17 ms·

YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 for 2 weeks

371 points by temp 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
timothya 11y ago
Reading the comments on that bug, it looks like it was only a small subset of Firefox users who experienced this bug. Not really a big story.
- stygiansonic 11y ago
  I believe this is the relevant comment: "Apologies to all impacted by this transient configuration. Firefox 43 users who do not have h.264 will get 360p VP8 until the configuration is updated early next year. The very large majority of Firefox users watching YouTube have h.264. For them, and for user who get VP9, <video> MSE performs better overall than Flash."
  - zeckalpha 11y ago
    Yeah, but the next comment was: > "Unfortunately this is not an acceptable state for us. We have many millions of users whose Youtube experience suddenly got significantly degraded, and we're not willing to leave them in that state over the holidays. Any chance you guys could simply roll back the change you guys made? If not, we're forced to ship a Firefox update that lies to you guys about the Firefox version, which really is not a good option for either of us :("
    - thawkins 11y ago
      It can still be "multiple millions" and still be very low percentage numbers, when you are accessing risk you deal with percentages not absolutes.
- acqq 11y ago
  Reading the comments, it's some 6%, not small for me, if the total number of users is many millions.
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Firefox users without H.264 platform codecs were affected: 100% of Windows XP users (which are about 14% of all Firefox users worldwide!), 2% of all other Windows users (the "N" and "KN" editions in Europe and South Korea), and 3% of Linux users.
    - ferbivore 11y ago
      Is OpenH264 still not being used for video decoding?
      - makomk 11y ago
        OpenH264 can't be used for video decoding because it can't decode the H264 profiles used to encode video on the internet; it's strictly baseline profile only which is pretty useless. The only reason it exists is because Cisco has a bunch of H264-only videoconferencing hardware that they want to be able to work with WebRTC.
- kuschku 11y ago
  I got this shit, just like I get no ability to change any search settings or do an advanced Google search on Firefox mobile, and am now spoofing Chrome as useragent. In my opinion, Firefox should do what Chrome did, and append the competing browser’s UA to their own useragent.
  - TD-Linux 11y ago
    In the case of Firefox for Android, there is already a rapidly growing blacklist of sites that get their UA spoofed to Chrome.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      You might want to add webp support to Firefox for Android then, and just spoof star.google.com/whatever TLD they support and star.youtube.com, too. (Replace "star" with *, as HN doesn’t support any proper escaping or markdown. This kind of bullshit is what makes this page so horrible to use)
      - dhimes 11y ago
        FWIW, you can enter things like that on HN by treating it as "code" -- skip a line and indent the next by two spaces *.youtube.com
- keehun 11y ago
  For me, the extreme Youtube slowdown coincided with me being in a new location. For a while, I just thought that the internet must be extremely slow, and yet, the pages themselves loaded fast, fps games worked smoothly, and there weren't any other signs that videos should buffer extremely slowly. Now I know why.
jimrandomh 11y ago
Browsers identify themselves with a user-agent string, and the user agent strings are a giant disaster of technical debt resulting from a long history of browsers working around buggy websites and websites working around buggy browsers. Browser video is also a giant disaster of technical debt, and YouTube uses the user-agent string to determine which ways of serving video will work and which ones won't. Presence of bugs here is no surprise, and any such bugs will naturally impact some browsers but not others. So, a bug in YouTube's compatibility-autodetection caused it to fall back to a slower, bitrate-limited fallback method that it didn't need to, for some versions of Firefox. They took two weeks to deploy the fix. Considering those two weeks included Christmas and the bug didn't affect security or render the site unavailable, this seems like a pretty good response time.
- chei0aiV 11y ago
  Browsers should start submitting a random 10 character string for the User-Agent header.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Could this be done with an extension?
    - chei0aiV 11y ago
      With an extension to this extension, yes: http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/ http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
    - gizmo686 11y ago
      Yes. https://github.com/muzuiget/user_agent_overrider https://github.com/muzuiget/user_agent_overrider As far as I am aware, no extension currently offers the option of a random user agent, but many (including the one linked) allows user supplied use agents, and there is no reason you could not make one support random user agents.
      - 11y ago
yuhong 11y ago
I wonder why it was that important (for Firefox to do something about it).
- timonovici 11y ago
  They already lost a massive chunk of their users. Do you think things will get sweeter if people start to notice that Firefox videos are crappier than on Chrome?
  - yuhong 11y ago
    Yes, but you are talking about only weeks here for one thing.
    - Strom 11y ago
      Only weeks? I wouldn't watch any video for even 10 seconds if it's only 360p. I would instantly start tracking down the problem and/or switch to a player that can do more.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - tamana 11y ago
        0th world problem, to the extreme. The bug would be fixed before at least 99.99% of users noticed and tested an alternative.
        timonovici 11y ago
        Put yourself in Mozilla's shoes. Why would their users have to take the punishment for no apparent reason? Wouldn't you be protective towards your users/reputation?
    - protomyth 11y ago
      It would be the week a lot of new computers were unboxed.
zimbatm 11y ago
