Some Firefox users noticed playback issues on YouTube for several months. These affected high resolution videos only, from 1080p and up. To make matters worse, no clear pattern could be identified.
Some videos played fine, others would stop abruptly when they ran out of buffer.
- macniel ( @DmMacniel@feddit.de ) 74•3 months ago
Clearly this isn’t an anti-competition effort.
- stormesp ( @stormesp@lemm.ee ) 38•3 months ago
Oh lol so that was it, yesterday all of a sudden 1440p and 4k videos were unwatchable, it was a stutter fest and thought something was wrong with my gpu.
- Zetta ( @Zetta@mander.xyz ) 9•3 months ago
Ya I’ve had this issue for months now, the video will freeze when the original 10 seconds of buffer is used, and it’ll play fine if I skip another 10 seconds but just buffer indefinitely otherwise.
- casmael ( @casmael@lemm.ee ) 5•3 months ago
You can get an extension to easily change your browser ‘user agent’ to make YouTube think you’re on chrome lol
- JPAKx4 ( @JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 19•3 months ago
Reminder for everyone to use a user-agent spoofing extension to make their Firefox appear to be chrome/another browser to Google
- noodlejetski ( @noodlejetski@lemm.ee ) 28•3 months ago
sadly, skewing stats like that gives Google more reason not to support Firefox in the long run.
- petrol_sniff_king ( @petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 10•3 months ago
Well… yes, but I assume that this specifically was sabotage. Like how Intel products have been throttling amd cpu performance for years.
- /home/pineapplelover ( @pineapplelover@lemm.ee ) 9•3 months ago
Absolutely not, I want them to know I’m using Firefox on my Linux computer. I’m doing my best to boost up marketshare.
- michael_palmer ( @michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org ) 9•3 months ago
Just add flag in about:config page
- oce 🐆 ( @oce@jlai.lu ) 5•3 months ago
It seems Netflix is able to detect that spoofing, and sends this error when trying to play videos, “Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again later.”. I had to disable my add-ons one by one to identify that it was User Agent Switcher causing it.
- fine_sandy_bottom ( @fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ) 1•3 months ago
what would be the benefit of that?
- YurkshireLad ( @YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca ) 16•3 months ago
For months I’ve had problems with YouTube videos in Firefox, at any resolution. They would play at really low FPS. Sometimes the player would pause and continue at the correct FPS, but usually not. Skipping backwards or forwards usually fixes it but not always. Another step in their monopoly to destroy competition.
- orhtej2 ( @orhtej2@eviltoast.org ) 16•3 months ago
I solved a lot of performance issues I had with yt playback by disabling Ambient Mode (it’s hidden under cog menu in the player). No clue why, but it was causing massve CPU usage.
- Blackmist ( @Blackmist@feddit.uk ) 4•3 months ago
Badly muxed VP9 stream? Is that where they tried to stuff ads into it?
- MonkderDritte ( @MonkderDritte@feddit.de ) 3•3 months ago
No such problems with yt-dlp + mpv. And still no injected ads.
- michael_palmer ( @michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org ) 3•3 months ago
I use Librewolf with Ublock and sponsorblock. Sometimes youtube video stops loading or keeps seeking 5-10 seconds forward. However, reloading the page helps. I don’t have such problems when watching Youtube with mpv.
- pbsds ( @pbsds@lemmy.ml ) 2•3 months ago
The youtube ui is so slow I don’t use it, even back when I was using chrome. Thanks invidious!
- wick ( @wick@lemm.ee ) 1•3 months ago
Affected users might have blamed Firefox for the issue. Some may even have switched to a Chromium-based browser, as these worked without any issue.
I’ve been having issues with YouTube on Firefox for ages, not these issues, different ones. I haven’t bothered to test if it’s only Firefox that has the problem because I’m not using Firefox for a seamless experience, I’m using because why the fuck would I use anything else on Linux? I won’t put google or ms into a Linux environment, even if I don’t really care about privacy or whatever, it just feels like mixing oil and water.
Might use another browser like brave or whatever foss solutions are out there, but I’d be surprised if anything like that is better than Firefox.
- InternetUser2012 ( @InternetUser2012@midwest.social ) 1•3 months ago
When I have issues, I use user agent switcher and go windows with chrome and the problems magically disappear. Google is such shit.