17 ms·

YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

1919 points by csvm 3y ago

mighmi 3y ago
The most interesting part from the discussion was noting it's implemented in the most basic, easily avoidable way (just spoof chrome) implying engineers unhappy with these tasks. @dang or op, wrong link. Should be: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
- rsolva 3y ago
  I sometimes wonder if the use of Firefox is under reported just because a lot of it's users are power users, installing extensions that spoof the user agent. I know I did for a long while, making my Firefox pretend it was Chrome on a Windows machine.
  - acdha 3y ago
    This is definitely the case for anything like Google or Adobe Analytics which are blocked by the default tracking protection. You can’t compare the results directly due to bots but on sites I’ve controlled our servers saw significant disparities between the server logs and the percentages commonly reported as global share.
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    I'm a too proud Firefox user to do that. But not all of us are fanatics like that.
csvm 3y ago
Correct Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
ayhanfuat 3y ago
From reddit discussion (https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9w3ei4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9...): > To clarify it more, it's simply this code in their polymer script link: > setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); > which doesn't do anything except making you wait 5s (5E3 = 5000ms = 5s). You can search for it easily in https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/96766c85/jsbin/desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.vflset/desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.js https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/96766c85/jsbin/desktop_pol...
- m4tthumphrey 3y ago
  This is interesting as I had noticed this happening to me (in Chrome) when the anti-ad-blocking started. I assumed that it was YT's way of "annoying" me still while no ads were shown... It was eventually replaced with the "You cant use Adblockers modal" and now I just tolerate the ads. So I wonder if that 5s delay has always been there.
  - dbspin 3y ago
    It's still trivial to block ads, but the delay has recently started for me, after never happening before. So presumably a very intentional volley in the ongoing war to own your attention.
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    It's weird but I saw the anti-blocker modal a week or two but them it stopped appearing and never saw it since shrug
    - psll 3y ago
      Might be because of the EU ruling, if you're in the EU.
      - dave881 3y ago
        I'm in the US, and had the same experience. I got the you can't use an adblocker message, but was able to close and/or reload the page to watch videos without ads. After a week or so it stopped popping up. US, Firefox, uBlockOrgin.
ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
While the EU has recently forced Microsoft to allow users to uninstall pre-installed crapware, Google is apparently unhindered in their ongoing (and succeeding) mission to take control of all layers of the consumer-facing internet.
- bad_user 3y ago
  Google, Samsung, Apple, and others have to abide by the same law, Microsoft isn't special. I also don't understand what this law has to do with the topic.
  - ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
    I support the enforcement of anti-trust laws against Microsoft, but I am at the same time puzzled at how much Google is allowed to get away with. They are simultaneously maintaining the biggest browser platform while also being the biggest content and advertisement provider, AND they have a major influence on the development of web standards, AND they control the development of a major OS (Android) for accessing the web, where their browser comes pre-installed. And now they are actively exploiting their position and trying to sabotage the competition. My point in highlighting it is that I think there is a lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws and/or a lack of laws that would prevent Google behaving in this way, since I think it is so much worse than what Microsoft has been doing with Windows not allowing users to uninstall crapware.
    - bad_user 3y ago
      The law you're mentioning is the “Digital Markets Act”, and it's a new law that will apply to Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung and others, not having to do with any enforcement of “antitrust” laws upon Microsoft. https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... Furthermore, are we talking about the same Microsoft that: 1. forced usage of Microsoft Edge, while also actively blocking circumvention mechanisms; 2. that keeps hijacking searches for Chrome, or Firefox; 3. that has telemetry in Edge that can't be disabled; 4. and that, upon first opening Edge, it asks you to agree to data sharing with the entire advertising industry? --- You basically assert that Google is receiving preferential treatment from the EU, yet provided absolutely no evidence for it.
explain 3y ago
I have been getting this same slow-down for a month or two, but using Brave - which is the same user-agent as Chrome. I would imagine changing the user-agent at all will (temporarily) fix it, rather than to a Chrome user-agent specifically. Probably targets ad blocking users rather than non-Chrome users.
- dwighttk 3y ago
  Huh, I nearly exclusively use Brave for YouTube because it does a good job blocking ads and I haven’t noticed any slowdown. I did see the ad nag once when I accidentally went to YouTube in safari
invalidusernam3 3y ago
Assume this is supposed to be the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
worldofmatthew 3y ago
Anti-Trust anyone?
- Halen77 3y ago
  Wait until the EU gets their hands on this..
StrLght 3y ago
I also noticed this during the weekend. I initially assumed that the new uBO filters are too blame -- guess that's exactly what Google is going for with these hostile measures, and it kinda works.
raspyberr 3y ago
How come this video isn't just showing caching at work?
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
I haven't noticed an issue yet. My issue at the moment is while ublock can still block ads, every video automatically pauses like 5 seconds in and I need to hit play again.
leosanchez 3y ago
I thought it was my adblocker (uBlock) causing the issue.
mbix77 3y ago
Sadly there is still no alternative to Youtube. Same with Reddit.
- zicxor 3y ago
  Hey, Ferhat here, I want to create an alternative for Reddit. Could you help me to build a better internet? https://discord.gg/buQmB8VJeS https://discord.gg/buQmB8VJeS
Racing0461 3y ago
happens to me on chrome too with ublock.
nan60 3y ago
This just... isn't happening for me? My only extensions are UBo, Return Youtube Dislike and Sponsorblock, so I presume a UBo filter is either fixing it or the change isn't rolled out to all users yet.
- snowram 3y ago
  The UBo team commented on the Reddit thread that they were looking into it. So it may have already been fixed.
jb1991 3y ago
I noticed Youtube started doing this in the last couple days, and I use FF. What a silly thing to do, about as juvenile as a company can be.
- Kiro 3y ago
  It's been happening on Chrome as well for the past few days so I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
bad_user 3y ago
I am not getting this behaviour in Firefox 120. Tried it, logged out as well. > setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); The code looks like a silly concurrency bug fix, i.e., a lazy way to force ordering.
- gwd 3y ago
  Or potentially a concurrency bug trigger? "One in 1000 times X takes a bit too long and causes problem Y; I'll make X take minimum 5 seconds so I can trigger Y reliably." Then fixes Y but forgets to remove the delay.
- seydor 3y ago
  I can't believe billion dollar companies 'solve' bugs the same way as i do
  - _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
    The people working there are also just people like you.
    - mewpmewp2 3y ago
      They just practice leetcode a lot, doesn't mean they know how to deal with those issues in the UI.
- petargyurov 3y ago
  A 5 SECOND timeout for a concurrency issue? I doubt it.
  - eli 3y ago
    It's timeout that's part of loading ads. That code isn't blocking anything. The headline here is wrong.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  Such fix won't sleep for 5000 ms though. In my reading it looks like a part of the adblocker detection code. (EDIT: Relocated the actual analysis to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346602 for more visibility.)
blueflow 3y ago
If you are fluent with the terminal, you don't need to suffer from the YT Web UI. Install mpv and yt-dlp. Play videos like this: mpv [--no-video] "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9zVjEZ7W8Q" Option in brackets is optional.
- sammy2255 3y ago
  I think you’re missing the point. How can I browse Youtube in mpv?
  - imiric 3y ago
    Use Invidious, Piped or any other frontend that doesn't track and manipulate you.
    - littlecranky67 3y ago
      Adding https://youtube-lite.js.org/#/ https://youtube-lite.js.org/#/ to the list.
  - blueflow 3y ago
    What do you mean by "browsing" Youtube? Clicking new links for the purpose of entertainment? My post was only about playing videos.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      Well, how do you get to the videos? How do you discover their links to pipe to mpv/yt-dl? One option is RSS (YouTube still supports it) subscribing to channels. Do you know of others?
      - blueflow 3y ago
        I don't, i use Youtube for listening to music or livestreams that i already know the title of.
    - 3y ago
mlindner 3y ago
Using firefox 118 on Mac here and seeing no issues. Videos load instantly or near instantly.
gadders 3y ago
Can someone check gmail as well? It loads so slowly under firefox.
agevag 3y ago
[dead]
jiggawatts 3y ago
Oh, and they also falsely show "4K" in the video quality icon, but "accidentally" play a 720p or even worse quality stream. If you manually select the 4K stream quality, then and only then will YouTube deign to show 4K to you.
- CapsAdmin 3y ago
  Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is that I'm capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they can only be played back at 420p. Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and there's nothing telling you about this not being supported in your browser until you've made the purchase (by just allowing 420p and needing to search for why it's broken) see https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/pm0eqh/why_are_my_movies_still_only_480p_its_been_almost/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/pm0eqh/why_are_my_...
  - _Algernon_ 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles. They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That's it! If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they've picked for you. If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you. You see, what actually happened, is that some too-smart UX guy at Netflix couldn't make a language picker look nice for that many options so he asked a too-smart data science (lol) guy to figure out the most common languages for each region. Here in Australia they picked English, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese because we have a lot of immigrants from those countries. I'm sure they used very clever algorithms on big data clusters to figure that out. Good job, well done. Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out. Netflix and their $500K total comp Stanford or wherever graduates couldn't. So they instructed their call centre staff to lie to their customers. Then they had someone write this idiocy: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101798 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101798 "If subtitles for a title are offered in a language but do not display on your device, try another device." Oh, oh, I'll go do that right now! Let me try my PC... nope four languages. On the TV? Four languages. Actually, I have a phone... and... oh... four languages. PS: Thai (only!) subtitles are "special" and use eye-searing HDR maximum white. Like 1,600 nits white that literally leaves green after-images etched into my retina. They have a support page and a pre-prepared set of lies for the support staff to read for that piece of shoddy engineering also.
