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Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually

by ustad 2y ago

Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do. It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space. For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.

wruza 2y ago
That's how Chrome started. I remember it showing a banner with itself on /. which froze a page on scrolling over it for a few seconds. In all browsers except Chrome. Never understood this Chrome-go-go mob mentality that everyone had back then. It was literally an ads-network prodived crappy browser with just tabs and urlbar. It was fast, because it did nothing and had no cpu pressure from the banners. I wouldn't be surprised if it was "fast" all this time only due to special treatment from google, youtube and the corresponding ads/tracking scripts. "Precedent", yeah.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  It was fast because in 2008 it used V8 [0] and other browsers didn't. Eventually competitors caught up. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)
  - wruza 2y ago
    And that was fast because google pushed on megabytes of javascript and tight loops in it. Regular ajax (now known as htmx) webpages worked absolutely fine in other browsers. I regularly scrolled through a whole freebsd single-html handbook and it never lagged in e.g. presto. Websites aren't expensive to run even on a slow interpreter. Even medium-complexity apps don't do much and could be written in python or ruby back then. The only source of website lag is ads networks.
    - Apocryphon 2y ago
      Nah, I remember Firefox in 2008 being a miserably bloated and slow experience. Guess it was because of no Electrolysis and any other refinements in the last two decades.
      - bigstrat2003 2y ago
        Yep, same. Firefox now is decent, but back in the day it was awful. I remember trying it out early on and immediately going back to IE because Firefox was significantly slower. Chrome was a marked improvement over both IE and Firefox, so it won.
segasaturn 2y ago
The irony that Google, who made their bones on the "open web", is now attacking open web standards and trying to turn the internet into their own walled garden that they control every aspect of I hope is not lost on the people here.
- diggan 2y ago
  Once the love of "Microsoft Loves FOSS Again" fades away as they aim to enter the next phase, some other company (Cloudflare? Tailscale?) will receive all the developer love until yet again, people realize that for-profit companies don't actually have their best interest at heart. Rinse and repeat forever...
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The only one who has your best interests at heart is you. And you sometimes get it wrong. It is very common the case that someone else will do something that aligns with your best interest. (love for example) In fact it is often in your best interest to do something that helps someone else and appears to harm you. (giving money to the poor at first glance appears to harm you and thus be illogical - but there are a number of secondary results of this that make it in your best interest anyway)
  - ragnese 2y ago
    I was convinced at the time--and I'm still convinced--that there was a TON of astroturfing on places like Reddit and even here when Nadella became CEO of Microsoft and there was that whole "Microsoft hearts Open Source" campaign. Every other comment was "You're just stuck in the past. You're as bad as the conspiracy theorists. It's not even the same people running the company anymore. Blah blah blah." And now they own Github and they're training their AI models on you and your code and forcing that crap into a bunch of PCs. They were about to push out a "feature" to Windows that periodically took screenshots of what you were doing and used AI to analyze what you were doing. Then they sprinkle some glitter for the easily-distracted and tell you that it's actually a feature for you. Last I heard, they shelved the idea for now because of the backlash, but we all know they'll circle back around. But, yeah, I'm a tinfoil hat weirdo who's just a "hater."
ethbr1 2y ago
What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.
- diggan 2y ago
  > What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme x graphics driver is a large space to sweep.
    - WorldMaker 2y ago
      "Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier to assume they do things that are broken in other browsers intentionally.
      - jeffbee 2y ago
        "Intentionally tanked" is just nerd spin. I've never seen an actually convincing recitation of these stories.
bartread 2y ago
It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful. As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  > Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome I've heard this before... Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Developers will always be time crunched / lazy. Why target multiple platforms when you can just support one?
    - basilgohar 2y ago
      This is a management problem, not a developer problem. Yes, developers should advocate, but it's not the developers' burden to make time out of thin air.
      - rileymat2 2y ago
        I have never had a manager that said “don’t make it work for firefox”. What I have seen is developers do it wrong to start, then tasks to fix it get low priority due to market share based priority.
        PaulHoule 2y ago
        I had one who did say "don't make it work for firefox" but he was the only one. The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear. (In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.) The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.
tapoxi 2y ago
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  [flagged]
- bee_rider 2y ago
  This is basically true. The ad supported web sucks, but the solution is to not use it.
  - wruza 2y ago
