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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
by 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 agoYouTube 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 agoI 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 agoJust 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.
- cpeterso 11y agoFrom what I hear, YouTube pushes daily, Monday through Thursday.
- yandie 11y agoMy former team (in a big company) push changes to prod at least once a day until 3PM Friday. However, the company has the no-deploy days policy for the holiday period because if things break, there are gonna be very few people in the office to fix it.
- yyhhsj0521 11y agoIf it's so, can't they just roll back?
- mxxx 11y agothanks for this summary, very succinct and hyperbole-free.
- toomanybeersies 11y agoThat sounds like something that shouldn't be rolled out over Christmas when nobody is in the office.
- lucb1e 11y agoAs if similar bugs in Google products wouldn't be fixed over Christmas. Chrome playing only in 360p? That would be fixed in a matter of hours.
- epimenov 11y agoThey said in the ticket that the issue does NOT affect the majority of Firefox users. It was just a calculation of the impact, and they decided not to release a hotfix. I'm pretty sure if it was affecting all firefox users it would be fixed in a matter of hours too.
- lucb1e 11y agoI am quite sure that even if it were the same amount (in absolute numbers) of Chrome users, it would have been a bigger priority than Firefox, at least for most people there.
- Caspy7 11y agoIf this had happened to Chrome users, the code freeze would have magically been broken in a matter of hours.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- toomanybeersies 11y agoThat sounds like something that shouldn't be rolled out over Christmas when nobody is in the office.