We should just remove the reporting of User-Agent in browsers. All they do is encourage user tracking a building half-baked heuristics.
- andrewguenther 11y ago
  How do they encourage user tracking? The user agent string only tells you information about the browser, not the user.
  - drdaeman 11y ago
    They add extra bits of identifying information to the pool. You know, https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
    - Survey_Sez 11y ago
      https://www.browserleaks.com/ https://www.browserleaks.com/ is another useful resource to help understand browser fingerprinting and how to combat it.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    It's not the only data that is available for deriving a tracking key. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ Why are you pretending that there is some sort of difference between "tracking a user" and "tracking the user's browser", which is close enough for most tracking purposes? Tracking the browser is tracking a user for a vast majority of people. For browsers on a phone, it is even more likely to be a 1:1 mapping.
    - andrewguenther 11y ago
      The user agent (by itself) provides you none of those things.... > Why are you pretending that there is some sort of difference between "tracking a user" and "tracking the user's browser" I'm not? That isn't what I said.
- 11y ago
0x0 11y ago
I'm curious about this non-user-visible europe-only feature, which depended on user-agents aligning between youtube.com and google.com, that got broken, especially since the details couldn't be discussed in public. Antispam? Ad-tracking? Why would it be Europe-only?
- rmccue 11y ago
  Cookie law related, perhaps? There was a cookie-related change in FF43 for third-party cookies (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536509 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536509).
hoodoof 11y ago
The only reason this should be on the front page #1 of HN is if there is tangible evidence that intent was malicious.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  The poor way in which YouTube does feature detection (via user agent string) is almost as appalling. There is nothing wrong with outlining it here.
  - tacos 11y ago
    And the unforeseen consequences to the "quick, innocent fix" more important still. They did not handle this properly.
  - timothya 11y ago
    > The poor way in which YouTube does feature detection (via user agent string) is almost as appalling. If you could provide a better alternative, I'm sure they'd be all ears.
    - pas 11y ago
      Put there a little button that lets the user select the format/resolution/implementation.
      - jrowley 11y ago
        What percentage of YouTube users could define the word "format"?
      - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
        The less options you give the user up front the better; I don't think this would be a better option (though allowing advanced users to select this may not be the worst thing).
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
dexwiz 11y ago
Some (not Mac) users on the newest version of Firefox got lower quality Youtube video over the holidays, and the issue would would not be fixed until next year? Oh yah, next year was next week. Thank goodness, it was still fixed within the year. Do we live in a world where this in unacceptable?
- cpeterso 11y ago
  The bug was reported on December 19 and fixed on January 7. That's at least 19 days, not just "next week". Do you think Larry Page would allow YouTube to serve 360p VP8 instead of hardware-accelerated 1080p H.264 to ~15% of Chrome users for 19+ days "because holidays"?
  - dgacmu 11y ago
    Well, when you consider that every bug fix carries with it the chance of introducing a worse bug, sometimes holding off on a non-critical fix until everybody's back from the holidays and able to work 100% again doesn't seem like a bad idea. Having some % of FF 43 users (who're about 3.5% of the browser market according to netmarketshare.com) experience degraded but functional video may be better than, say, a 1% risk of breaking youtube for 100% of users and not being able to fix it for a day.
    - sylvinus 11y ago
      I think the point of the parent comment is that they would have done it right away even if Chrome usage had been at the same 3.5% share.
      - zobzu 11y ago
        Defending Google and attacking Firefox is still the trend though, as many of the comments show here, even thus this Mozilla employe's comments are crystal clear (for once someone does that - that's great!)
    - lucb1e 11y ago
mpitt 11y ago
The existence of a “feature” that relies on UA strings being consistent across domains, with the potential to “brick YouTube entirely in a user-visible way for all Firefox 43 users in Europe”[1], is quite worrying to be honest. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c61 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c61
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  And this "feature" being not noticeable to the user, but kinda a requirement that it be there, and apparently associating stuff on someone's Google/YouTube side... but the Googler in question is unwilling for that feature to be identified.
  - sylvinus 11y ago
    From what he describes, it might be something like a quota service or an ad service that does consistency checks over the course of user sessions to fight spam/abuse/crawlers.
- davb 11y ago
  Honestly, it sounds like the commenter was defending some crappy engineering decisions. I'm not really comfortable that YT/Google were, via this guy, asking for special consideration (from an open source project) but only willing to discuss their request in private. It lacks transparency.
tinco 11y ago