    The solution is how we solve it. There’s a technical end to every demand, and at the end of the day regulation only can do so much for both sides. The reality sorts everything else. The solution you mentioned is valid too. But you cannot ignore the fact that internet is for everyone and not for google. Google minus all the shit it does to the internet can definitely exist in some form. Claiming it’s either this or nothing is just defeatist. If google and youtube disappeared tomorrow, I’d be the first among those guys who buy hdds and torrent videos from these. For no money, like I did with all torrents in my life. There would be less professional videos obviously, but almost everyone agrees it’s a good thing (quit SM, anxiety, kids social issues, etc talks).
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Sorry, I was ambiguous. I just meant not to use the ad-supported part of the web. Yes, the rest of it is fine. Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send bits to people who don’t render their ads, on purpose, which is also fine, they just don’t want those of us who don’t render ads around. Entitled ad guys don’t get to change the social convention to add some obligation to render their ads. If they don’t want to serve bits to users that block their ads, that’s fine, but if they send bits I’ll render them however I want on my system.
vanous 2y ago
A while back nobody would believe that Google's search dominance could be disturbed... and now many have either switched away or stopped using search altogether. It takes me two clicks to set a search to DDG, Kagi or other and Google has lost this customer (often a family) forever. So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Google still has close to 90% market share with DDG being a little more than a half percent. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/worldwide/2020 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo... Edit:Wrong year - that was 2020 this is 2024 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/worldwide/2024 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
  - dartos 2y ago
    Change is sometimes slow. Let’s see how Google does as a century old company. In the grand scheme of things, they’re still a fairly young giant.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      The thing is I see it everywhere around me. People don't care looking for a better search engine. Worse I am pretty sure that most people do not know they can choose their search engine and can define whatever is used when searching in the url bar.
      - skydhash 2y ago
        From what I see, people don't even care to search anymore. They mostly go direct to an app.
      - dartos 2y ago
        Sure, today. Right now. That’s what I’m saying. Search engines are still a part young technology in the grand scheme of things. No reason to believe this is the end state.
asdfasdf1 2y ago
about youtube being totally unusable on firefox: is it just youtube/google being evil as is customary or also firefox having loads of memory leaks, as its usual too? (plenty of mem leak bugs with video/audio reported over the years, many very recent and still open)
- dartos 2y ago
  Yes
- danielbln 2y ago
  I was about to write that YouTube works flawlessly for me in Firefox on Mac, but I just upgraded to a monster of a M4 MBP, so it's probably just overcoming these issues (malicious or otherwise) via brute force.
  - kome 2y ago
    I watch youtube on a 10 years old macbook air 11, and it works flawlessly with firefox and ublock origin.
- dismalaf 2y ago
  YouTube works perfectly on Firefox if you pay for YouTube Premium. Haven't noticed any bugs, if it leaks memory or something it's not noticeable on my machine.
- josephd79 2y ago
  I've used firefox for a very long time and have never had an issue with youtube...
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Firefox + ublock origin seems to be the combo allowing me the best user experience with youtube. I have no idea what the previous poster is talking about really.
- EdwardKrayer 2y ago
  Firefox+uBO on Fedora/W11 here, with Firefox being my primary browser for close to 8 years. I only run in to an issues maybe once a year, where I have to pop open Edge/Chrome for some random edge cases to work. I've used Firefox on dodgy, overly burdened and hacked together systems with no issues that were memorable. The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week. But, this is just my experience.
squarefoot 2y ago
> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. I would add to the list the Linux Foundation too. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-launch-of-supporters-of-chromium-based-browsers https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...
- tgv 2y ago
  My first though: WTF? All hail Manifest v3?
  - basilgohar 2y ago
    Linux Foundation is made up of corporations. This should not be a surprising outcome when you think about it that way. Edit: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
    - mossTechnician 2y ago
      And the Chromium supporter group is just a subset of those corporations. Several leading organizations have already pledged their support for the ["Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers"] initiative, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Reminds me of the Open Source Initiative. People tell me that licenses like the SSPL aren't open source because the OSI says they aren't. I tell them to look at who comprises the OSI. Nobody has yet showed me a reason why we should believe the OSI when it tells us what open source is or isn't.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  This is so backwards it seems like a joke. Honestly it reads like a rebel group announcing peace with the dictator and joining the oppression.
HunOL 2y ago
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
- immibis 2y ago
  Even market-dominant companies do this. Windows ships a bunch of backward compatibility patches. Graphics card drivers (especially Nvidia) wholesale replace shaders in popular games.
  - darknavi 2y ago
    Webkit does this. Examples: - https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/page/Quirks.cpp https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa... - https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/platform/glib/UserAgentQuirks.cpp https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pl...
    - immibis 2y ago