blibble 3y ago
I noticed this one and it did come to mind that it was, ahem, targeted overlords: I'll give up youtube entirely rather than watch ads/contribute towards your revenue
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
frankjr 3y ago
I have a hard time believing that's actually what's happening. If they wanted to slow down other browsers, why would they choose this easily discoverable way? They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect. It seems more likely this is just a debug snippet that has made it into production by accident.
- amelius 3y ago
  > They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect. And that is /not/ easily discoverable??
  - _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
    I would argue it's a bit harder to find if the youtube backend serves files slower for certain browsers. One could even radomize it and sometimes still serve it fast or something. Since you cannot look at the backend code it would be hard to proof anything.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  If I was working at Google and I was tasked with doing that, I'd half ass it too
  - frankjr 3y ago
    I mean it could be that the programmer wanted it to be discovered to draw attention to Google managers' shenanigans but that seems kind of far fetched.
- asddubs 3y ago
  ah yes, the fact that they are sabotaging other browsers in a very obvious way is actually proof that they didn't meant to sabotage other browsers!
udev4096 3y ago
Hilarious
denkmoon 3y ago
Using firefox I get "instant" youtube. The video starts playing before most of the rest of the UI has loaded even, definitely under 1 second. Any idea what specifically causes it to happen, rather than just "firefox"?
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  An up-to-date adblocker blocker blocker, most likely. Paying for Premium may also do it.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  I've gotten that really slow UI loading almost always lately and I've always assumed that it's because I'm running uBlock Origin. Although I just tried opening two videos and both opened basically instantly.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
I've had this slow down show up for me as well. I wonder if there's a non malicious explanation, although I'll admit I'm unable to think of a charitable interpretation. Sometimes YouTube also disables features on my home page. For example, at the top of the home page there's usually a filter bar with various categories. I haven't figured out under what conditions this gets triggered, but there's times where the filter bar just disappears.
seydor 3y ago
It's a bug they can't fix and "if you wait 5 seconds it works". Also , in 5 seconds, ad blockers are guaranteed to have kicked in
manjalyc 3y ago
Code generally does not enter the YouTube code base without a lot of review namely (1) performance tests and (2) code reviews from multiple teams. Lines like this almost certainly get flagged/increased scrutiny. It would be very hard to imagine multiple people didn’t know about this and assign the blame to a single person.
octacat 3y ago
And that is why these giant companies should be split apart.
azalemeth 3y ago
On a completely related note, the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority has recently been flexing its muscles on digital markets. You may wish to know of this URL, specifically for reporting anti-competitive practices: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition-or-market-problem https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...
toldyouso2022 3y ago
Youtube is a very toxic environment. Even "informative" content is often toxic, but in a very subtle manner. At google They may be not respecting the web but they are doing firefox users a favor. If you really need to see a video, five seconds won't make a difference. If you don't need it, five seconds may remind you that you don't really need it. Try to see the positives
ReptileMan 3y ago
Use brave. The best youtube premium experience without paying for premium.
alentred 3y ago
Hm, it does not correspond to my observations. I'm using Firefox and the videos load and start just as they usually do. A/B testing? :)
DarkmSparks 3y ago
lol, I think this ended up being one of several factors that made me switch to firefox (now vivaldi). The "extra chance to consider your life choices and do you really want to watch this video" was a feature not a bug. Plus now tiktok and telegram are orders of magnitude more popular than YT. Im seeing more and more creators arrive on YT as their "second choice" platform.
iinnPP 3y ago
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/page-load-time-statistics/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and... Seems odd to do something so brazen while also publishing information that (could) prove intent. Google also modifies how business information can be accessed from Firefox Mobile. You can't read reviews easily from Firefox Mobile. At least not my install.
- gear54rus 3y ago
  That's because it's not actually what's happening. I'm all for bashing bigcorps and especially ad empires but reddit folks confused correlation with causation here. The code in question is part of a function that injects a video ad (that plays before the start) and the code itself is just a fallback in case it fails to load over 5 seconds so that video page doesn't break completely. Why was this affected by user agent change? My best guess is that on some combinations they somehow decide not to show any ads at all (for now) and therefore this function is not called and some other code path is taken. This is consistent with my own experience with the recent anti-adblock bullshit they implemented. The banner was not being shown after user agent change implying it's one of the considered variables. You can verify all this if you click 'format code' in browser debugger.
  - iinnPP 3y ago
    That makes sense and explains why it seemed so odd. I don't use YouTube so the comment was more of a way to bring up the other behavior in business reviews. It seemed relevant. Edit: reviews are also broken(for me) on Firefox desktop with no extensions enabled and with ublock enabled.
  - immibis 3y ago
    The code also returns 0 if the advert loads and 1 if it doesn't load. In other words, it detects adblockers.
nomilk 3y ago
I don't use firefox but have noticed a strange delay occurring during the past day or two. Wondering if it's coincidence. I use ublock origin, so maybe youtube's detecting its presence somehow and forcing a delay? (ublock is up to date so I don't get the message from youtube telling me to stop using adblockers - perhaps this is their next attempt to annoy people into paying/allowing ads?).
quantum_state 3y ago
If that’s true, it is pure evil.
laserbeam 3y ago
I've recently done a pc upgrade and am now enjoying 64 gigs of ram. Decided to watch a live stream on youtube this weekend. Firefox: 22 GB of ram usage for the youtube tab after ~15 minutes. Tab became unresponsive. Edge: Out of memory error after ~5 minutes. Chrome: working fine, the youtube tab sitting peacefully ay 400-600 MB.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Not sure what is specific in your setup but I have watched numerous live stream on firefox and tab never became unresponsive. Haven't checked the ram but my laptop had half of yours and the live were running for an hour or so.
- jug 3y ago
  I don't know what your problem is exactly but this is not normal behavior on Firefox at least. Check your extensions to begin with, or for a quick test, try watching a video in a prvivate tab.
  - laserbeam 3y ago
    Just, ublock origin, a password manager, and the kagi extension for my search engine. ublock origin was installed on all browsers. I'm not even trying to watch it without ublock, as that would be an unreasonable thing to do in general. I know this is not normal behaviour, and it's likely unintetional, but I'll be damn sure google won't bother to fix it. I'm most surprised by Edge as it's running chromium and it should share some similarity to chrome.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I had the same issue, it turned out to be some random addon I installed years ago. Check if the problem also occurs with everything but uBlock Origin disabled.
welzel 3y ago
I hope they keep this code in YT. It will be a party for the EU to punish Google with an anti-monopoly lawsuit. Best case: google gets forced to split up chrome, youtube and search as they obviously abuse their power.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Would be a bad day for the Internet. There's no way Youtube is financially viable without being cross-subsidised by Google's search income and running on Google's peering agreements with ISPs. Ads would be nowhere near enough to cover the bandwidth cost, which is why sooner or later any attempt to copycat it failed or went down to utter niche content.
qwery 3y ago
Oh, I noticed this yesterday and assumed it was ad blocker hostility. Which I guess it may well be -- are Firefox users more likely to use ad blockers? Possibly. Certainly on Android. That doesn't strictly matter though, presumably the Youtube people try to avoid stepping on the Chrome people's toes. Given Google is apparently going ahead with killing extensions on Chrome it's not hard to imagine some scheme where a guy is just lookin' at'cha merchandise and happens to be carryin' a baseball bat is all -- you can't really blame him for some spillage, right? (make using Firefox painful to try and push people to Chrome). Before crippling Chrome? Sounds ridiculous, but one can't help but wonder... Thinking about some more, the point could actually be to make users question if its because they have an ad blocker not even actively blocking anything, but simply installed. Some number of users may uninstall their ad blocking extension to see if it makes the lag go away.
baz00 3y ago
Quick note: yt-dlp + VLC speed this right up again!
t43562 3y ago
Software that's not getting any attention will be ok as it won't get python upgrades. Software that is getting attention has a nice long warning period and fixes may not even cause any trouble at all if the code is ok and there are unit tests. New software won't have a whole class of timezone problems because people will use the better API to remove the warnings. I cannot see what the big problem is - much more troublesome things happen in Go all the time. Python isn't a huge for-profit company like Google or even MS which has to dedicate efforts to ensuring that games from 1992 still run in 2023.
agluszak 3y ago
I wrote an email to Electronic Frontier Foundation and European Digital Rights collective asking them to file a complaint against Google because of this unjustified slowdown. I advise other readers to consider doing the same.
Andrew018 3y ago
[dead]
FrenchDevRemote 3y ago
Not only that: Google's recaptcha will also ask you for dozens of captchas on firefox android (which is probably the best) way to watch youtube/use google site without ads on mobile) f** google
- boudin 3y ago
  On android NewPipe is a good alternative to watch youtube
everdrive 3y ago
Seems like this is an unintentional benefit to firefox users. A small amount of friction is the difference between "I'm mindlessly watching" vs "I actually care about watching this video."
dinckelman 3y ago
This is why you don't let a single corporation control more than half the internet, and more than 75% of the browser market
