it’s naive to think google would do this, which is so easily bypassed, when they have so many better options that wouldn’t get the European courts frothing. Again, occams razor
As someone else posted, it’s very much intentional: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
Well this rumor came from the linus tech tips forums so just by that I assume it’s sensationalized bullshit.
Unfortunately not. It’s intentional as someone else looked to the explanation below
If they are able to make you switch, you become a heck of a lot more profitable long term as they’re able to collect a loooot more data
Probably connected to them forcing v3 on chrome soon, which will gimp down completely ublock on chrome.
Might be a very dumb financial decision but maybe it’s time to rethink that whole google search contract renewal coming up in a year or so. Feeling like a toxic relationship
Edit: the time frame is just an assumption due to it being a 3 year contract made in 2020. I would try to seek a relationship with bing tbh, it sucks with privacy but would be a kick to google’s balls. Plus the majority of firefox users who start giving a crap about their privacy, change to duckduckgo in the beginning of their journey so it wont be a massive shift from bing imo in terms of searching experience.
The biggest problem is the loss of users that that incurs… it would be long term damage for temporary financial boost. I think they already tried once to switch to yahoo and it was an unmitigated disaster
Yeah I expect that would be the case but I honestly think out of all the other longterm rivals with deep pockets, bing is firefox’s best chance of maintaining most of it’s current userbase and maybe even growing it in the longterm especially if bing ai’s features keep expanding. Else why would bard be a thing if google didn’t feel a bit threatened. Again just my thoughts would like to hear what other opinions are out there.
Edit: would also be a big win for microsoft since a respectable browser is now using it’s search engine and not just a butt of the joke like edge is, so maybe firefox can leveage a good chunk of change from them to keep their browser running for a while unlike the deal they did with google. Think it would ultimately destroy edge though but since edge can now be user uninstalled thats bound to happen in a couple of years anyways and with this deal bing will still get some traffic so still a win for microsoft.
I would be willing to donate if they dropped ties with Google to help supplement the less of revenue
Google paying them an absolute shitload of money (still pretty small compared to what Google pays Apple). It’d be pretty hard to get the donations to make up a missing half billion.
Has space bar stopped working for anyone else with Youtube? I keep spamming it and it sometimes doesn’t work.
Us j, k, l (-10s, play/pause, +10s). Does not require player focus.
Based vim user
Because I use Vim Keybindings in LibreWolf through Tridactyl, I actually can’t use j, k and l for -10s, play/pause and +10s lol
Ah, the irony XD
How are video controls with it then?I use spacebar for play/pause and the arrow keys for +5 and -5 seconds. It’s not perfect, but I haven’t found a better solution yet.
Haha, so it circled back into being normal
I use Piped or Invidious most of the time, the keybindings work there. They seem to be broken on the official YouTube website though.
Wait its not just me?
I had a feeling this was Youtube fuckery.
Here’s the actual source: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
The link in the post is just recycling the reddit content.
Ah, even more reason for me to use less Youtube.
Been substituting it with Nebula, Odysee, and just watching less video content.
@BombOmOm @furycd001
I am sort of in a content slump right now. The YouTube adblocker blocker has me watching much less and noticing the content actually kinda sucks.Most news sites are either paywalled or adblocked blocked or so stuffed with ads it’s unreadable.
Even my library app doesn’t have books newer than like 2019.
This DRM shit totally sucks.
What ad blocker are you using? I’m using ublock origin and I still haven’t seen the ad blocker blocker thing on anything.
@Fosheze
I use PiHole at home for sytem wide blocking and Vivaldi as my main browser.I get the adblocker blocker on my main google account, but I have a couple of others for hobbies and I have not seen the blocker there.
Pi-Hole can’t block YouTube ads. Use LibreWolf with uBlock Origin, it works like a dream. Or try alternative frontends for YouTube like Invidious or Piped. These are even better when combined with LibRedirect, it automatically redirects all YouTube links to your preferred alternative frontend.
Even though Pi hole doesn’t block youtube ads, that’s probably what is triggering the ad blocker blocker. Unfortunately I don’t know a way around that but I’m sure someone in one of the pihole communities has figured it out.
Vivaldi looks like it supports extensions. Try out UBlock Origin for it. I use that add-on and a PiHole and have had no issues.