      > DuckDuckGo discriminates against WebKitGTK's standard user agent by returning an HTTP 400 Bad Request error when loading every search result. I guess they only want spyware browsers on DDG.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Thing is, Opera had to do this specifically to work around stuff like UA-based degradation of service on YouTube etc.
- doctor_radium 2y ago
  Somehow I wasn't previously familiar with about:compat, which led me down a rabbit hole to finding about:about. Great stuff!
Workaccount2 2y ago
[flagged]
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  "I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should_b_59519811e4b0f078efd98440 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to...
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Where is the article titled "I don't know how to explain that ads (and the "suckers" who view them) are what keep the internet running"
    - cobbaut 2y ago
      The Internet worked fine without ads though.
    - endemic 2y ago
      Sure, I don't mind the ads. The pervasive tracking and data collection and profile building is where I draw the line. Tons and tons of JS churning my browser to sell me stuff. If my adblock eventually causes some sort of economic disaster, so be it.
    - 542354234235 2y ago
      Ads are what make the internet a bloated mess. Ads are why there are a thousand different results for “roasted broccoli recipe”, because they are all trying to get me to pick them so I can see ads. Its why each one is 5 pages of crap before you get to the actual recipe, so they can shove in more ads. Everything is stretched, duplicative, and needless complex, so you will move through as many ads as humanly possible.
- Croftengea 2y ago
  Imagine your local cafe notices and starts feeding you poisoned food instead of asking to pay.
Timshel 2y ago
> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. While I agree; between an up-to-date uBlock Origin and https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/chrome-mask https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/chrome-mask YT is quite usable. Long term I'm more worried by Mozilla leadership than Google shenanigans.
- normie3000 2y ago
  From your link: > Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
  - Timshel 2y ago
    I can't seem to find your citation from the add-on page. Might be a placebo but YT appear more responsive with it on than off after a ctrl+f5. Edit: appears to be in the reviews: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/reviews/2128307/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/r...
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  YT is quite usable Ehh. Youtube has been problematic for 3 or 4 Firefox versions now. If you leave a video open long enough memory usage skyrockets and the page becomes unresponsive. Supposedly it's just been fixed? https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i182q7/firefox_13401_just_released_with_fix_for_memory/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i182q7/firefox_13...
dismalaf 2y ago
Using an ad blocker (and not paying for a subscription in the case of YouTube) isn't the "user making their own choices", it's stealing content. If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.
- basilgohar 2y ago
  I understand this perspective, but I disagree with it. If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that. Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people. It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
  - dismalaf 2y ago
    > But getting the benefits of a free, global audience The benefit of the audience is literally the ad views (or Premium views).
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    A restaurant is also a public space. But you can't eat for free or behave as you wish there.
    - asadotzler 2y ago
      If the restaurant puts food on the public sidewalk I'm free to pick it up. The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like. Your analogy is ridiculous and makes you come across as a simp for Big Advertising.
      - 2y ago
PaulHoule 2y ago
Also it boggles my mind that an advertising company (1) offers its own ad blocker to block competitors ads, and (2) circumscribes what ad blockers can do, and (3) nobody stops them... All when the FBI is saying you should run an ad blocker to avoid being the victim of a crime.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Anti trust has been a joke since the 70s, when the threshold moved to "consumer harm (so blatant people will vote me out of office)"
snarfy 2y ago
It's not the engineers making these decisions. They write the code they are told to write. Some middle manager / VP gets a promotion if they 'increase engagement', 'increase ad-spend', or some other hollow metric they chase. They are the ones deciding to send any 1-3 star ratings to customer support, and 4-5 ratings recorded as an actual rating. It's not about the users at all. It's about gaming the system for some manager's benefit.
- LegitShady 2y ago
  I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics. The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Same here. Ultimately, the engineer is the one typing in the code and hitting submit. They are at the very least complicit and need to at least share responsibility.
  - adamc 2y ago
    This. If you only shoot the crowds when your overlord demands it, that does not make you innocent.
    - snarfy 2y ago
      Yes because implementing a pop-up is akin to murder.
      - adamc 2y ago
        The moral issues are the same even when the gravity of the offense is different.
tttttrhowwwwai 2y ago
maybe my rant is going to be a bit out of place here but here it goes anyways: sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person. but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago? and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode. i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.
- neilv 2y ago
  AFAICT, current tech industry culture is most like what I understood of the '80s stereotype of Wall Street bro culture: sociopathic unchecked-greed that will do whatever it can get away with. I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next. So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general. What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking? Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things. Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it. (Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.) Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?