ploum 3y ago
Another "Youtube is doing shit" thread and yet not a single mention of Peertube. https://joinpeertube.org/en https://joinpeertube.org/en So for all people uploading videos, please have a look at Peertube. It is to Youtube what Mastodon is to Twitter. (and more: it is compatible with Mastodon, one can subscribe to your Peertube channel through his/her mastodon account). I’m not arguing to leave Youtube completely but to offer an alternative to your audience. Please join peertube.
- hollowturtle 3y ago
  I'd love to see real competition to YouTube. I'm afraid this seems not, the UX isn't great, homepage is useless, you need to click on Browse content then enter some keywords on a blank page, search results limited to 2 items and then you need to click on "Display more videos". I might be to used to youtube homepage, for me it's perfect I get videos right away and suggestions are good. I'm pretty sure this project, Mastodon and others are in good will, but they lack great ux/ui, it seems to me that ux isn't even researched, how can it be a viable competitor?
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Please send this to the Peertube developer. Consider also that until recently it's likely that having videos load fast on peer2peer and adding features like streaming likely had a higher priority than interface polishing. But you might be asking for something impossible : the focus is on the different servers, and having a "suggested videos" page is seen as an anti-feature because it involves making an "algorithm", at which point you are editorializing, become (legally !) responsible for what you select, and are close to become a platform yourself, something that you started out by fighting in the first place !
    - ploum 3y ago
      Like Mastodon, Peertube should not aim to "Do everything people think will be good to get audience". It should create a philosophy. I’m quite sure that lot and lot of people are tired by all those algorithmic suggestions. People are sad to see creators doing videos to get likes/subscribers/views instead of really creating. This is a new model. And the winners of the old models will either adapt or not be winners any more. And that’s good if the premise is that the old model is broken in the first place.
insanitybit 3y ago
The second I saw reddit as the source I knew this was going to be incorrect.
nixass 3y ago
Time for EU to slap them in the face again
sebzim4500 3y ago
People on reddit have posted videos of this happening in chrome, I think it's possible this is actually just a bug and not an evil scheme.
littlecranky67 3y ago
As a JavaScript Dev, around 2010-2012 it was not uncommon to see `setTimeout(..., n)` hacks, often with n=0 but sometimes even n=1000, n=5000 into a codebase. This could workaround some bugs, and given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back then, often a last-resort. And yes, am guilty too of committing this to prod back then. I think I haven't had a case where this was deployed in the last decade, but in the ugly SPA days pre angular v1 (and even during angular v1), where you code was this big glued-together conglomerate of various 3rd party UI libraries, this was common. Its ugly as hell, and you really had to be there at that time to understand this. But often it was just a cheap alternative, while debugging and fixing the truly underlying cause would be several man-days or even weeks. My point being: It might have slipped their QA cracks and was at some point intended to workaround a bug of some obscure Firefox behavior. For a company at youtube's scale this is however pretty embarrassing.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  > given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back then As opposed to now?
flohofwoe 3y ago
I'm getting such a pause also in Chrome since a few days, I was assuming that it's fallout from the adblocking wars though (I use uBlock Origin and don't get the nag screen anymore since around the time that pause appeared)
- christop 3y ago
  Yup, same here — I see the same delay in Chrome now and then. I guessed it was due to the cat-and-mouse adblocking prevention between YouTube and adblockers (I'm also using uBlock Origin).
nbittich 3y ago
Glad I dropped chrome for Firefox at the beginning of 2022. It took some time to get used to it but eventually it's now my main browser. Tired of Google being such a piece of shit. Hopefully 2024 will be the year of Linux on mobile.
pcf 3y ago
I use Firefox on macOS Ventura, and here the video pages load instantly. I do have YouTube Premium (paid for in India to reduce the cost), but also in an incognito window where I'm not logged in, the video pages load immediately. Maybe it's because I use the extensions uBlock Origin and/or Disable Autoplay For YouTube?
nottorp 3y ago
* Meanwhile, reddit asks me to sign up or log in to see the thread. * Oh wait. Who thought it's a good idea to post this with a link to a login page instead of the actual discussion thread?
katsura 3y ago
The mentioned issue that can be seen on the video has been happening to me for a day or two while using Chrome.
TexanFeller 3y ago
I’ve also noticed mysterious buffering in the iOS app for YouTube for at least a few months. Even on a Google Fiber connection many videos will take a number of seconds to start, and sometimes buffer in the middle. I also have YT Premium, so anti ad blocking shouldn’t come into the picture. Videos load right away in Safari though.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Delete the iOS app and install the Vinegar Safari extension. It will replace the hostile video player with a native HTML5 <video> element. I never see any ads, I can select the stream quality, and Picture-in-Picture works as my OS intended it to.
foob 3y ago
I use Firefox, and Google's sites are literally the only ones where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken for me, the map wouldn't update at all when attempting to search or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript code spinning the CPU nonstop. It's literally gotten to the point where I keep a Chrome window open and use it exclusively for Gmail, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Maps. It's pretty obvious from the outside that supporting Firefox is not a product priority for Google. It also seems clear that it's in their best interest to have users choose Chrome over Firefox. My guess is that this likely emerges from a lot of very reasonable sounding local decisions, like "prioritize testing on browsers with the most market share," but it is convenient how those align with the anti-competitive incentives.
- joelanman 3y ago
  Gmail has recently become extremely slow for me in Safari on a well specced M1 max
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    Same here on Firefox, for both my laptop running Windows 11 on Alder Lake, and my desktop running Ubuntu on Zen 2.
- 1980phipsi 3y ago
  Using Google sites with a VPN on Firefox has been really annoying for the past couple of months as well.
- vmfunction 3y ago
  These sounds like classic MS behaviour. It is kind of thing that ought to addressed in anti-trust case.
  - giancarlostoro 3y ago
    I've posted this here on HN numerous times over the years, and it's been a while since I last posted it: Google is the new "Microsoft", they embrace, they extend, then extinguish. Look at their email offering, messaging offerings, they built on top of XMPP, then they pulled the plug eventually. Android is Linux based, but insanely proprietary, the app store is not open by any means, you're fully at their whims to get your apps on there. Chrome is basically the IE of old, implementing proprietary things or APIs that are not yet standard for Google products, and pushing out competing browsers.
varispeed 3y ago
I don't understand this. If people don't want to or need to buy anything and they don't want to see ads, because this is pure simply a distraction and won't sway them into buying anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads? Furthermore, I wish regulators have gone at YouTube like a ton of bricks. The ads they show are mostly from various kind of scam artists. My friend is a bit naive, but fortunately she asked me for an opinion whether she should invest her savings into the programme offered by one of "gurus" advertising on YT. She even gone on a few of their webinars and became as you would say, brainwashed. The kind of way you see in a cult. Fortunately there was still some worry running around her and she asked me to check before transferring £20k. You can't imagine how much effort it took to tell here these guys are fraudsters. Now she is onto another scheme and now she tells me that I just don't want her to invest the money, because I think everyone is a fraudster and these are the good guys! Then she showed me testimonials from apparent "clients" how they got rich. One person looked familiar and I actually found them on Cameo. She tried to say maybe this is just that person's side gig etc. and she does not talk to me. I really really hope someone or some organisation get to the bottom of this kind of harmful and dangerous content. YouTube is a scammers paradise and YouTube wants more people to fall for these things.
- bool3max 3y ago
  > I don't understand this. If people don't want to or need to buy anything and they don't want to see ads, because this is pure simply a distraction and won't sway them into buying anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads? Age-old question. It's not that simple. Those ads have an effect on you whether you "want to or need to buy anything" or not.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  The point of forcing ads onto users who don't want to see them and won't buy anything from them, is that the advertisers will still pay Google. In the long run, their CTR will suffer, but it will be consistent across advertisers. If they're paying per click then nobody loses except the user, who Google is betting actually will click on some ads (meaning they're basically engaging in psychological warfare, or at least rewarding the advertisers who do). And if they're paying per impression, then advertisers will see conversions go down in the long run, but Google might think the increased volume will make up for it.
dncornholio 3y ago
Can we have some fucking facts already? We have seen other reports of this same issue but people were using Chrome. This seems like an over-reaction. And the Reddit herd is known for being unstoppable over false-assumptions.
- Kiro 3y ago
  HN is no better. We love to jump to premature conclusions. Just look at this thread. It doesn't even link to anything (right now the submission link is https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/) and yet people are automatically bringing out the pitchforks.
theyeenzbeanz 3y ago
It’s been like this for years on Firefox for me, even before they cracked down on adblockers and such. I’ve also noticed it messes with the history functionality and often breaks the back button. Getting sick of googles nonsense.
theshrike79 3y ago
Chrome has been the new Internet Explorer for a bunch of years already. And even people who lived the horror days of "We need to support IE6 because the client wants so" and "ActiveX is a good choice for web pages" are complacent. Please, for the love of all that's good in the world, use ANYTHING but a Chromium-based browser if at all possible.
mnd999 3y ago
They’re gonna start rickrolling anyone not using Chrome next. Unexpected side effect - Rick is now number 1 in all the streaming charts.
ndiddy 3y ago
Just yesterday people on here were talking about how using Adblock instead of paying for Youtube was unfair to Google and basically stealing. Is this the type of behavior you want to reward?
- davidgerard 3y ago
  every post about adblockers gets a flurry of those none ever seem to offer e.g. indemnification for ad-based malware
Kiro 3y ago