I am in a similar situation. I did just start using RSS and that has been interesting. Nice to get everything in one spot, with no ads, and it’s specifically what I’m interested in.
@H3L1X
It would be nice if RSS feeds were easier to discover. I think people feel that no one uses them anymore and doesn’t bother to put it front and center or to make lists of good feeds to follow.That is very true. This page is a good starting point: https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds. It has some interesting feeds, but it is very hard to find things “in the wild” now.
@H3L1X
That looks good 😃
Try FreeTube viewer, still in alpha but already works great. You can create profiles with the channels you want in each one.
On mobile (Android) you have NewPipe, GrayJay or SkyTube.
LibreTube is another option for Android. On iOS you can use Yattee with this guide.
Invidious and Piped work in the browser, you can combine them with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links. LibRedirect is great, you can also use it to redirect other websites, e.g. Twitter -> Nitter, Reddit -> Teddit, etc.
How many of these just use YouTube under the hood?
Or any of these actually host their own videos? And if they host their own, wouldn’t they be missing like millions of videos only available on YouTube?
These are all better ways to access YouTube, they don’t host any videos themselves. If you want a YouTube alternative, check out PeerTube
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That is not their official website btw. The maintainer of uBO has stated that he doesn’t want a website
He doesn’t want a forum or a website, thus he won’t have any costs and he won’t have to accept donations meaning he doesn’t have to deal with the administrative workload and that way he has more time to develop uBlock Origin.
Source: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don’t-you-accept-donations%3F
Guys relax. Most of the ‘research’ comes from this reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
It points out following code in youtube’s polymer script:
setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);But exactly this code does show up on a stock installation of chrome too, and it does not check for the user agent. One of the responses goes a bit deeper into what the code above could do: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/ka08uqj/
It is rather clear, that this code is not aimed at firefox users to slow down their loading time.
Mine instantly loads. Perhaps there’s some other stuff going on with hardware/software or something this person is running?
Same, I am not facing any issues too.
I use YT every day and use Firefox as my main browser. I’ve never experienced this. Just tested out of curiosity, it loads fine.
I’ve experienced this issue firsthand, although it’s more like 3 to 4 seconds. Changing the user agent to Chrome causes videos to load instantly, and restoring it to the original user agent causes the “lag”.
Some possibly relevant information: I’m running Firefox with unlock Origin on Linux Mint. I’ve also received the “playback will be disabled after 3 videos” message in the past – so it’s possibly only affecting users they strongly suspect are still using ad-blockers with workarounds.
It’s just typical sensationalized bullshit with people jumping to conclusions based off random ass Reddit threads. This apparently originated from the linus tech tips forums so it’s probably straight bs.
Yeah it appears on chrome as well. There isn’t any evidence that it’s purposely “slowing down” anything. I had a quick glance at the Reddit thread (been avoiding it as much as possible, but had to visit in incognito to confirm the source for this outrage) and it looks like it’s part of a small script to check if an adblocker is present and disabling video ads from playing.
It’s possible FF have a delay in playing that first video, but also the test methodology isn’t super reliable because of caching.
Question: since adblockers are against their TOS now, why don’t they just remove them from the web store ?
Only a fool would miss that opportunity to market their browser at that point, but its seems strange to me they’re playing this gang war
First They went after invidious, then they slowly started blocking adblocker only for desktop users…
I think that the plan is to not hit people where it hurts directly ( which is mobile phones ), just start slowly taking things that only matter to a small percentage of users, and once that’s taken care of, move to more noticeable stuff
Use Piped or Invidious, it also bypasses ads and tracking. It works best in combination with LibRedirect, which you can configure to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Piped or Invidious.
Freetube has been the biggest life improvement on how I consume YouTube. The fact that it gets better recommendations and I can list my subscriptions in an easy way, even import them is something I miss in all the rest of alternatives.
Between FreeTube and NewPipe, I haven’t visited YouTube in about a year. It makes it a bit surreal when I see so many complaints about ads.
Then I use someone else’s laptop or phone and see the amount of ads everywhere and how much time is taking away from them.
How can one put up with that…I’d use FreeTube, but the quality was not as good as on YouTube itself, has that changed?