i_love_retros 2y ago
> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. Can you explain this more? I don't understand what this means.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  Google has a habit of intentionally delivering degraded versions of their services to not Chromium based browsers, particularly non-Chrome versions of their browsers (determined by User Agent). There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
- 20after4 2y ago
  Youtube intentionally degrades the user experience if you use Firefox, at least if you are using a proper ad blocker. And there really isn't much reason to use Firefox if you aren't also using uBlock. So by targeting the users of uBlock+Firefox, YouTube is aggressively degrading the experience of Firefox users. Things I've noticed include: 1. Every video defaults to the absolute lowest resolution (240 or 320) until I manually switch it to a higher setting. 2. Occasional (but fairly frequent) 30-second delay before a page loads (loads enough to show a black page, then just freezes for a while. During this delay, refreshing the page gives the same result. 3. Rarely, interstitial notice pages threatening vague consequences if I continue to use an ad blocker.
  - i_love_retros 2y ago
    I wonder if using DNS level ad blocking would prevent this. I avoid YouTube as much as possible anyway as they force me to login.
hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
>it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional. There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded. There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging. Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment. Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.
WorldMaker 2y ago
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was. I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies. Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".
Der_Einzige 2y ago
You used LLMs to write this comment.
cornstalks 2y ago
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").
- recursive 2y ago
  If you have a lot of technical churn, and only test perf on Chromium, then you could certainly claim that the result is "unintentional", but it's almost guaranteed based on that circumstance.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- asadotzler 2y ago
  I unintentionally burned down a dozen houses because I was too incompetent to properly test the propane systems I was hooking up to houses, but only the ones built by competing contractors that didn't quite fit my way of doing things. How can you call that anything but unintentional and how can you possibly hold me accountable?
cnotv 2y ago
> these engineers seem to be focused Managers.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
The firehose of cash is ads and user tracking, not serving better video. It's such an unprecedented amount of money that it corrupts everything else and distorts the market.
taylodl 2y ago
> it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere. > or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would. Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  Then put it behind a goddamned login. If you don't, it's mine to consume and filter how I want.
  - taylodl 2y ago
    Then you should be locked up behind bars. You're a thief, pure and simple.
jshen 2y ago
Don't like YouTube's ads, great don't use it. You aren't entitled to get it for free though.
- observationist 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jshen 2y ago
    > If your internet server serves content, I'm entitled to connect to it. Nope
    - beej71 2y ago
      As far as I can tell, this case went nowhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Department_of_Elementary_and_Secondary_Education#St._Louis_Post-Dispatch_database_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Department_of_Element... I'm curious if you know of any court cases that back up your position. I've connected to a lot of servers today and downloaded all the information they sent me.
      - jshen 2y ago
        I think that's a different issue. I can serve content behind a paywall, that doesn't make you entitled to it.
        asadotzler 2y ago
        The OP explicitly called out logins. Are you being intentionally misleading or just dense or what?
        jshen 2y ago
        The issue is about preventing users from watching if they block ads. Talking about logins is being intentionally misleading.
bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
freetube is a superior experience for consuming youtube content in every way, including not running google’s javascript so they cannot mess with the users in the same way. it has adblock and sponsorblock built in. that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that). i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)
ebjcoat 2y ago
What irks me even a bit more is that user experience is degraded even for logged in premium users. They just really don't want us using other browsers. FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.
laylower 2y ago
Empirical, but I have noscript and ublock enabled on Mozilla and whenever I go to youtube, it reloads three times in a laggy manner before it will let me type into the search. I check to see that I am not logged into gmail before using youtube. I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.
lippihom 2y ago
YouTube is totally bricked for me on Firefox, and the quality of use of Gmail + anything Google Drive related has degraded severely over the past ~year. Feels concerted.
Ferret7446 2y ago
"such as YouTube?" Mozilla is an advertising company now, and by many accounts Mozilla has been the main attack on Firefox for the many years even before they explicitly shifted to advertising. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1e0p62h/mozilla_is_an_advertising_company_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1e0p62h/mozilla_i...