Why are people upvoting a submission without a proper link? Really shows that people are always just commenting on the headline and not the content.
- Kiro 3y ago
  It has been changed now but it was the wrong link (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/) for 3 hours with 900 upvotes.
lou1306 3y ago
I really hope the next Next Generation EU package will be entirely funded by the fines we will inflict on Google for its blatant abuse of market dominance
danhau 3y ago
I haven‘t tested this thoroughly, but I have a feeling that YouTube also forces worse codecs on Firefox. Codecs that can only decoder on the CPU, making Firefox seem sluggish and wasteful. This is a reason why I switched to Safari on macOS.
blacklight 3y ago
I said it already several times, but it's worth repeating. Stop using the youtube.com frontend entirely. It's enshittified beyond redemption. If they could replace it with a big ads billboard with no added value while leaving their profits intact, they'll do it. If you really have to watch some content that it's only on YouTube, use Piped, Invidious, or one of the many tools based on youtube-dl or any of its forks. Google deserves piracy now because a big loss of revenue resulting from their hostile practices is the only thing that can stop this enshittification process. Google will stop only when users say that it's gone too far. Scraping them, pirating them and financially damaging them is a moral duty at this point.
dbg31415 3y ago
Is this what has been making Firefox crash when I load videos lately?
arzig 3y ago
I would need to see a Firefox UA warm cache reload in the same video before I put any stock in this. This aligns to perfectly with the “But Google evil” narrative for me to believe it uncritically. Alas, I don’t trust the internet anymore.
Pxtl 3y ago
Wait, so this is about the delay loading, but not why FF mobile has really poor frameretes at the start of most (non-ad) videos?
malermeister 3y ago
This seems like a pretty clear-cut antitrust case. The EU Commission better go after it.
scotty79 3y ago
YouTube company should be split into two. One for client, one for infrastructure. And they should ban them from your exclusive deals with each other.
darklycan51 3y ago
They did this for years in the past, I really despise google
mendyberger 3y ago
Seems relevant to the discussion here. How Google is building a browser monopoly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig
vGPU 3y ago
setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); The actual code. They went and actually hardcoded a 5 second delay.
- eli 3y ago
  or it's a background process that waits until other assets have had time to load
Covzire 3y ago
Pretty sure Apple does something similar with iTunes on Windows. It's amazing how slow the UI is in general and how poorly the Movie watching experience is with it being incredibly slow to seek or take any inputs while playing a video.
supermatt 3y ago
I have experienced similar delays when clicking links from google search.
Havoc 3y ago
Oh wow. I’ve been feeling this but had ascribed it to the new ad blocker war thing. Surely this is straight to court for anti-competitive behaviour?
yencabulator 3y ago
Because this wasn't visible enough: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9w3ei4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9... setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
s3p 3y ago
I use Firefox and I have never had issues with Google sites. I don't know if they are picking and choosing users but I just checked and my load times for youtube are ~2 seconds for both Chrome and FF. no difference in load times.
valeg 3y ago
Google's play in order to force Mozilla to adopt new Manifest V3 and cripple adblocking.
exxos 3y ago
Maybe not intentional. Virtually everybody is using an engine based on Webkit or Blink these days. This is naturally what websites are optimized for.
giancarlostoro 3y ago
I guess this explains why some people say they use Chrome because "Firefox is slow", I've been using Firefox my entire life, and after Quantum it has been on par with Chrome in terms of speed if not faster from what I can tell. I do wish Firefox didn't stop with their Oxidation efforts, I would have loved to see it as a way to grow Rust, since as FF was developed in Rust, the language grew and evolved as a result. One key area I wish Firefox would grow in is the development tools. I ONLY use Chrome for the dev tools. I wish Mozilla would invest way more into Firefox itself. I think Mozilla could and absolutely should consider suing Google if they're artificially slowing down Firefox.
OOPMan 3y ago
I've been seeing this issue with Vivaldi as well
err4nt 3y ago
Just being real here for a moment - Firefox probably wouldn't exist if Google didn't give them millions, so the continuing existence of Firefox is thanks at least in part to Google taking them on as a project. Now secondly, Firefox does have some very real performance bottlenecks that other browsers do not have. This means (and has been my experience already) that you can build experiences in all other browsers that are buttery smooth and nice, but that will cause crashes in Firefox. In my own work, to get around this I ended up making my product inferior in all browsers so it would not crash Firefox. But if I was big enough and had a team of more than 1, could I have implemented a solution that worked in Firefox and another that worked in other browsers, and delivered the best experience I could to all users of all browsers? There's no need to jump to malice on Google's part if what they're doing is legitimately in an attempt to ensure that Firefox users have the best experience overall.
- yifanl 3y ago
  I don't like to jump to conclusions, but I'm going to jump to malice if their purported solution for user experience is time.sleep(5) based on a user agent lookup, and conditional on when their antiadblock fails to work.
  - lupire 3y ago
    Evidence for your claims?
kmoser 3y ago
Maybe it played more quickly the 2nd time because assets were already cached? It doesn't look like the person doing the testing cleared cache between tries.
butz 3y ago
Could someone check if this issue occurs on Youtube Premium too?
lupire 3y ago
Post was deleted, possibly because it's simply not true.
iscrewyou 3y ago
I recently got a new Mac and didn’t install Chrome. I now only run Firefox and Safari. For a company so big, it’s embarrassing to see their websites and products be some of the poorest run on my computer now. It’s quite obvious that they at least optimize it for Chrome if not de-optimize it for other browsers.
daeros 3y ago
Well now i'm using a user agent switcher to lie to Google about what browser i'm using. Telling them chrome, it's Firefox. Thanks for the heads-up.
1letterunixname 3y ago
yt-dlp and VLC. Problem solved :@]
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Still not watching ads, Youtube.
cvan 3y ago
garbage. just use invidious.io as a mirror. +1 to privacy. +1 to minimal javascript.
nishantk 3y ago
Just tested this out myself. Firefox loads noticeably slower than chrome, even when loading same video side-by-side.
duringmath 3y ago
> For me, YouTube works equally well across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Other team members also could not replicate this delayed behavior across browsers. "Reportedly" also known as: "unable to confirm but we saw it on reddit so it must be true"
- jahsome 3y ago
  I am so damn sick of "news" articles summarizing social media posts. Worse, the posts are seemingly chosen at random without even going to the effort of contacting the poster, not that such an interview would improve anything. If I wanted to read what random Twitter users thought about a topic, I'd just read Twitter. I read news articles to learn from experts I wouldn't otherwise have access to, not random Reddit trolls, Instagram moms, and Russian Twitter bots.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Google is constantly running "experiments" in their products so even if you and your friends can't replicate it, doesn't mean that it's not happening.
  - duringmath 3y ago
    Doesn't mean it is happening either especially since the code in question is still present. At any rare you should probably confirm/disconfirm these kinds of allegations before you decide to publish it verbatim.
khana 3y ago
[dead]
steponlego 3y ago
Do people still really use the Youtube web site or official clients? They have done everything in their power to ruin the user experience in favor of guiding you to promoted content. Endless vlogs of people reviewing products. "Content" that's just somebody walking around and eating. And it's been a while since they changed the search function, now you get a few results, then an infinite scroll of promoted videos most of which aren't even vaguely close to what you searched for. These days I can still find videos quickly and easily with DDG, which is vastly superior to Youtube itself for searching Youtube. But I worry, this will be taken away some day by Google just like everything else.
etoxin 3y ago
Using a browser devtools performance profiler could confirm this. I highly doubt there's a 5 second setTimeout in youtube. More likely switching of browser technologies based on user agent.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
  You might be surprised. setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i...
smoyer 3y ago
Debunked by the original author. https://t.co/2lPM2pFtoN https://t.co/O331DcmVBs TLDC: it's related to ad blocker detection and can happen even on Chrome.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Would you have a pointer to this debunking?
  - mattnewton 3y ago
    It’s in the twitter thread (which I’m guessing was hidden to you because you weren’t signed in - certainly one of the product choices of all time). Seems to be an experiment condition around the new adblocking detection.
    - not2b 3y ago
      Perhaps HN could encourage people to post nitter.net links, so those of us who refuse to be on Twitter or who deleted our accounts can follow along.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- davidgerard 3y ago
  https://nitter.net/uwukko/status/1726640538613584258 https://nitter.net/uwukko/status/1726640538613584258 that doesn't appear to "debunk" this in any way when I actually read the whole thread, you're using words oddly here
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
helf 3y ago
[dead]
gustavus 3y ago
Interesting thought that I had, that is probably not true but interesting anyway. Is this a move by Google to boost Chrome usage numbers. Although it is a terrible way to do it, many organizations still count views by looking at User-Agent. Google makes Youtube work worse if you report a non-Chrome UA, but all you have to do is report a Chrome UA and then it works perfectly fine. Suddenly a lot of people who were using FF now look like they are using Chrome because the UA has changed. They then use this as proof that no one should bother developing for anything other than Chrome because no one uses anything but Chrome, because all the FF users spoofed their UA to make it look like Chrome because Google purposefully cripples their site if you aren't using Chrome. I doubt there was that much aforethought, but it is a nice win for Google regardless. In the meantime I'll still just be sitting here telling websites I use IE 6 or Netscape Navigator to mess with web admins.
mistyvales 3y ago
Shit, I thought it was just me.. what a joke.
- the_only_law 3y ago
  I remember some years ago, when I had an android phone and was using Firefox on it, Google Images would render differently on Chrome and Firefox. On Chrome, I could long press to get the context menu to download an image. If I did the same in Firefox however, an obnoxious transparent box would block the image and force me to go to source site before I could download it.
EchoReflection 3y ago
I just want to say thank you to everyone who is doing tests and contributing to this, you are truly unsung heroes (not sarcasm)
Adsila197 3y ago
[flagged]

