this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023

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YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users (www.androidauthority.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 158 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Is this arguably anticompetitive and illegal?

[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Nobody can even state that it's actually happening "for competitive browsers" as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it's just wild speculation and bandwagoning.

[–] [email protected] 101 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

You absolutely can tell what's happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when ontimeupdate promise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.

https://pastebin.com/TqjzbqQE

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm sorry but I don't see how that check is browser-specific. Is that part happening on the browser side?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (3 children)

They don't need to put incriminating "if Firefox" statements in their code -- the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Easy enough to test though. Load the page with a UA changer and see if it still shows up when Firefox pretends to be Chrome

[–] TastehWaffleZ 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The video in the linked article does just that. The page takes 5 seconds to load the video, the user changes the UA, they refresh the page and suddenly the video loads instantly. I would have liked to see them change the UA back to Firefox to prove it's not some weird caching issue though

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Yeah, and also Edge or an older version of Chrome etc just to be sure.

[–] nixcamic 8 points 8 months ago

I guess his question is "is that happening?"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Well, at least I learned that javascript understands exponential notation. I never even bothered to try that lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Can I have ublock block that? It seems simple enough to extract that code out.

[+] Ottomateeverything -6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There's been multiple posts pointing to some possibly "wait for ads to finish loading" type code. It's quite possible that it's just bugged in Firefox etc since browsers are horrendously inconsistent etc.

But that doesn't make a cool headline so instead the "it's Google being evil" story is the popular one.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

it was already made public in the lawsuit some weeks ago that they are indeed slowing down youtube for firefox.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

Link?

[–] Ottomateeverything 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Source?

I've read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.

There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using...

There's also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn't been able to keep up.

I don't see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there's nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.

So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I'm not ready to jump to that conclusion until there's actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. "Someone said they are" is not going to convince me. Especially if you can't even point to that someone saying that thing.