by ustad 2y ago

wruza 2y ago

That's how Chrome started. I remember it showing a banner with itself on /. which froze a page on scrolling over it for a few seconds. In all browsers except Chrome. Never understood this Chrome-go-go mob mentality that everyone had back then. It was literally an ads-network prodived crappy browser with just tabs and urlbar. It was fast, because it did nothing and had no cpu pressure from the banners. I wouldn't be surprised if it was "fast" all this time only due to special treatment from google, youtube and the corresponding ads/tracking scripts. "Precedent", yeah.

ethbr1 2y ago
It was fast because in 2008 it used V8 [0] and other browsers didn't. Eventually competitors caught up. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)
- wruza 2y ago
  And that was fast because google pushed on megabytes of javascript and tight loops in it. Regular ajax (now known as htmx) webpages worked absolutely fine in other browsers. I regularly scrolled through a whole freebsd single-html handbook and it never lagged in e.g. presto. Websites aren't expensive to run even on a slow interpreter. Even medium-complexity apps don't do much and could be written in python or ruby back then. The only source of website lag is ads networks.
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    Nah, I remember Firefox in 2008 being a miserably bloated and slow experience. Guess it was because of no Electrolysis and any other refinements in the last two decades.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      Yep, same. Firefox now is decent, but back in the day it was awful. I remember trying it out early on and immediately going back to IE because Firefox was significantly slower. Chrome was a marked improvement over both IE and Firefox, so it won.

segasaturn 2y ago

The irony that Google, who made their bones on the "open web", is now attacking open web standards and trying to turn the internet into their own walled garden that they control every aspect of I hope is not lost on the people here.

diggan 2y ago
Once the love of "Microsoft Loves FOSS Again" fades away as they aim to enter the next phase, some other company (Cloudflare? Tailscale?) will receive all the developer love until yet again, people realize that for-profit companies don't actually have their best interest at heart. Rinse and repeat forever...
- bluGill 2y ago
  The only one who has your best interests at heart is you. And you sometimes get it wrong. It is very common the case that someone else will do something that aligns with your best interest. (love for example) In fact it is often in your best interest to do something that helps someone else and appears to harm you. (giving money to the poor at first glance appears to harm you and thus be illogical - but there are a number of secondary results of this that make it in your best interest anyway)
- ragnese 2y ago
  I was convinced at the time--and I'm still convinced--that there was a TON of astroturfing on places like Reddit and even here when Nadella became CEO of Microsoft and there was that whole "Microsoft hearts Open Source" campaign. Every other comment was "You're just stuck in the past. You're as bad as the conspiracy theorists. It's not even the same people running the company anymore. Blah blah blah." And now they own Github and they're training their AI models on you and your code and forcing that crap into a bunch of PCs. They were about to push out a "feature" to Windows that periodically took screenshots of what you were doing and used AI to analyze what you were doing. Then they sprinkle some glitter for the easily-distracted and tell you that it's actually a feature for you. Last I heard, they shelved the idea for now because of the backlash, but we all know they'll circle back around. But, yeah, I'm a tinfoil hat weirdo who's just a "hater."

ethbr1 2y ago

What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.

diggan 2y ago
> What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme x graphics driver is a large space to sweep.
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    "Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier to assume they do things that are broken in other browsers intentionally.
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      "Intentionally tanked" is just nerd spin. I've never seen an actually convincing recitation of these stories.

bartread 2y ago

It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful. As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.

theshrike79 2y ago
> Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome I've heard this before... Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Developers will always be time crunched / lazy. Why target multiple platforms when you can just support one?
  - basilgohar 2y ago
    This is a management problem, not a developer problem. Yes, developers should advocate, but it's not the developers' burden to make time out of thin air.
    - rileymat2 2y ago
      I have never had a manager that said “don’t make it work for firefox”. What I have seen is developers do it wrong to start, then tasks to fix it get low priority due to market share based priority.
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        I had one who did say "don't make it work for firefox" but he was the only one. The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear. (In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.) The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.

tapoxi 2y ago

> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.