1919 points by csvm 3y ago

The most interesting part from the discussion was noting it's implemented in the most basic, easily avoidable way (just spoof chrome) implying engineers unhappy with these tasks. @dang or op, wrong link. Should be: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...

rsolva 3y ago
I sometimes wonder if the use of Firefox is under reported just because a lot of it's users are power users, installing extensions that spoof the user agent. I know I did for a long while, making my Firefox pretend it was Chrome on a Windows machine.
- acdha 3y ago
  This is definitely the case for anything like Google or Adobe Analytics which are blocked by the default tracking protection. You can’t compare the results directly due to bots but on sites I’ve controlled our servers saw significant disparities between the server logs and the percentages commonly reported as global share.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  I'm a too proud Firefox user to do that. But not all of us are fanatics like that.

csvm 3y ago

Correct Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...

ayhanfuat 3y ago

From reddit discussion (https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9w3ei4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9...): > To clarify it more, it's simply this code in their polymer script link: > setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); > which doesn't do anything except making you wait 5s (5E3 = 5000ms = 5s). You can search for it easily in https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/96766c85/jsbin/desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.vflset/desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.js https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/96766c85/jsbin/desktop_pol...

m4tthumphrey 3y ago
This is interesting as I had noticed this happening to me (in Chrome) when the anti-ad-blocking started. I assumed that it was YT's way of "annoying" me still while no ads were shown... It was eventually replaced with the "You cant use Adblockers modal" and now I just tolerate the ads. So I wonder if that 5s delay has always been there.
- dbspin 3y ago
  It's still trivial to block ads, but the delay has recently started for me, after never happening before. So presumably a very intentional volley in the ongoing war to own your attention.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  It's weird but I saw the anti-blocker modal a week or two but them it stopped appearing and never saw it since shrug
  - psll 3y ago
    Might be because of the EU ruling, if you're in the EU.
    - dave881 3y ago
      I'm in the US, and had the same experience. I got the you can't use an adblocker message, but was able to close and/or reload the page to watch videos without ads. After a week or so it stopped popping up. US, Firefox, uBlockOrgin.

ulrikrasmussen 3y ago

While the EU has recently forced Microsoft to allow users to uninstall pre-installed crapware, Google is apparently unhindered in their ongoing (and succeeding) mission to take control of all layers of the consumer-facing internet.

bad_user 3y ago
Google, Samsung, Apple, and others have to abide by the same law, Microsoft isn't special. I also don't understand what this law has to do with the topic.
- ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
  I support the enforcement of anti-trust laws against Microsoft, but I am at the same time puzzled at how much Google is allowed to get away with. They are simultaneously maintaining the biggest browser platform while also being the biggest content and advertisement provider, AND they have a major influence on the development of web standards, AND they control the development of a major OS (Android) for accessing the web, where their browser comes pre-installed. And now they are actively exploiting their position and trying to sabotage the competition. My point in highlighting it is that I think there is a lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws and/or a lack of laws that would prevent Google behaving in this way, since I think it is so much worse than what Microsoft has been doing with Windows not allowing users to uninstall crapware.
  - bad_user 3y ago
    The law you're mentioning is the “Digital Markets Act”, and it's a new law that will apply to Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung and others, not having to do with any enforcement of “antitrust” laws upon Microsoft. https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... Furthermore, are we talking about the same Microsoft that: 1. forced usage of Microsoft Edge, while also actively blocking circumvention mechanisms; 2. that keeps hijacking searches for Chrome, or Firefox; 3. that has telemetry in Edge that can't be disabled; 4. and that, upon first opening Edge, it asks you to agree to data sharing with the entire advertising industry? --- You basically assert that Google is receiving preferential treatment from the EU, yet provided absolutely no evidence for it.

explain 3y ago

I have been getting this same slow-down for a month or two, but using Brave - which is the same user-agent as Chrome. I would imagine changing the user-agent at all will (temporarily) fix it, rather than to a Chrome user-agent specifically. Probably targets ad blocking users rather than non-Chrome users.

dwighttk 3y ago
Huh, I nearly exclusively use Brave for YouTube because it does a good job blocking ads and I haven’t noticed any slowdown. I did see the ad nag once when I accidentally went to YouTube in safari

invalidusernam3 3y ago

Assume this is supposed to be the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...

worldofmatthew 3y ago

Anti-Trust anyone?

Halen77 3y ago
Wait until the EU gets their hands on this..

StrLght 3y ago

I also noticed this during the weekend. I initially assumed that the new uBO filters are too blame -- guess that's exactly what Google is going for with these hostile measures, and it kinda works.

raspyberr 3y ago

How come this video isn't just showing caching at work?

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

I haven't noticed an issue yet. My issue at the moment is while ublock can still block ads, every video automatically pauses like 5 seconds in and I need to hit play again.

leosanchez 3y ago

I thought it was my adblocker (uBlock) causing the issue.

mbix77 3y ago

Sadly there is still no alternative to Youtube. Same with Reddit.

zicxor 3y ago
Hey, Ferhat here, I want to create an alternative for Reddit. Could you help me to build a better internet? https://discord.gg/buQmB8VJeS https://discord.gg/buQmB8VJeS

Racing0461 3y ago

happens to me on chrome too with ublock.

nan60 3y ago

This just... isn't happening for me? My only extensions are UBo, Return Youtube Dislike and Sponsorblock, so I presume a UBo filter is either fixing it or the change isn't rolled out to all users yet.

snowram 3y ago
The UBo team commented on the Reddit thread that they were looking into it. So it may have already been fixed.

jb1991 3y ago

I noticed Youtube started doing this in the last couple days, and I use FF. What a silly thing to do, about as juvenile as a company can be.

Kiro 3y ago
It's been happening on Chrome as well for the past few days so I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.

bad_user 3y ago

I am not getting this behaviour in Firefox 120. Tried it, logged out as well. > setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); The code looks like a silly concurrency bug fix, i.e., a lazy way to force ordering.

gwd 3y ago
Or potentially a concurrency bug trigger? "One in 1000 times X takes a bit too long and causes problem Y; I'll make X take minimum 5 seconds so I can trigger Y reliably." Then fixes Y but forgets to remove the delay.
seydor 3y ago
I can't believe billion dollar companies 'solve' bugs the same way as i do
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
  The people working there are also just people like you.
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    They just practice leetcode a lot, doesn't mean they know how to deal with those issues in the UI.
petargyurov 3y ago
A 5 SECOND timeout for a concurrency issue? I doubt it.
- eli 3y ago
  It's timeout that's part of loading ads. That code isn't blocking anything. The headline here is wrong.
lifthrasiir 3y ago
Such fix won't sleep for 5000 ms though. In my reading it looks like a part of the adblocker detection code. (EDIT: Relocated the actual analysis to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346602 for more visibility.)

blueflow 3y ago

If you are fluent with the terminal, you don't need to suffer from the YT Web UI. Install mpv and yt-dlp. Play videos like this: mpv [--no-video] "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9zVjEZ7W8Q" Option in brackets is optional.

sammy2255 3y ago
I think you’re missing the point. How can I browse Youtube in mpv?
- imiric 3y ago
  Use Invidious, Piped or any other frontend that doesn't track and manipulate you.
  - littlecranky67 3y ago
    Adding https://youtube-lite.js.org/#/ https://youtube-lite.js.org/#/ to the list.
- blueflow 3y ago
  What do you mean by "browsing" Youtube? Clicking new links for the purpose of entertainment? My post was only about playing videos.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    Well, how do you get to the videos? How do you discover their links to pipe to mpv/yt-dl? One option is RSS (YouTube still supports it) subscribing to channels. Do you know of others?
    - blueflow 3y ago
      I don't, i use Youtube for listening to music or livestreams that i already know the title of.
  - 3y ago

mlindner 3y ago

Using firefox 118 on Mac here and seeing no issues. Videos load instantly or near instantly.

gadders 3y ago

Can someone check gmail as well? It loads so slowly under firefox.

agevag 3y ago

[dead]

jiggawatts 3y ago

Oh, and they also falsely show "4K" in the video quality icon, but "accidentally" play a 720p or even worse quality stream. If you manually select the 4K stream quality, then and only then will YouTube deign to show 4K to you.

