If Chrome is known for one thing, it's absurd User-Agent strings. Why not make it even more absurd???
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (Ahahaha; Fuck you Google; This is actually) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0
I can confirm this. I signed up for the free trial of YT Premium (which I immediately cancelled, but I’ll take the three months) but YT seems to be detecting that I’m on Firefox and have Ublock installed, so I’m getting the occasional 5 second forced delay, even though I’m a premium user. (They may not count the trial as being a “true” premium user, I’d suspect.)
I regret being complicit in allowing these silicon valley behemoths to reach a point where they’re indelibly linked to practically every aspect of the average person’s digital life.
At least the Fediverse and Lemmy are showing the way forward.
They do the same shit for Google search results. Search weather or stock tickers with a Chrome user agent* and you get a rich, interactive chart of the weather forecast or stock history. Search with another mobile user agent and you get a static snapshot of the weather or stock price at an instant in time.
There’s even an extension for Firefox for Android which changes the user agent for Google searches to Chrome, to get the rich content.
just a user agent, not an actual browser, which proves that it isn’t about browser capability, but rather abusing their monopolistic market position in search to further their web browser’s market share. Sound familiar, Microsoft from the 90’s?
I’m A YouTube Premium subscriber, and I’ve been noticing this delay on my TV for a few days now - a very noticeable, long pause when opening the home screen until the thumbnails are loaded. I’ll explicitly check other places too now, I’m not sure if it’s also happening in Firefox for me.
Ah, I was wondering why YouTube was taking so long to load recently. I thought it was just because their code was shit, and it turns out I was right, but not in the way I thought.
Yeah, the simplest the answer is usually correct. Is this a conspiracy involving hundreds of Google employees intentionally building features to slow the app down on Firefox or is it incompetence because they don’t test their product on multiple browsers?
Oh, so it’s shit in the way I originally thought, then.
And also shit in the second way I thought, since adblock is a symptom of how terrible they’ve made the experience on their platform and if they want less people to use it they should make that experience more reasonable.
Given the shit big companies have got up to in the past and continue to get up to, as exposed in past and ongoing antitrust cases, that conspiracy theory you mention really isn’t all that unrealistic. Yeah, it’s not what happened in this case and it isn’t the simplest solution, but it’s absolutely a believable thing for YouTube to do, though I think they would have hidden it better if they had.
Firefox isn’t going to die because of this. There are already workarounds and even if there weren’t, an open source browser isn’t dependent on bringing in revenue to stay in development.
I’m in the EU, using Vivaldi, and have the delay since yesterday. It’s not on every video though. Seems like UBlock and YouTube are fighting each other every time I open a new link.
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