Workaccount2 2y ago
[flagged]
bee_rider 2y ago
This is basically true. The ad supported web sucks, but the solution is to not use it.
- wruza 2y ago
  The solution is how we solve it. There’s a technical end to every demand, and at the end of the day regulation only can do so much for both sides. The reality sorts everything else. The solution you mentioned is valid too. But you cannot ignore the fact that internet is for everyone and not for google. Google minus all the shit it does to the internet can definitely exist in some form. Claiming it’s either this or nothing is just defeatist. If google and youtube disappeared tomorrow, I’d be the first among those guys who buy hdds and torrent videos from these. For no money, like I did with all torrents in my life. There would be less professional videos obviously, but almost everyone agrees it’s a good thing (quit SM, anxiety, kids social issues, etc talks).
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Sorry, I was ambiguous. I just meant not to use the ad-supported part of the web. Yes, the rest of it is fine. Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send bits to people who don’t render their ads, on purpose, which is also fine, they just don’t want those of us who don’t render ads around. Entitled ad guys don’t get to change the social convention to add some obligation to render their ads. If they don’t want to serve bits to users that block their ads, that’s fine, but if they send bits I’ll render them however I want on my system.

vanous 2y ago

A while back nobody would believe that Google's search dominance could be disturbed... and now many have either switched away or stopped using search altogether. It takes me two clicks to set a search to DDG, Kagi or other and Google has lost this customer (often a family) forever. So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.

scarface_74 2y ago
Google still has close to 90% market share with DDG being a little more than a half percent. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/worldwide/2020 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo... Edit:Wrong year - that was 2020 this is 2024 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/worldwide/2024 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
- dartos 2y ago
  Change is sometimes slow. Let’s see how Google does as a century old company. In the grand scheme of things, they’re still a fairly young giant.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    The thing is I see it everywhere around me. People don't care looking for a better search engine. Worse I am pretty sure that most people do not know they can choose their search engine and can define whatever is used when searching in the url bar.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      From what I see, people don't even care to search anymore. They mostly go direct to an app.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Sure, today. Right now. That’s what I’m saying. Search engines are still a part young technology in the grand scheme of things. No reason to believe this is the end state.

asdfasdf1 2y ago

about youtube being totally unusable on firefox: is it just youtube/google being evil as is customary or also firefox having loads of memory leaks, as its usual too? (plenty of mem leak bugs with video/audio reported over the years, many very recent and still open)

dartos 2y ago
Yes
danielbln 2y ago
I was about to write that YouTube works flawlessly for me in Firefox on Mac, but I just upgraded to a monster of a M4 MBP, so it's probably just overcoming these issues (malicious or otherwise) via brute force.
- kome 2y ago
  I watch youtube on a 10 years old macbook air 11, and it works flawlessly with firefox and ublock origin.
dismalaf 2y ago
YouTube works perfectly on Firefox if you pay for YouTube Premium. Haven't noticed any bugs, if it leaks memory or something it's not noticeable on my machine.
josephd79 2y ago
I've used firefox for a very long time and have never had an issue with youtube...
prmoustache 2y ago
Firefox + ublock origin seems to be the combo allowing me the best user experience with youtube. I have no idea what the previous poster is talking about really.
EdwardKrayer 2y ago
Firefox+uBO on Fedora/W11 here, with Firefox being my primary browser for close to 8 years. I only run in to an issues maybe once a year, where I have to pop open Edge/Chrome for some random edge cases to work. I've used Firefox on dodgy, overly burdened and hacked together systems with no issues that were memorable. The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week. But, this is just my experience.

squarefoot 2y ago

> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. I would add to the list the Linux Foundation too. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-launch-of-supporters-of-chromium-based-browsers https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...

tgv 2y ago
My first though: WTF? All hail Manifest v3?
- basilgohar 2y ago
  Linux Foundation is made up of corporations. This should not be a surprising outcome when you think about it that way. Edit: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
  - mossTechnician 2y ago
    And the Chromium supporter group is just a subset of those corporations. Several leading organizations have already pledged their support for the ["Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers"] initiative, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Reminds me of the Open Source Initiative. People tell me that licenses like the SSPL aren't open source because the OSI says they aren't. I tell them to look at who comprises the OSI. Nobody has yet showed me a reason why we should believe the OSI when it tells us what open source is or isn't.
dotancohen 2y ago
This is so backwards it seems like a joke. Honestly it reads like a rebel group announcing peace with the dictator and joining the oppression.