CapsAdmin 3y ago
Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is that I'm capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they can only be played back at 420p. Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and there's nothing telling you about this not being supported in your browser until you've made the purchase (by just allowing 420p and needing to search for why it's broken) see https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/pm0eqh/why_are_my_movies_still_only_480p_its_been_almost/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/pm0eqh/why_are_my_...
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles. They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That's it! If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they've picked for you. If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you. You see, what actually happened, is that some too-smart UX guy at Netflix couldn't make a language picker look nice for that many options so he asked a too-smart data science (lol) guy to figure out the most common languages for each region. Here in Australia they picked English, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese because we have a lot of immigrants from those countries. I'm sure they used very clever algorithms on big data clusters to figure that out. Good job, well done. Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out. Netflix and their $500K total comp Stanford or wherever graduates couldn't. So they instructed their call centre staff to lie to their customers. Then they had someone write this idiocy: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101798 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101798 "If subtitles for a title are offered in a language but do not display on your device, try another device." Oh, oh, I'll go do that right now! Let me try my PC... nope four languages. On the TV? Four languages. Actually, I have a phone... and... oh... four languages. PS: Thai (only!) subtitles are "special" and use eye-searing HDR maximum white. Like 1,600 nits white that literally leaves green after-images etched into my retina. They have a support page and a pre-prepared set of lies for the support staff to read for that piece of shoddy engineering also.

blibble 3y ago

I noticed this one and it did come to mind that it was, ahem, targeted overlords: I'll give up youtube entirely rather than watch ads/contribute towards your revenue

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

frankjr 3y ago

I have a hard time believing that's actually what's happening. If they wanted to slow down other browsers, why would they choose this easily discoverable way? They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect. It seems more likely this is just a debug snippet that has made it into production by accident.

amelius 3y ago
> They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect. And that is /not/ easily discoverable??
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
  I would argue it's a bit harder to find if the youtube backend serves files slower for certain browsers. One could even radomize it and sometimes still serve it fast or something. Since you cannot look at the backend code it would be hard to proof anything.
sebstefan 3y ago
If I was working at Google and I was tasked with doing that, I'd half ass it too
- frankjr 3y ago
  I mean it could be that the programmer wanted it to be discovered to draw attention to Google managers' shenanigans but that seems kind of far fetched.
asddubs 3y ago
ah yes, the fact that they are sabotaging other browsers in a very obvious way is actually proof that they didn't meant to sabotage other browsers!

udev4096 3y ago

Hilarious

denkmoon 3y ago

Using firefox I get "instant" youtube. The video starts playing before most of the rest of the UI has loaded even, definitely under 1 second. Any idea what specifically causes it to happen, rather than just "firefox"?

jeroenhd 3y ago
An up-to-date adblocker blocker blocker, most likely. Paying for Premium may also do it.
Hamuko 3y ago
I've gotten that really slow UI loading almost always lately and I've always assumed that it's because I'm running uBlock Origin. Although I just tried opening two videos and both opened basically instantly.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

I've had this slow down show up for me as well. I wonder if there's a non malicious explanation, although I'll admit I'm unable to think of a charitable interpretation. Sometimes YouTube also disables features on my home page. For example, at the top of the home page there's usually a filter bar with various categories. I haven't figured out under what conditions this gets triggered, but there's times where the filter bar just disappears.

seydor 3y ago

It's a bug they can't fix and "if you wait 5 seconds it works". Also , in 5 seconds, ad blockers are guaranteed to have kicked in

manjalyc 3y ago

Code generally does not enter the YouTube code base without a lot of review namely (1) performance tests and (2) code reviews from multiple teams. Lines like this almost certainly get flagged/increased scrutiny. It would be very hard to imagine multiple people didn’t know about this and assign the blame to a single person.

octacat 3y ago

And that is why these giant companies should be split apart.

azalemeth 3y ago

On a completely related note, the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority has recently been flexing its muscles on digital markets. You may wish to know of this URL, specifically for reporting anti-competitive practices: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition-or-market-problem https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...

toldyouso2022 3y ago

Youtube is a very toxic environment. Even "informative" content is often toxic, but in a very subtle manner. At google They may be not respecting the web but they are doing firefox users a favor. If you really need to see a video, five seconds won't make a difference. If you don't need it, five seconds may remind you that you don't really need it. Try to see the positives

ReptileMan 3y ago

Use brave. The best youtube premium experience without paying for premium.

alentred 3y ago

Hm, it does not correspond to my observations. I'm using Firefox and the videos load and start just as they usually do. A/B testing? :)

DarkmSparks 3y ago

lol, I think this ended up being one of several factors that made me switch to firefox (now vivaldi). The "extra chance to consider your life choices and do you really want to watch this video" was a feature not a bug. Plus now tiktok and telegram are orders of magnitude more popular than YT. Im seeing more and more creators arrive on YT as their "second choice" platform.

iinnPP 3y ago

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/page-load-time-statistics/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and... Seems odd to do something so brazen while also publishing information that (could) prove intent. Google also modifies how business information can be accessed from Firefox Mobile. You can't read reviews easily from Firefox Mobile. At least not my install.

gear54rus 3y ago
That's because it's not actually what's happening. I'm all for bashing bigcorps and especially ad empires but reddit folks confused correlation with causation here. The code in question is part of a function that injects a video ad (that plays before the start) and the code itself is just a fallback in case it fails to load over 5 seconds so that video page doesn't break completely. Why was this affected by user agent change? My best guess is that on some combinations they somehow decide not to show any ads at all (for now) and therefore this function is not called and some other code path is taken. This is consistent with my own experience with the recent anti-adblock bullshit they implemented. The banner was not being shown after user agent change implying it's one of the considered variables. You can verify all this if you click 'format code' in browser debugger.
- iinnPP 3y ago
  That makes sense and explains why it seemed so odd. I don't use YouTube so the comment was more of a way to bring up the other behavior in business reviews. It seemed relevant. Edit: reviews are also broken(for me) on Firefox desktop with no extensions enabled and with ublock enabled.
- immibis 3y ago
  The code also returns 0 if the advert loads and 1 if it doesn't load. In other words, it detects adblockers.

nomilk 3y ago

I don't use firefox but have noticed a strange delay occurring during the past day or two. Wondering if it's coincidence. I use ublock origin, so maybe youtube's detecting its presence somehow and forcing a delay? (ublock is up to date so I don't get the message from youtube telling me to stop using adblockers - perhaps this is their next attempt to annoy people into paying/allowing ads?).

quantum_state 3y ago

If that’s true, it is pure evil.

laserbeam 3y ago

I've recently done a pc upgrade and am now enjoying 64 gigs of ram. Decided to watch a live stream on youtube this weekend. Firefox: 22 GB of ram usage for the youtube tab after ~15 minutes. Tab became unresponsive. Edge: Out of memory error after ~5 minutes. Chrome: working fine, the youtube tab sitting peacefully ay 400-600 MB.

prmoustache 3y ago
Not sure what is specific in your setup but I have watched numerous live stream on firefox and tab never became unresponsive. Haven't checked the ram but my laptop had half of yours and the live were running for an hour or so.
jug 3y ago
I don't know what your problem is exactly but this is not normal behavior on Firefox at least. Check your extensions to begin with, or for a quick test, try watching a video in a prvivate tab.
- laserbeam 3y ago
  Just, ublock origin, a password manager, and the kagi extension for my search engine. ublock origin was installed on all browsers. I'm not even trying to watch it without ublock, as that would be an unreasonable thing to do in general. I know this is not normal behaviour, and it's likely unintetional, but I'll be damn sure google won't bother to fix it. I'm most surprised by Edge as it's running chromium and it should share some similarity to chrome.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I had the same issue, it turned out to be some random addon I installed years ago. Check if the problem also occurs with everything but uBlock Origin disabled.

welzel 3y ago

I hope they keep this code in YT. It will be a party for the EU to punish Google with an anti-monopoly lawsuit. Best case: google gets forced to split up chrome, youtube and search as they obviously abuse their power.

mschuster91 3y ago
Would be a bad day for the Internet. There's no way Youtube is financially viable without being cross-subsidised by Google's search income and running on Google's peering agreements with ISPs. Ads would be nowhere near enough to cover the bandwidth cost, which is why sooner or later any attempt to copycat it failed or went down to utter niche content.

qwery 3y ago

Oh, I noticed this yesterday and assumed it was ad blocker hostility. Which I guess it may well be -- are Firefox users more likely to use ad blockers? Possibly. Certainly on Android. That doesn't strictly matter though, presumably the Youtube people try to avoid stepping on the Chrome people's toes. Given Google is apparently going ahead with killing extensions on Chrome it's not hard to imagine some scheme where a guy is just lookin' at'cha merchandise and happens to be carryin' a baseball bat is all -- you can't really blame him for some spillage, right? (make using Firefox painful to try and push people to Chrome). Before crippling Chrome? Sounds ridiculous, but one can't help but wonder... Thinking about some more, the point could actually be to make users question if its because they have an ad blocker not even actively blocking anything, but simply installed. Some number of users may uninstall their ad blocking extension to see if it makes the lag go away.

baz00 3y ago

Quick note: yt-dlp + VLC speed this right up again!

t43562 3y ago

Software that's not getting any attention will be ok as it won't get python upgrades. Software that is getting attention has a nice long warning period and fixes may not even cause any trouble at all if the code is ok and there are unit tests. New software won't have a whole class of timezone problems because people will use the better API to remove the warnings. I cannot see what the big problem is - much more troublesome things happen in Go all the time. Python isn't a huge for-profit company like Google or even MS which has to dedicate efforts to ensuring that games from 1992 still run in 2023.

agluszak 3y ago

I wrote an email to Electronic Frontier Foundation and European Digital Rights collective asking them to file a complaint against Google because of this unjustified slowdown. I advise other readers to consider doing the same.