I don’t know. For any given video? I’ve seen high res options, but TBH I don’t watch much on YT - certainly not movies, or anything that’d really matter - and don’t pay much attention to it.
It’s free, if you want to check out how the current version works.
Yeah, just gave it a shot. I’m just too accustomed to YTs quality that the drop just isn’t worth to me, at least while I’m still not ad-block blocked.
What’s the drop in quality you see? Is there an example video? I can’t detect a difference.
It only supports up to 1080p/60fps, most videos I watch these days have 1440p or more, so the increased bitrate immediately makes the videos look a lot more crisp. For just a side to side 1080p comparison, there isn’t much difference, just some more artifacting on the edges of things (not really that noticable). Maybe due to the YT stream being VP9 and FreeTube AVC? I don’t really know to be honest.
Can I set this up so I can still browse my YouTube recommended and only redirect when I select the actual video?
You can exclude https://youtube.com/ in the LibRedirect settings. For some reason that doesn’t seem to work though, but you can always click on the LibRedirect icon in the extension toolbar and hit ‘Redirect to Original’. You can also set up a keybinding for that.
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Any difference between Piped and NewPipe?
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NewPipe is an Android app that allows you to watch YouTube videos without ads or tracking. It exposes your IP to Google servers though. Piped consists of a web client and a backend server, it uses the NewPipeExtractor on the server to load the video as well as all the metadata from Google servers and then serves it to you through the web client. That way, you don’t have to connect to Google, only the Piped server communicates with YouTube servers.
I wonder what would happen if Google manages to destroy itself with increasing shenanigans like this.
I mean, so much of digital based stuff relies on them for some extent.
First thing that comes to mind is user agent spoofer. Anyway I say let them, it’s their company with userbase content and it’s based in US. They can do whatever they want with it because terms of service. I can just look at my sexy John Oliver poster on the wall for 30 min and replace their service.
First thing that comes to mind is user agent spoofer.
If we all go ahead and spoof our user agents to Chrome, Google will say ‘No one uses Firefox’. Use better solutions like Invidious and Piped in combination wit LibRedirect instead.
Yeah cheers. I’ve been using Invidious and NewPipe for a while now…:-)
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Piped is not blocked on my school/work wifi and looks better than invidious.
LibRedirect is Awesome!
I’m glad you like Piped and LibRedirect.
Btw, check out this guide to bypass any website block. It utilizes Cloudflare to create a proxy, it works really well, I love this solution.
If we all go ahead and spoof our user agents to Chrome, Google will say ‘No one uses Firefox’. Use better solutions like Invidious and Piped in combination wit LibRedirect instead.
Do these pass through the user agent to YouTube? Otherwise they’ll have the same issue with Firefox being underrepresented.
YouTube doesn’t actually throttle the video stream on the server, they just use some JavaScript on their official website that adds delay to the playback when Firefox is detected. The Invidious client directly connects to Google servers for video streaming, but it just displays the raw video stream without any ads, artificial delay or any crap like that.
I was replying to this part of the comment:
If we all go ahead and spoof our user agents to Chrome, Google will say ‘No one uses Firefox’.
If the alternatives don’t use a Firefox user-agent, it’ll also have the same effect in reducing the amount of Firefox traffic in their logs.
I edited my comment a bit to clarify :)
If the alternatives don’t use a Firefox user-agent, it’ll also have the same effect in reducing the amount of Firefox traffic in their logs.
When you stream a video from Google servers through the Invidious frontend and you use Firefox, the user-agent that gets reported to googlevideo.com (the domain that the requests for YouTube video streams are sent to) is Firefox. You can easily verify that yourself, go to an Invidious instance using Firefox, make sure to disable ‘Proxy videos’ in the Invidious settings, open the Developer Tools, go the Network tab and load a video. Click on any request to *.googlevideo.com and look at the user-agent, you can see, it’s a Firefox user-agent. This thread explains how the slowdown is introduced in YouTube JavaScript:
Using Invidious avoids this.
Wow! I thought it was a bug, but that code does it intentionally. Amazing.
Obviously it’s intentional, it’s Google, what do you expect from this piece of shit Big Tech corporation? Don’t be evil has already belonged to the past for a long time.
It’s actually how the discovered this, user agent was changed to chrome and it was no longer slowed down
I’m not signed in, bitches, your ploy does not work here.