HunOL 2y ago

> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat

immibis 2y ago
Even market-dominant companies do this. Windows ships a bunch of backward compatibility patches. Graphics card drivers (especially Nvidia) wholesale replace shaders in popular games.
- darknavi 2y ago
  Webkit does this. Examples: - https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/page/Quirks.cpp https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa... - https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/platform/glib/UserAgentQuirks.cpp https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pl...
  - immibis 2y ago
    > DuckDuckGo discriminates against WebKitGTK's standard user agent by returning an HTTP 400 Bad Request error when loading every search result. I guess they only want spyware browsers on DDG.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Thing is, Opera had to do this specifically to work around stuff like UA-based degradation of service on YouTube etc.
doctor_radium 2y ago
Somehow I wasn't previously familiar with about:compat, which led me down a rabbit hole to finding about:about. Great stuff!

Workaccount2 2y ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 2y ago
"I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should_b_59519811e4b0f078efd98440 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to...
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Where is the article titled "I don't know how to explain that ads (and the "suckers" who view them) are what keep the internet running"
  - cobbaut 2y ago
    The Internet worked fine without ads though.
  - endemic 2y ago
    Sure, I don't mind the ads. The pervasive tracking and data collection and profile building is where I draw the line. Tons and tons of JS churning my browser to sell me stuff. If my adblock eventually causes some sort of economic disaster, so be it.
  - 542354234235 2y ago
    Ads are what make the internet a bloated mess. Ads are why there are a thousand different results for “roasted broccoli recipe”, because they are all trying to get me to pick them so I can see ads. Its why each one is 5 pages of crap before you get to the actual recipe, so they can shove in more ads. Everything is stretched, duplicative, and needless complex, so you will move through as many ads as humanly possible.
Croftengea 2y ago
Imagine your local cafe notices and starts feeding you poisoned food instead of asking to pay.

Timshel 2y ago

> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. While I agree; between an up-to-date uBlock Origin and https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/chrome-mask https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/chrome-mask YT is quite usable. Long term I'm more worried by Mozilla leadership than Google shenanigans.

normie3000 2y ago
From your link: > Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
- Timshel 2y ago
  I can't seem to find your citation from the add-on page. Might be a placebo but YT appear more responsive with it on than off after a ctrl+f5. Edit: appears to be in the reviews: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/reviews/2128307/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/r...
inferiorhuman 2y ago
YT is quite usable Ehh. Youtube has been problematic for 3 or 4 Firefox versions now. If you leave a video open long enough memory usage skyrockets and the page becomes unresponsive. Supposedly it's just been fixed? https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i182q7/firefox_13401_just_released_with_fix_for_memory/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i182q7/firefox_13...

dismalaf 2y ago

Using an ad blocker (and not paying for a subscription in the case of YouTube) isn't the "user making their own choices", it's stealing content. If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.

basilgohar 2y ago
I understand this perspective, but I disagree with it. If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that. Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people. It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
- dismalaf 2y ago
  > But getting the benefits of a free, global audience The benefit of the audience is literally the ad views (or Premium views).
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  A restaurant is also a public space. But you can't eat for free or behave as you wish there.
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    If the restaurant puts food on the public sidewalk I'm free to pick it up. The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like. Your analogy is ridiculous and makes you come across as a simp for Big Advertising.
    - 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago

Also it boggles my mind that an advertising company (1) offers its own ad blocker to block competitors ads, and (2) circumscribes what ad blockers can do, and (3) nobody stops them... All when the FBI is saying you should run an ad blocker to avoid being the victim of a crime.

paulryanrogers 2y ago
Anti trust has been a joke since the 70s, when the threshold moved to "consumer harm (so blatant people will vote me out of office)"

snarfy 2y ago

It's not the engineers making these decisions. They write the code they are told to write. Some middle manager / VP gets a promotion if they 'increase engagement', 'increase ad-spend', or some other hollow metric they chase. They are the ones deciding to send any 1-3 star ratings to customer support, and 4-5 ratings recorded as an actual rating. It's not about the users at all. It's about gaming the system for some manager's benefit.