This is actually pretty great. Youtube has some issue with Firefox 43 and serves it lower quality video to deal with it (probably as a hack to enable video for some users for whom it didn't work at all under 43, but there's no explanation from Youtube engineers in the thread). The Firefox team complains to Youtube, but Youtube responds with that they won't budge until January at least. Firefox sees it as a threat to their reputation (obviously for them having a few users for whom it doesn't work is better than having loads of users with a degraded experience) and they start spoofing their UA to another version. The Youtube engineer is indifferent (or can't really do anything about it). Then when it's done a Google employee from a different team comes in the thread to complain about the situation because the fact that the UA is spoofed for only youtube.com and not other (Google) domains breaks his product.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  YouTube wanted to deprecate Flash video, so Mozilla enabled VP9 support in Firefox 43 for users whose operating system does not provide an H.264 codec. (VP9 for all other platforms is coming a little later.) YouTube disabled Flash for Firefox 43 users, as planned, but forgot (?) to enable VP9 for those users. Without H.264 or Flash video, those users received low-quality 360p VP8 instead of high-quality VP9. When this mistake was discovered, YouTube could not fix or revert the configuration change because of their holiday code freeze. (I am a Mozilla employee.)
  - unethical_ban 11y ago
    I thought google committed code to prod thousands of times a day! Why do they even have a holiday freeze if it's so automated to push to prod?
    - saryant 11y ago
      Just because all of Google pushes to prod thousands of times a day doesn't mean that the team within Youtube pushes to prod that often. They may have some sort of scheduled deploy cycle and likely a review process. During the holidays they simply may not be staffed up for that process. Just because you can push to prod doesn't mean you should push to prod.
Siecje 11y ago
Here is a list of bugs with Google services and Firefox. http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-bugs-list http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-...
goodplay 11y ago
I was actually hit by that bug, which I erroneously attributed to firefox. I stopped using firefox as a result. I will probably start using it again because I read this article. I can't help but wonder how many ex-users who wont because they don't follow the news.
- akerro 11y ago
  It's not the first time people blame firefox for bugs in Youtube, very similar bug was introduced when youtube went HTML5. Firefox was served the same encoded video as chrome, but opera stayed on the old codec. Firefox didn't have chromes codec implemented yet and people left firefox for chrome.
chris_wot 11y ago
I think that browser user-agent-strings are far more trouble than they are worth. I think at this point, if there are browser bugs in something as important as video, the release team or someone should pick it up before release as a show-stopper. If the issue is on the server end, then the people running the server should be fixing their mess. Do we know which it was? A Firefox issue that caused Youtube to detect the user-agent and server lower quality video, or was it an issue on Youtube's end?
- bzbarsky 11y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878678 for what happened here, at least from Mozilla's point of view.
- makecheck 11y ago
  Probably true but sadly there are equivalents to a user-agent string in a lot of technologies and they will never really go away because of compatibility constraints. Entire operating systems contain hacks to work around unfortunately-designed-but-popular applications doing things they shouldn't. Device drivers too. Even the x86 processor specification in some cases is more about "what companies actually do" than "what some document says", because that is the only way things work correctly.
betolink 11y ago
I've also noticed the bug, it didn't happen with Chrome. What do you all think was my first thought?
- zobzu 11y ago
  "oh firefox sux" but in fact, it was all google's doing. imagine if they do this randomly and developers of safari, edge, firefox, dont always notice... good way to grab market share, by leveraging that the entire human race browse/use youtube daily.
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    I doubt YouTube is willing to jeopardize their ad revenue for some intangible nudge towards Chrome. I'm sure these Google different orgs, rightly, prioritize their own P&Ls.
    - zobzu 11y ago
      I'm sure it's involuntary (at least I hope so) but the prioritization is voluntary (like you said, if it was chrome it'd be instant fix - even if chrome had 1% market share). My comment means also to show the power Google holds over all web browsers. Imagine a sharp sword above the head of all of the web browsers, and they can swing it any time they please. They don't hopefully, but they can. Sometimes, the sword just slip, even. That's a lot of power for a single company.
osoti 11y ago
Some Websites and Apps that help the world..http://goo.gl/TRryRx http://goo.gl/TRryRx
jtchang 11y ago
Ah user agents. One of my favorite quotes: "And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded." http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
nitrobeast 11y ago
Interesting ... Because of some incidents Google is evil ... Meanwhile Firefox is not allowed on iOS.
- josteink 11y ago
  "Everyone" which cares about openness avoids Apple products and iOS in particular and has for a long time. Pointing out how Google is evil, does exclude other companies from being evil too.
  - josteink 11y ago
    > Pointing out how Google is evil, does exclude other companies from being evil too. Obvious typo: Pointing out how Google is evil, does NOT exclude other companies from being evil too.
- babuskov 11y ago
  There is Firefox on iOS: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/
- anon1385 11y ago
  Chrome isn't allowed on FirefoxOS…
rplnt 11y ago
On a similar note, Facebook does this as well for video. Take these two browsers: Chrome (with Flash bundled) and Opera (the new shitty one, based on Chromium, with chrome-like user agent and without Flash). Facebook serves Flash video to the browser without flash and HTML video to the browser with Flash. Why? Fucking user agent.
- rplnt 11y ago
  Oh, I just remembered - they also do it with gifs - convert them to video and serve through flash. I sometimes wonder whether they are invested in Adobe or something.