Andrew018 3y ago

[dead]

FrenchDevRemote 3y ago

Not only that: Google's recaptcha will also ask you for dozens of captchas on firefox android (which is probably the best) way to watch youtube/use google site without ads on mobile) f** google

boudin 3y ago
On android NewPipe is a good alternative to watch youtube

everdrive 3y ago

Seems like this is an unintentional benefit to firefox users. A small amount of friction is the difference between "I'm mindlessly watching" vs "I actually care about watching this video."

dinckelman 3y ago

This is why you don't let a single corporation control more than half the internet, and more than 75% of the browser market

ploum 3y ago

Another "Youtube is doing shit" thread and yet not a single mention of Peertube. https://joinpeertube.org/en https://joinpeertube.org/en So for all people uploading videos, please have a look at Peertube. It is to Youtube what Mastodon is to Twitter. (and more: it is compatible with Mastodon, one can subscribe to your Peertube channel through his/her mastodon account). I’m not arguing to leave Youtube completely but to offer an alternative to your audience. Please join peertube.

hollowturtle 3y ago
I'd love to see real competition to YouTube. I'm afraid this seems not, the UX isn't great, homepage is useless, you need to click on Browse content then enter some keywords on a blank page, search results limited to 2 items and then you need to click on "Display more videos". I might be to used to youtube homepage, for me it's perfect I get videos right away and suggestions are good. I'm pretty sure this project, Mastodon and others are in good will, but they lack great ux/ui, it seems to me that ux isn't even researched, how can it be a viable competitor?
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Please send this to the Peertube developer. Consider also that until recently it's likely that having videos load fast on peer2peer and adding features like streaming likely had a higher priority than interface polishing. But you might be asking for something impossible : the focus is on the different servers, and having a "suggested videos" page is seen as an anti-feature because it involves making an "algorithm", at which point you are editorializing, become (legally !) responsible for what you select, and are close to become a platform yourself, something that you started out by fighting in the first place !
  - ploum 3y ago
    Like Mastodon, Peertube should not aim to "Do everything people think will be good to get audience". It should create a philosophy. I’m quite sure that lot and lot of people are tired by all those algorithmic suggestions. People are sad to see creators doing videos to get likes/subscribers/views instead of really creating. This is a new model. And the winners of the old models will either adapt or not be winners any more. And that’s good if the premise is that the old model is broken in the first place.

insanitybit 3y ago

The second I saw reddit as the source I knew this was going to be incorrect.

nixass 3y ago

Time for EU to slap them in the face again

sebzim4500 3y ago

People on reddit have posted videos of this happening in chrome, I think it's possible this is actually just a bug and not an evil scheme.

littlecranky67 3y ago

As a JavaScript Dev, around 2010-2012 it was not uncommon to see `setTimeout(..., n)` hacks, often with n=0 but sometimes even n=1000, n=5000 into a codebase. This could workaround some bugs, and given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back then, often a last-resort. And yes, am guilty too of committing this to prod back then. I think I haven't had a case where this was deployed in the last decade, but in the ugly SPA days pre angular v1 (and even during angular v1), where you code was this big glued-together conglomerate of various 3rd party UI libraries, this was common. Its ugly as hell, and you really had to be there at that time to understand this. But often it was just a cheap alternative, while debugging and fixing the truly underlying cause would be several man-days or even weeks. My point being: It might have slipped their QA cracks and was at some point intended to workaround a bug of some obscure Firefox behavior. For a company at youtube's scale this is however pretty embarrassing.

asylteltine 3y ago
> given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back then As opposed to now?

flohofwoe 3y ago

I'm getting such a pause also in Chrome since a few days, I was assuming that it's fallout from the adblocking wars though (I use uBlock Origin and don't get the nag screen anymore since around the time that pause appeared)

christop 3y ago
Yup, same here — I see the same delay in Chrome now and then. I guessed it was due to the cat-and-mouse adblocking prevention between YouTube and adblockers (I'm also using uBlock Origin).

nbittich 3y ago

Glad I dropped chrome for Firefox at the beginning of 2022. It took some time to get used to it but eventually it's now my main browser. Tired of Google being such a piece of shit. Hopefully 2024 will be the year of Linux on mobile.

pcf 3y ago

I use Firefox on macOS Ventura, and here the video pages load instantly. I do have YouTube Premium (paid for in India to reduce the cost), but also in an incognito window where I'm not logged in, the video pages load immediately. Maybe it's because I use the extensions uBlock Origin and/or Disable Autoplay For YouTube?

nottorp 3y ago

* Meanwhile, reddit asks me to sign up or log in to see the thread. * Oh wait. Who thought it's a good idea to post this with a link to a login page instead of the actual discussion thread?

katsura 3y ago

The mentioned issue that can be seen on the video has been happening to me for a day or two while using Chrome.

TexanFeller 3y ago

I’ve also noticed mysterious buffering in the iOS app for YouTube for at least a few months. Even on a Google Fiber connection many videos will take a number of seconds to start, and sometimes buffer in the middle. I also have YT Premium, so anti ad blocking shouldn’t come into the picture. Videos load right away in Safari though.

chatmasta 3y ago
Delete the iOS app and install the Vinegar Safari extension. It will replace the hostile video player with a native HTML5 <video> element. I never see any ads, I can select the stream quality, and Picture-in-Picture works as my OS intended it to.

foob 3y ago

I use Firefox, and Google's sites are literally the only ones where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken for me, the map wouldn't update at all when attempting to search or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript code spinning the CPU nonstop. It's literally gotten to the point where I keep a Chrome window open and use it exclusively for Gmail, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Maps. It's pretty obvious from the outside that supporting Firefox is not a product priority for Google. It also seems clear that it's in their best interest to have users choose Chrome over Firefox. My guess is that this likely emerges from a lot of very reasonable sounding local decisions, like "prioritize testing on browsers with the most market share," but it is convenient how those align with the anti-competitive incentives.

joelanman 3y ago
Gmail has recently become extremely slow for me in Safari on a well specced M1 max
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Same here on Firefox, for both my laptop running Windows 11 on Alder Lake, and my desktop running Ubuntu on Zen 2.
1980phipsi 3y ago
Using Google sites with a VPN on Firefox has been really annoying for the past couple of months as well.
vmfunction 3y ago
These sounds like classic MS behaviour. It is kind of thing that ought to addressed in anti-trust case.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  I've posted this here on HN numerous times over the years, and it's been a while since I last posted it: Google is the new "Microsoft", they embrace, they extend, then extinguish. Look at their email offering, messaging offerings, they built on top of XMPP, then they pulled the plug eventually. Android is Linux based, but insanely proprietary, the app store is not open by any means, you're fully at their whims to get your apps on there. Chrome is basically the IE of old, implementing proprietary things or APIs that are not yet standard for Google products, and pushing out competing browsers.

varispeed 3y ago

I don't understand this. If people don't want to or need to buy anything and they don't want to see ads, because this is pure simply a distraction and won't sway them into buying anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads? Furthermore, I wish regulators have gone at YouTube like a ton of bricks. The ads they show are mostly from various kind of scam artists. My friend is a bit naive, but fortunately she asked me for an opinion whether she should invest her savings into the programme offered by one of "gurus" advertising on YT. She even gone on a few of their webinars and became as you would say, brainwashed. The kind of way you see in a cult. Fortunately there was still some worry running around her and she asked me to check before transferring £20k. You can't imagine how much effort it took to tell here these guys are fraudsters. Now she is onto another scheme and now she tells me that I just don't want her to invest the money, because I think everyone is a fraudster and these are the good guys! Then she showed me testimonials from apparent "clients" how they got rich. One person looked familiar and I actually found them on Cameo. She tried to say maybe this is just that person's side gig etc. and she does not talk to me. I really really hope someone or some organisation get to the bottom of this kind of harmful and dangerous content. YouTube is a scammers paradise and YouTube wants more people to fall for these things.

bool3max 3y ago
> I don't understand this. If people don't want to or need to buy anything and they don't want to see ads, because this is pure simply a distraction and won't sway them into buying anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads? Age-old question. It's not that simple. Those ads have an effect on you whether you "want to or need to buy anything" or not.
chatmasta 3y ago
The point of forcing ads onto users who don't want to see them and won't buy anything from them, is that the advertisers will still pay Google. In the long run, their CTR will suffer, but it will be consistent across advertisers. If they're paying per click then nobody loses except the user, who Google is betting actually will click on some ads (meaning they're basically engaging in psychological warfare, or at least rewarding the advertisers who do). And if they're paying per impression, then advertisers will see conversions go down in the long run, but Google might think the increased volume will make up for it.

dncornholio 3y ago

Can we have some fucking facts already? We have seen other reports of this same issue but people were using Chrome. This seems like an over-reaction. And the Reddit herd is known for being unstoppable over false-assumptions.

Kiro 3y ago
HN is no better. We love to jump to premature conclusions. Just look at this thread. It doesn't even link to anything (right now the submission link is https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/) and yet people are automatically bringing out the pitchforks.

theyeenzbeanz 3y ago

It’s been like this for years on Firefox for me, even before they cracked down on adblockers and such. I’ve also noticed it messes with the history functionality and often breaks the back button. Getting sick of googles nonsense.

theshrike79 3y ago

Chrome has been the new Internet Explorer for a bunch of years already. And even people who lived the horror days of "We need to support IE6 because the client wants so" and "ActiveX is a good choice for web pages" are complacent. Please, for the love of all that's good in the world, use ANYTHING but a Chromium-based browser if at all possible.

mnd999 3y ago

They’re gonna start rickrolling anyone not using Chrome next. Unexpected side effect - Rick is now number 1 in all the streaming charts.

ndiddy 3y ago

Just yesterday people on here were talking about how using Adblock instead of paying for Youtube was unfair to Google and basically stealing. Is this the type of behavior you want to reward?

davidgerard 3y ago
every post about adblockers gets a flurry of those none ever seem to offer e.g. indemnification for ad-based malware

Kiro 3y ago

Why are people upvoting a submission without a proper link? Really shows that people are always just commenting on the headline and not the content.