LegitShady 2y ago
I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics. The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Same here. Ultimately, the engineer is the one typing in the code and hitting submit. They are at the very least complicit and need to at least share responsibility.
- adamc 2y ago
  This. If you only shoot the crowds when your overlord demands it, that does not make you innocent.
  - snarfy 2y ago
    Yes because implementing a pop-up is akin to murder.
    - adamc 2y ago
      The moral issues are the same even when the gravity of the offense is different.

tttttrhowwwwai 2y ago

maybe my rant is going to be a bit out of place here but here it goes anyways: sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person. but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago? and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode. i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.

neilv 2y ago
AFAICT, current tech industry culture is most like what I understood of the '80s stereotype of Wall Street bro culture: sociopathic unchecked-greed that will do whatever it can get away with. I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next. So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general. What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking? Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things. Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it. (Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.) Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?

i_love_retros 2y ago

> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. Can you explain this more? I don't understand what this means.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
Google has a habit of intentionally delivering degraded versions of their services to not Chromium based browsers, particularly non-Chrome versions of their browsers (determined by User Agent). There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
20after4 2y ago
Youtube intentionally degrades the user experience if you use Firefox, at least if you are using a proper ad blocker. And there really isn't much reason to use Firefox if you aren't also using uBlock. So by targeting the users of uBlock+Firefox, YouTube is aggressively degrading the experience of Firefox users. Things I've noticed include: 1. Every video defaults to the absolute lowest resolution (240 or 320) until I manually switch it to a higher setting. 2. Occasional (but fairly frequent) 30-second delay before a page loads (loads enough to show a black page, then just freezes for a while. During this delay, refreshing the page gives the same result. 3. Rarely, interstitial notice pages threatening vague consequences if I continue to use an ad blocker.
- i_love_retros 2y ago
  I wonder if using DNS level ad blocking would prevent this. I avoid YouTube as much as possible anyway as they force me to login.

hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago

>it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional. There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded. There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging. Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment. Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.

WorldMaker 2y ago

> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was. I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies. Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".

Der_Einzige 2y ago

You used LLMs to write this comment.

cornstalks 2y ago

> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").

recursive 2y ago
If you have a lot of technical churn, and only test perf on Chromium, then you could certainly claim that the result is "unintentional", but it's almost guaranteed based on that circumstance.
deleted 2y ago
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asadotzler 2y ago
I unintentionally burned down a dozen houses because I was too incompetent to properly test the propane systems I was hooking up to houses, but only the ones built by competing contractors that didn't quite fit my way of doing things. How can you call that anything but unintentional and how can you possibly hold me accountable?

cnotv 2y ago

> these engineers seem to be focused Managers.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

The firehose of cash is ads and user tracking, not serving better video. It's such an unprecedented amount of money that it corrupts everything else and distorts the market.

taylodl 2y ago

> it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere. > or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would. Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.

asadotzler 2y ago
Then put it behind a goddamned login. If you don't, it's mine to consume and filter how I want.
- taylodl 2y ago
  Then you should be locked up behind bars. You're a thief, pure and simple.

jshen 2y ago

Don't like YouTube's ads, great don't use it. You aren't entitled to get it for free though.

observationist 2y ago
[flagged]
- jshen 2y ago
  > If your internet server serves content, I'm entitled to connect to it. Nope
  - beej71 2y ago
    As far as I can tell, this case went nowhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Department_of_Elementary_and_Secondary_Education#St._Louis_Post-Dispatch_database_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Department_of_Element... I'm curious if you know of any court cases that back up your position. I've connected to a lot of servers today and downloaded all the information they sent me.
    - jshen 2y ago
      I think that's a different issue. I can serve content behind a paywall, that doesn't make you entitled to it.
      - asadotzler 2y ago
        The OP explicitly called out logins. Are you being intentionally misleading or just dense or what?
        jshen 2y ago
        The issue is about preventing users from watching if they block ads. Talking about logins is being intentionally misleading.

bdhcuidbebe 2y ago

freetube is a superior experience for consuming youtube content in every way, including not running google’s javascript so they cannot mess with the users in the same way. it has adblock and sponsorblock built in. that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that). i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)

ebjcoat 2y ago

What irks me even a bit more is that user experience is degraded even for logged in premium users. They just really don't want us using other browsers. FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.

laylower 2y ago

Empirical, but I have noscript and ublock enabled on Mozilla and whenever I go to youtube, it reloads three times in a laggy manner before it will let me type into the search. I check to see that I am not logged into gmail before using youtube. I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.

lippihom 2y ago

YouTube is totally bricked for me on Firefox, and the quality of use of Gmail + anything Google Drive related has degraded severely over the past ~year. Feels concerted.

Ferret7446 2y ago

"such as YouTube?" Mozilla is an advertising company now, and by many accounts Mozilla has been the main attack on Firefox for the many years even before they explicitly shifted to advertising. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1e0p62h/mozilla_is_an_advertising_company_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1e0p62h/mozilla_i...