Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away.
Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away.
Posted in r/youtube by u/vk6_ • 2,938 points and 264 comments
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Bet it's done in such a way that they can claim "We're just optimizing for Chrome, not slowing down any competitors. It's not our fault our competitors don't using our web engine for their browsers."
I mentioned similar shading behavior on another post, when using Firefox with Chrome or native user agents on the plain old Google search page.
It's apparently not even subtle enough to make that claim, it checks the useragent and sleeps for 5 seconds if it's not Chrome.
I was wondering why YouTube started taking a while to load pages in the last couple weeks. Fucking Google, pulling this shit.
If changing your user agent to Chrome on Firefox fixes it that justification won't fly
You seem to be quite in the know, would you say that this happens often across the tech space or is this a case of web platform, and in some cases the browser developers acting out?
Oh, I have no idea. It's just something I noticed previously, and has a similar thing to this post, so I thought I'd mention it. I don't have any inside or expert knowledge here.