Kiro 3y ago
It has been changed now but it was the wrong link (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/ https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/) for 3 hours with 900 upvotes.

lou1306 3y ago

I really hope the next Next Generation EU package will be entirely funded by the fines we will inflict on Google for its blatant abuse of market dominance

danhau 3y ago

I haven‘t tested this thoroughly, but I have a feeling that YouTube also forces worse codecs on Firefox. Codecs that can only decoder on the CPU, making Firefox seem sluggish and wasteful. This is a reason why I switched to Safari on macOS.

blacklight 3y ago

I said it already several times, but it's worth repeating. Stop using the youtube.com frontend entirely. It's enshittified beyond redemption. If they could replace it with a big ads billboard with no added value while leaving their profits intact, they'll do it. If you really have to watch some content that it's only on YouTube, use Piped, Invidious, or one of the many tools based on youtube-dl or any of its forks. Google deserves piracy now because a big loss of revenue resulting from their hostile practices is the only thing that can stop this enshittification process. Google will stop only when users say that it's gone too far. Scraping them, pirating them and financially damaging them is a moral duty at this point.

dbg31415 3y ago

Is this what has been making Firefox crash when I load videos lately?

arzig 3y ago

I would need to see a Firefox UA warm cache reload in the same video before I put any stock in this. This aligns to perfectly with the “But Google evil” narrative for me to believe it uncritically. Alas, I don’t trust the internet anymore.

Pxtl 3y ago

Wait, so this is about the delay loading, but not why FF mobile has really poor frameretes at the start of most (non-ad) videos?

malermeister 3y ago

This seems like a pretty clear-cut antitrust case. The EU Commission better go after it.

scotty79 3y ago

YouTube company should be split into two. One for client, one for infrastructure. And they should ban them from your exclusive deals with each other.

darklycan51 3y ago

They did this for years in the past, I really despise google

mendyberger 3y ago

Seems relevant to the discussion here. How Google is building a browser monopoly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig

vGPU 3y ago

setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); The actual code. They went and actually hardcoded a 5 second delay.

eli 3y ago
or it's a background process that waits until other assets have had time to load

Covzire 3y ago

Pretty sure Apple does something similar with iTunes on Windows. It's amazing how slow the UI is in general and how poorly the Movie watching experience is with it being incredibly slow to seek or take any inputs while playing a video.

supermatt 3y ago

I have experienced similar delays when clicking links from google search.

Havoc 3y ago

Oh wow. I’ve been feeling this but had ascribed it to the new ad blocker war thing. Surely this is straight to court for anti-competitive behaviour?

yencabulator 3y ago

Because this wasn't visible enough: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9w3ei4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9... setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);

s3p 3y ago

I use Firefox and I have never had issues with Google sites. I don't know if they are picking and choosing users but I just checked and my load times for youtube are ~2 seconds for both Chrome and FF. no difference in load times.

valeg 3y ago

Google's play in order to force Mozilla to adopt new Manifest V3 and cripple adblocking.

exxos 3y ago

Maybe not intentional. Virtually everybody is using an engine based on Webkit or Blink these days. This is naturally what websites are optimized for.

giancarlostoro 3y ago

I guess this explains why some people say they use Chrome because "Firefox is slow", I've been using Firefox my entire life, and after Quantum it has been on par with Chrome in terms of speed if not faster from what I can tell. I do wish Firefox didn't stop with their Oxidation efforts, I would have loved to see it as a way to grow Rust, since as FF was developed in Rust, the language grew and evolved as a result. One key area I wish Firefox would grow in is the development tools. I ONLY use Chrome for the dev tools. I wish Mozilla would invest way more into Firefox itself. I think Mozilla could and absolutely should consider suing Google if they're artificially slowing down Firefox.

OOPMan 3y ago

I've been seeing this issue with Vivaldi as well

err4nt 3y ago

Just being real here for a moment - Firefox probably wouldn't exist if Google didn't give them millions, so the continuing existence of Firefox is thanks at least in part to Google taking them on as a project. Now secondly, Firefox does have some very real performance bottlenecks that other browsers do not have. This means (and has been my experience already) that you can build experiences in all other browsers that are buttery smooth and nice, but that will cause crashes in Firefox. In my own work, to get around this I ended up making my product inferior in all browsers so it would not crash Firefox. But if I was big enough and had a team of more than 1, could I have implemented a solution that worked in Firefox and another that worked in other browsers, and delivered the best experience I could to all users of all browsers? There's no need to jump to malice on Google's part if what they're doing is legitimately in an attempt to ensure that Firefox users have the best experience overall.

yifanl 3y ago
I don't like to jump to conclusions, but I'm going to jump to malice if their purported solution for user experience is time.sleep(5) based on a user agent lookup, and conditional on when their antiadblock fails to work.
- lupire 3y ago
  Evidence for your claims?

kmoser 3y ago

Maybe it played more quickly the 2nd time because assets were already cached? It doesn't look like the person doing the testing cleared cache between tries.

butz 3y ago

Could someone check if this issue occurs on Youtube Premium too?

lupire 3y ago

Post was deleted, possibly because it's simply not true.

iscrewyou 3y ago

I recently got a new Mac and didn’t install Chrome. I now only run Firefox and Safari. For a company so big, it’s embarrassing to see their websites and products be some of the poorest run on my computer now. It’s quite obvious that they at least optimize it for Chrome if not de-optimize it for other browsers.

daeros 3y ago

Well now i'm using a user agent switcher to lie to Google about what browser i'm using. Telling them chrome, it's Firefox. Thanks for the heads-up.

1letterunixname 3y ago

yt-dlp and VLC. Problem solved :@]

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

Still not watching ads, Youtube.

cvan 3y ago

garbage. just use invidious.io as a mirror. +1 to privacy. +1 to minimal javascript.

nishantk 3y ago

Just tested this out myself. Firefox loads noticeably slower than chrome, even when loading same video side-by-side.

duringmath 3y ago

> For me, YouTube works equally well across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Other team members also could not replicate this delayed behavior across browsers. "Reportedly" also known as: "unable to confirm but we saw it on reddit so it must be true"

jahsome 3y ago
I am so damn sick of "news" articles summarizing social media posts. Worse, the posts are seemingly chosen at random without even going to the effort of contacting the poster, not that such an interview would improve anything. If I wanted to read what random Twitter users thought about a topic, I'd just read Twitter. I read news articles to learn from experts I wouldn't otherwise have access to, not random Reddit trolls, Instagram moms, and Russian Twitter bots.
Hamuko 3y ago
Google is constantly running "experiments" in their products so even if you and your friends can't replicate it, doesn't mean that it's not happening.
- duringmath 3y ago
  Doesn't mean it is happening either especially since the code in question is still present. At any rare you should probably confirm/disconfirm these kinds of allegations before you decide to publish it verbatim.

khana 3y ago

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steponlego 3y ago

Do people still really use the Youtube web site or official clients? They have done everything in their power to ruin the user experience in favor of guiding you to promoted content. Endless vlogs of people reviewing products. "Content" that's just somebody walking around and eating. And it's been a while since they changed the search function, now you get a few results, then an infinite scroll of promoted videos most of which aren't even vaguely close to what you searched for. These days I can still find videos quickly and easily with DDG, which is vastly superior to Youtube itself for searching Youtube. But I worry, this will be taken away some day by Google just like everything else.

etoxin 3y ago

Using a browser devtools performance profiler could confirm this. I highly doubt there's a 5 second setTimeout in youtube. More likely switching of browser technologies based on user agent.

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ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
You might be surprised. setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i...

smoyer 3y ago

Debunked by the original author. https://t.co/2lPM2pFtoN https://t.co/O331DcmVBs TLDC: it's related to ad blocker detection and can happen even on Chrome.

resolutebat 3y ago
Would you have a pointer to this debunking?
- mattnewton 3y ago
  It’s in the twitter thread (which I’m guessing was hidden to you because you weren’t signed in - certainly one of the product choices of all time). Seems to be an experiment condition around the new adblocking detection.
  - not2b 3y ago
    Perhaps HN could encourage people to post nitter.net links, so those of us who refuse to be on Twitter or who deleted our accounts can follow along.
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davidgerard 3y ago
https://nitter.net/uwukko/status/1726640538613584258 https://nitter.net/uwukko/status/1726640538613584258 that doesn't appear to "debunk" this in any way when I actually read the whole thread, you're using words oddly here

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helf 3y ago

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gustavus 3y ago

Interesting thought that I had, that is probably not true but interesting anyway. Is this a move by Google to boost Chrome usage numbers. Although it is a terrible way to do it, many organizations still count views by looking at User-Agent. Google makes Youtube work worse if you report a non-Chrome UA, but all you have to do is report a Chrome UA and then it works perfectly fine. Suddenly a lot of people who were using FF now look like they are using Chrome because the UA has changed. They then use this as proof that no one should bother developing for anything other than Chrome because no one uses anything but Chrome, because all the FF users spoofed their UA to make it look like Chrome because Google purposefully cripples their site if you aren't using Chrome. I doubt there was that much aforethought, but it is a nice win for Google regardless. In the meantime I'll still just be sitting here telling websites I use IE 6 or Netscape Navigator to mess with web admins.

mistyvales 3y ago

Shit, I thought it was just me.. what a joke.

the_only_law 3y ago
I remember some years ago, when I had an android phone and was using Firefox on it, Google Images would render differently on Chrome and Firefox. On Chrome, I could long press to get the context menu to download an image. If I did the same in Firefox however, an obnoxious transparent box would block the image and force me to go to source site before I could download it.

EchoReflection 3y ago

I just want to say thank you to everyone who is doing tests and contributing to this, you are truly unsung heroes (not sarcasm)

Adsila197 3y ago

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