371 points by temp 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Reading the comments on that bug, it looks like it was only a small subset of Firefox users who experienced this bug. Not really a big story.

stygiansonic 11y ago
I believe this is the relevant comment: "Apologies to all impacted by this transient configuration. Firefox 43 users who do not have h.264 will get 360p VP8 until the configuration is updated early next year. The very large majority of Firefox users watching YouTube have h.264. For them, and for user who get VP9, <video> MSE performs better overall than Flash."
- zeckalpha 11y ago
  Yeah, but the next comment was: > "Unfortunately this is not an acceptable state for us. We have many millions of users whose Youtube experience suddenly got significantly degraded, and we're not willing to leave them in that state over the holidays. Any chance you guys could simply roll back the change you guys made? If not, we're forced to ship a Firefox update that lies to you guys about the Firefox version, which really is not a good option for either of us :("
  - thawkins 11y ago
    It can still be "multiple millions" and still be very low percentage numbers, when you are accessing risk you deal with percentages not absolutes.
acqq 11y ago
Reading the comments, it's some 6%, not small for me, if the total number of users is many millions.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Firefox users without H.264 platform codecs were affected: 100% of Windows XP users (which are about 14% of all Firefox users worldwide!), 2% of all other Windows users (the "N" and "KN" editions in Europe and South Korea), and 3% of Linux users.
  - ferbivore 11y ago
    Is OpenH264 still not being used for video decoding?
    - makomk 11y ago
      OpenH264 can't be used for video decoding because it can't decode the H264 profiles used to encode video on the internet; it's strictly baseline profile only which is pretty useless. The only reason it exists is because Cisco has a bunch of H264-only videoconferencing hardware that they want to be able to work with WebRTC.
kuschku 11y ago
I got this shit, just like I get no ability to change any search settings or do an advanced Google search on Firefox mobile, and am now spoofing Chrome as useragent. In my opinion, Firefox should do what Chrome did, and append the competing browser’s UA to their own useragent.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  In the case of Firefox for Android, there is already a rapidly growing blacklist of sites that get their UA spoofed to Chrome.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    You might want to add webp support to Firefox for Android then, and just spoof star.google.com/whatever TLD they support and star.youtube.com, too. (Replace "star" with *, as HN doesn’t support any proper escaping or markdown. This kind of bullshit is what makes this page so horrible to use)
    - dhimes 11y ago
      FWIW, you can enter things like that on HN by treating it as "code" -- skip a line and indent the next by two spaces *.youtube.com
keehun 11y ago
For me, the extreme Youtube slowdown coincided with me being in a new location. For a while, I just thought that the internet must be extremely slow, and yet, the pages themselves loaded fast, fps games worked smoothly, and there weren't any other signs that videos should buffer extremely slowly. Now I know why.

