this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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#YouTube <https://infosec.exchange/tags/YouTube> is making the watching experience worse on #Firefox <https://infosec.exchange/tags/Firefox> and Microsoft Edge. (media.infosec.exchange)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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#YouTube is making the watching experience worse on #Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

I didn't believe it the first time I heard abt it, since it sounded more like a conspiracy theory than a actual thing, but it's true. Google does add 5s timeout specifically to Firefox and Edge users when they try to watch a video on YT. If you want to know more about it, Mental Outlaw make a very good video abt it (Link: https://youtu.be/v4gXhmzQztE ). I think Google did this, to get people moving to Chrome since the majority will think this is a browser issue, nobody would expect YouTube to purposely doing this. In the attached Screenshot you can see that YouTube checks the user agent of browsers to see if it's Edge, Firefox or not. You can bypass this by changing your User agent to chrome.

Edit: Due a lot of people saying a lot of different things abt it, I want to say that I'm not 100% sure abt how exactly this works, there is a inbuild delay by Google, but who is actually affected, there are a lot of different opinions abt it. I wasn't able to verify this myself in LibreWolf, but this could be the case due my intensive hardening I did and this is just a result of what I found in the code and what Mental Outlaw and others shared across social media, if you got different or additional infos abt this feel free to comment and I suggest everyone ti also check the comment section.

#privacy #youtube #google #dataprotection #firefox #msedge #browser @privacy

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I've been using freetube for almost 2 years now and as long as google doesn't find a way to restrict that access I couldn't give less of a fuck about every dumb restriction they introduce. Freetube on desktop and newpipe on mobile devices for when you wanna ruin your eyes and you'll never see an ad again that's not product placement. I genuinely don't understand how people still use google products when they have the option to just don't?!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

FreeTube has built in SponsorBlock, you can tell it to automatically and seamlessly skip sections of videos, such as sponsors, self ads, intros, outros,...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

And Newpipe has a forked version with Sponsorblock integration. Or, Libretube has it built in as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Yeah I know, but for some of my channels the sponsors are part of the storytelling and I'd miss stuff if I autoskip them. I'm not too bothered by sponsors most of the time either and I think it's kinda interesting to see which company is currently trying to establish itself in which bubble, but I also totally understand why people would use that feature.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (2 children)

This looks to me like some bog standard browser detection code. I personally think it's not great to have this kind of thing, but purely for technical reasons. There's no clear indication what they are doing with the result of this function. Maybe the YT link has more damning evidence, but I certainly don't see it in this code.

Fuck google tho

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I'm not even sure the code in this image is related to YouTube at all. Seems like a bog standard code copy pasted from somewhere. The video doesn't really go into any detail anyways, except to show there is a 5 sec delay inserted, but the code seems te be related to ads and not anything about which browser is used.

This whole story is just made up, someone put two unrelated things together based on a poor understanding of the code and the internet ran with Google bad Firefox good!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (3 children)

lmao

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but omg that font and color scheme.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Not my ss

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

piped and yt-dlp are also good

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

NUKED the problem in a SINGLE post 😜

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I have never experienced that... Maybe ublock blocks that? I for sure haven't changed my user agent

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

@SaltyIceteaMaker Same, I think it's bc of uBO or other modifications from or which I made to LibreWolf, but other people made reports on Reddit and other Social Media platforms that they expierenced that and the code obviously shows that YT is doing that stuff.

[–] GentriFriedRice 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

This just seems to be detecting if the browser is Firefox. The function is even named isGecko which is Mozilla's browser engine used by Firefox. Edge, IE (Trident) don't return true from isGecko

Unless I'm missing something I don't see where the delay is added

[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@GentriFriedRice There are multiply dectections and like mentioned in another comment there was multiply reports from Edge and Firefox users that they experienced the same issue.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It would be a lot more conclusive if you could find somewhere the isGecko function is being used in association with a delay though, there are other things they could use it for.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I personally use Invidious (Privacy front-end of YouTube) using Docker. Though it can be compiled and run standalone as well.

It doesn't take much resource (< 100 MB) to run on my system. There is NO ad or no pause.

It's like YouTube Premium account with ZERO tracking.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I think the function in the image only checks for firefox browser and not Edge. It explicitly returns false if it finds Edge in your user agent.

Hopefully youtube only checks the user agent which can be changed with just a few clicks using an addon.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@programmer_belch Not sure since I'm not so good at javascript, but I know abt several reports and articles that Edge users has the same issue as Firefox users.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Yes, I don't deny that, I thought the javascript in the image was presented as the offending code that checks for the browser before giving the delay

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

yt plays a funny game with anti ad people.

imo, I'll just wait until the uBO filter masters sort this out. Or another yt-like platform appears.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

uBO filters won't work the way they used to because Chrome's v3 manifest will explicitly prevent them from working the way they have been.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

They will continue working on everything not chromium, so 50% of the platforms they are targeting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/v4gXhmzQztE

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] Zeth0s 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Is that from Google? I was expecting much better code given the average engineer salary. That code looks pretty ugly.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This looks like code after being compiled and transpiled from something like Typescript and Babel, it's not what the engineer actually wrote.

For people that are not programmers: this code probably was generated by a program based on a different, supposedly better code. This is done because many browsers will only execute legacy JavaScript, and that is a pain in the ass to work with, so people work with better different languages or newer versions of JavaScript and a program just translates that to the lagacy JavaScript that old browsers will support.

[–] Zeth0s 3 points 7 months ago

Thanks for the explanation!

[–] Asudox 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I understand Firefox, but why Edge? Isn't it chromium based?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@Asudox Firefox and Edge are two of the biggest competitors to Chrome, Edge is like a degoogled version of Chromium but with a bunch of Microsoft Trash instead, they don't even have Google Safebrowsing or Google as default search engine like Firefox does.

[–] Asudox 3 points 7 months ago

Oh, thanks I get it now.

[–] grue 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My Firefox only gets the delay when I'm in private browsing mode. When I'm logged in to Youtube, no delay.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

@grue It's using A/B testing ig. since not everyone is affected.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Wow, I thought the same op. Incredible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Well, actually, many google services perform worse on my computers when I'm using firefox than when I'm using some chromium based browser.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@voxel @privacy This video explains that it's not just #Firefox users being affected by the delay, but #Safari, #Edge, #Brave and even #Chrome itself. It also has nothing to do solely with the #browser you use, but rather a combination of that and your #ad blocker. #Google's testing this with different groups of people, that's why changing your agent string seems to help.

https://youtu.be/xJxrN3CaTs4

@BrodieOnLinux

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/xJxrN3CaTs4

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.