jimrandomh 11y ago

Browsers identify themselves with a user-agent string, and the user agent strings are a giant disaster of technical debt resulting from a long history of browsers working around buggy websites and websites working around buggy browsers. Browser video is also a giant disaster of technical debt, and YouTube uses the user-agent string to determine which ways of serving video will work and which ones won't. Presence of bugs here is no surprise, and any such bugs will naturally impact some browsers but not others. So, a bug in YouTube's compatibility-autodetection caused it to fall back to a slower, bitrate-limited fallback method that it didn't need to, for some versions of Firefox. They took two weeks to deploy the fix. Considering those two weeks included Christmas and the bug didn't affect security or render the site unavailable, this seems like a pretty good response time.

chei0aiV 11y ago
Browsers should start submitting a random 10 character string for the User-Agent header.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Could this be done with an extension?
  - chei0aiV 11y ago
    With an extension to this extension, yes: http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/ http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
  - gizmo686 11y ago
    Yes. https://github.com/muzuiget/user_agent_overrider https://github.com/muzuiget/user_agent_overrider As far as I am aware, no extension currently offers the option of a random user agent, but many (including the one linked) allows user supplied use agents, and there is no reason you could not make one support random user agents.
    - 11y ago

yuhong 11y ago

I wonder why it was that important (for Firefox to do something about it).

timonovici 11y ago
They already lost a massive chunk of their users. Do you think things will get sweeter if people start to notice that Firefox videos are crappier than on Chrome?
- yuhong 11y ago
  Yes, but you are talking about only weeks here for one thing.
  - Strom 11y ago
    Only weeks? I wouldn't watch any video for even 10 seconds if it's only 360p. I would instantly start tracking down the problem and/or switch to a player that can do more.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - tamana 11y ago
      0th world problem, to the extreme. The bug would be fixed before at least 99.99% of users noticed and tested an alternative.
      - timonovici 11y ago
        Put yourself in Mozilla's shoes. Why would their users have to take the punishment for no apparent reason? Wouldn't you be protective towards your users/reputation?
  - protomyth 11y ago
    It would be the week a lot of new computers were unboxed.

zimbatm 11y ago

We should just remove the reporting of User-Agent in browsers. All they do is encourage user tracking a building half-baked heuristics.

andrewguenther 11y ago
How do they encourage user tracking? The user agent string only tells you information about the browser, not the user.
- drdaeman 11y ago
  They add extra bits of identifying information to the pool. You know, https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
  - Survey_Sez 11y ago
    https://www.browserleaks.com/ https://www.browserleaks.com/ is another useful resource to help understand browser fingerprinting and how to combat it.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  It's not the only data that is available for deriving a tracking key. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ Why are you pretending that there is some sort of difference between "tracking a user" and "tracking the user's browser", which is close enough for most tracking purposes? Tracking the browser is tracking a user for a vast majority of people. For browsers on a phone, it is even more likely to be a 1:1 mapping.
  - andrewguenther 11y ago
    The user agent (by itself) provides you none of those things.... > Why are you pretending that there is some sort of difference between "tracking a user" and "tracking the user's browser" I'm not? That isn't what I said.
11y ago

0x0 11y ago

I'm curious about this non-user-visible europe-only feature, which depended on user-agents aligning between youtube.com and google.com, that got broken, especially since the details couldn't be discussed in public. Antispam? Ad-tracking? Why would it be Europe-only?

rmccue 11y ago
Cookie law related, perhaps? There was a cookie-related change in FF43 for third-party cookies (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536509 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536509).

hoodoof 11y ago

The only reason this should be on the front page #1 of HN is if there is tangible evidence that intent was malicious.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
The poor way in which YouTube does feature detection (via user agent string) is almost as appalling. There is nothing wrong with outlining it here.
- tacos 11y ago
  And the unforeseen consequences to the "quick, innocent fix" more important still. They did not handle this properly.
- timothya 11y ago
  > The poor way in which YouTube does feature detection (via user agent string) is almost as appalling. If you could provide a better alternative, I'm sure they'd be all ears.
  - pas 11y ago
    Put there a little button that lets the user select the format/resolution/implementation.
    - jrowley 11y ago
      What percentage of YouTube users could define the word "format"?
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      The less options you give the user up front the better; I don't think this would be a better option (though allowing advanced users to select this may not be the worst thing).
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago

dexwiz 11y ago

Some (not Mac) users on the newest version of Firefox got lower quality Youtube video over the holidays, and the issue would would not be fixed until next year? Oh yah, next year was next week. Thank goodness, it was still fixed within the year. Do we live in a world where this in unacceptable?

cpeterso 11y ago
The bug was reported on December 19 and fixed on January 7. That's at least 19 days, not just "next week". Do you think Larry Page would allow YouTube to serve 360p VP8 instead of hardware-accelerated 1080p H.264 to ~15% of Chrome users for 19+ days "because holidays"?
- dgacmu 11y ago
  Well, when you consider that every bug fix carries with it the chance of introducing a worse bug, sometimes holding off on a non-critical fix until everybody's back from the holidays and able to work 100% again doesn't seem like a bad idea. Having some % of FF 43 users (who're about 3.5% of the browser market according to netmarketshare.com) experience degraded but functional video may be better than, say, a 1% risk of breaking youtube for 100% of users and not being able to fix it for a day.
  - sylvinus 11y ago
    I think the point of the parent comment is that they would have done it right away even if Chrome usage had been at the same 3.5% share.
    - zobzu 11y ago
      Defending Google and attacking Firefox is still the trend though, as many of the comments show here, even thus this Mozilla employe's comments are crystal clear (for once someone does that - that's great!)
  - lucb1e 11y ago

mpitt 11y ago

The existence of a “feature” that relies on UA strings being consistent across domains, with the potential to “brick YouTube entirely in a user-visible way for all Firefox 43 users in Europe”[1], is quite worrying to be honest. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c61 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c61

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
And this "feature" being not noticeable to the user, but kinda a requirement that it be there, and apparently associating stuff on someone's Google/YouTube side... but the Googler in question is unwilling for that feature to be identified.
- sylvinus 11y ago
  From what he describes, it might be something like a quota service or an ad service that does consistency checks over the course of user sessions to fight spam/abuse/crawlers.
davb 11y ago
Honestly, it sounds like the commenter was defending some crappy engineering decisions. I'm not really comfortable that YT/Google were, via this guy, asking for special consideration (from an open source project) but only willing to discuss their request in private. It lacks transparency.

tinco 11y ago

This is actually pretty great. Youtube has some issue with Firefox 43 and serves it lower quality video to deal with it (probably as a hack to enable video for some users for whom it didn't work at all under 43, but there's no explanation from Youtube engineers in the thread). The Firefox team complains to Youtube, but Youtube responds with that they won't budge until January at least. Firefox sees it as a threat to their reputation (obviously for them having a few users for whom it doesn't work is better than having loads of users with a degraded experience) and they start spoofing their UA to another version. The Youtube engineer is indifferent (or can't really do anything about it). Then when it's done a Google employee from a different team comes in the thread to complain about the situation because the fact that the UA is spoofed for only youtube.com and not other (Google) domains breaks his product.

cpeterso 11y ago
YouTube wanted to deprecate Flash video, so Mozilla enabled VP9 support in Firefox 43 for users whose operating system does not provide an H.264 codec. (VP9 for all other platforms is coming a little later.) YouTube disabled Flash for Firefox 43 users, as planned, but forgot (?) to enable VP9 for those users. Without H.264 or Flash video, those users received low-quality 360p VP8 instead of high-quality VP9. When this mistake was discovered, YouTube could not fix or revert the configuration change because of their holiday code freeze. (I am a Mozilla employee.)
- unethical_ban 11y ago
  I thought google committed code to prod thousands of times a day! Why do they even have a holiday freeze if it's so automated to push to prod?
  - saryant 11y ago
    Just because all of Google pushes to prod thousands of times a day doesn't mean that the team within Youtube pushes to prod that often. They may have some sort of scheduled deploy cycle and likely a review process. During the holidays they simply may not be staffed up for that process. Just because you can push to prod doesn't mean you should push to prod.

Siecje 11y ago

Here is a list of bugs with Google services and Firefox. http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-bugs-list http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-...

goodplay 11y ago

I was actually hit by that bug, which I erroneously attributed to firefox. I stopped using firefox as a result. I will probably start using it again because I read this article. I can't help but wonder how many ex-users who wont because they don't follow the news.

akerro 11y ago
It's not the first time people blame firefox for bugs in Youtube, very similar bug was introduced when youtube went HTML5. Firefox was served the same encoded video as chrome, but opera stayed on the old codec. Firefox didn't have chromes codec implemented yet and people left firefox for chrome.

chris_wot 11y ago

I think that browser user-agent-strings are far more trouble than they are worth. I think at this point, if there are browser bugs in something as important as video, the release team or someone should pick it up before release as a show-stopper. If the issue is on the server end, then the people running the server should be fixing their mess. Do we know which it was? A Firefox issue that caused Youtube to detect the user-agent and server lower quality video, or was it an issue on Youtube's end?

bzbarsky 11y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878678 for what happened here, at least from Mozilla's point of view.
makecheck 11y ago
Probably true but sadly there are equivalents to a user-agent string in a lot of technologies and they will never really go away because of compatibility constraints. Entire operating systems contain hacks to work around unfortunately-designed-but-popular applications doing things they shouldn't. Device drivers too. Even the x86 processor specification in some cases is more about "what companies actually do" than "what some document says", because that is the only way things work correctly.

betolink 11y ago

I've also noticed the bug, it didn't happen with Chrome. What do you all think was my first thought?

zobzu 11y ago
"oh firefox sux" but in fact, it was all google's doing. imagine if they do this randomly and developers of safari, edge, firefox, dont always notice... good way to grab market share, by leveraging that the entire human race browse/use youtube daily.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  I doubt YouTube is willing to jeopardize their ad revenue for some intangible nudge towards Chrome. I'm sure these Google different orgs, rightly, prioritize their own P&Ls.
  - zobzu 11y ago
    I'm sure it's involuntary (at least I hope so) but the prioritization is voluntary (like you said, if it was chrome it'd be instant fix - even if chrome had 1% market share). My comment means also to show the power Google holds over all web browsers. Imagine a sharp sword above the head of all of the web browsers, and they can swing it any time they please. They don't hopefully, but they can. Sometimes, the sword just slip, even. That's a lot of power for a single company.

osoti 11y ago

Some Websites and Apps that help the world..http://goo.gl/TRryRx http://goo.gl/TRryRx

jtchang 11y ago

Ah user agents. One of my favorite quotes: "And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded." http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

nitrobeast 11y ago

Interesting ... Because of some incidents Google is evil ... Meanwhile Firefox is not allowed on iOS.

josteink 11y ago
"Everyone" which cares about openness avoids Apple products and iOS in particular and has for a long time. Pointing out how Google is evil, does exclude other companies from being evil too.
- josteink 11y ago
  > Pointing out how Google is evil, does exclude other companies from being evil too. Obvious typo: Pointing out how Google is evil, does NOT exclude other companies from being evil too.
babuskov 11y ago
There is Firefox on iOS: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/
anon1385 11y ago
Chrome isn't allowed on FirefoxOS…

rplnt 11y ago

On a similar note, Facebook does this as well for video. Take these two browsers: Chrome (with Flash bundled) and Opera (the new shitty one, based on Chromium, with chrome-like user agent and without Flash). Facebook serves Flash video to the browser without flash and HTML video to the browser with Flash. Why? Fucking user agent.

rplnt 11y ago
Oh, I just remembered - they also do it with gifs - convert them to video and serve through flash. I sometimes wonder whether they are invested in Adobe or something.