Is this arguably anticompetitive and illegal?
Nobody can even state that it’s actually happening “for competitive browsers” as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it’s just wild speculation and bandwagoning.
You absolutely can tell what’s happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when
ontimeupdatepromise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.I’m sorry but I don’t see how that check is browser-specific. Is that part happening on the browser side?
They don’t need to put incriminating “if Firefox” statements in their code – the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.
Easy enough to test though. Load the page with a UA changer and see if it still shows up when Firefox pretends to be Chrome
Well, at least I learned that javascript understands exponential notation. I never even bothered to try that lol
It’s not wild speculation as there is compelling, if incomplete, evidence. And to describe everyone’s reaction as “bandwagoning” is ridiculous. Firefox and Mullvad are my daily drivers. This directly impacts me. The fediverse is going to have a disproportionate number of non-chrome users.
I also use FF solely and have no slowdowns on YT. I guess they like my copy of the browser.
I’ve duplicated it on 4 machines across 3 OS’s (windows 11, macOS, steamOS). Glad you got lucky. I’m sure you’re also familiar with A/B testing but if not I’m happy to explain it.
It is absolutely possible there is a reasonable explanation but for you to say 1) nothing is happening and 2) it’s “bandwagoning” is, again, ridiculous. Especially if your evidence is “well mine is fine,” which is not acceptable troubleshooting procedure.
Not all regions are served with the same scripts. That’s why the ad-block pop-up was shown for some users but not for others or at a later time for others. This also affected the update cycle of those anti-adblock scripts.
The reason for that is quite simple. New stuff is rolled out to only some users at first as some sort of beta testing procedure. If many people complain about functionality issues and all of those have the new version of the script, Google knows there is something wrong with it.
“works fine on my machine lol” is unhelpful and useless.
It’s very well known that Google makes heavy use of a/b testing. They did it with the adblock block and they’re doing it with this
“It happens all the time” and “they always do *” is also comically unhelpful and useless. I’m getting a pot/kettle vibe from those that seem to take offense at my comment.
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Where’s the proof? Note: I didn’t read the article
Then read it?
no thanks… I havent had any issues… been using firefox since v1.0
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to do lol
Ok
I mean you’re saying you want proof, don’t read the article, then say you don’t care because it works for you. Do you not understand why that’s a little perplexing? Anyway, I’ve said my piece. I don’t imagine it will be a very productive discussion. Have a good week.
Then why did you ask for proof lol
So Alphabet:
-
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
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has the most used video platform online, with no close second (unless you count porn, but i’d still argue its not close)
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has the biggest share of devices relying on its platform worldwide (android)
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has the most used search engine worldwide.
Alphabet has to be split up. Alphabet alone is deciding what shape internet will take in the future.
All of those are meaningless peanuts versus
- Owns the biggest (borderline only) web ad service in the world
My long bet: The EU will force Google Search + Ads, to separate from Youtube within a decade.
-
It’s fucking incredible watching Google change from a fairly well-liked company into essentially fucking Comcast. Fucking incredible.
Change from? I doubt they will stop being a fairly well hliked company in my lifetime
Well I’ve gone from being entirely indifferent to strongly disliking Google. I am actively and somewhat successfully in the process of de-googling. I encourage my friends to do the same, with some success. I think the writing is on the wall. Google seems to have no desire to maintain any sort of goodwill or positive feeling amongst the general public, whom it clearly views as a naturally occurring resource rather than a customer base. Nobody can predict the future but I don’t have a good feeling about the future of the company. Perhaps they will be able to diversify, but their recent actions show both that they deeply misunderstand their product and also that they lack good ideas about how to progress and evolve as an organisation. Fuck Google. All my homies hate Google.
The hardest part of ‘de-googling’ is the stranglehold it has on email. Between them and microsoft, I’ve only seen a few companies (small to medium size) that don’t use one of those two as the email. It’s mind-boggling. If either of them ever got testy, they could bring entire sectors down just by using the information stored in emails on.
Again? I remember they did this years ago when releasing Chrome.
Incidentally, I dropped Youtube’s web app like a rock when they started messing with adblockers and today they emailed me to say they’re cutting down features in my account because “I don’t have enough of a history”.
I swear, these decaying tech firms just don’t get the value of not appearing to be flailing in desperation.
hey’re cutting down features in my account because “I don’t have enough of a history”.
any idea what this actually means?
What features are they cutting down?
Is this a free account?
I had the same email, it’s creator-related features. So if you don’t produce content it shouldn’t affect anything
I received the same notification on my artist account. I can’t remember everything, but it was something like daily upload limits for videos and shorts and other creator related stuff. I don’t think there’s anything related to just basic usage features.
They take away the ability to include links in video descriptions. That’s still not related to watching videos, but it seems like a legit eff you to small content creators.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. That’s definitely a big issue. I think you can’t also pin comments.
they turn off video recommendations if your watch history isn’t on
This is a plus for me. I don’t want them to recommend me anything. I don’t trust them not to recommend me stuff that’s going to piss me off.
Their recommendations engine seems to stuck on “50 more of exactly the last thing you watched, plus a dash of right-wing conspiracy nonsense.”
Once I made the mistake of looking up how to change the oil on my Kawasaki Vulcan without being in incognito. Now half of my recommendations are how to perform maintenance on motorcycles that I’ll never own. And ads for Harley Davidson. A company whose business model is converting gasoline into noise.
I just use youtube-dl now and have it go to my NAS. It’s not easier then going to the website, per se. But now the video lives on my storage and it won’t go away after a corporation’s billionth DMCA claim that hour.
Genuinely wish I had done this a decade ago on my favorite articles. Link rot is getting worse and worse and YouTube is the absolute worst.
Turns out when you stop using it the recommendations become more and more unhinged and take on a slight pleading tone.
It’s weird and kinda satisfying to watch, honestly.
For me it’s "oh? You really like this creator? Be careful not to binge their backlog all at once! I think you’ve had enough. Let me hide the rest of their content for you so you’re not tempted
Hey, how about this news show where the guys stand instead of sitting, and wear normal clothes? They still awkwardly read off a teleprompter and have a very shallow understanding of the topics, but come on, you should watch them again. I know their shrill, forced, voices make you cringe and exit the video as fast as you can, but let me put that up next on auto play for you again
All I have left to say about Google and Youtube in particular is that Youtubes ads have become so problematic, both in amount and quality (like seriously, people get banned for using innocuous words in videos targeted at adult audiences, yet completely fucked up ads are squarely targeted at children) and at this point, it’s time for YouTube to die.
A new platform needs to come along.
Which will be hard since Google has such a stranglehold on the datacenter and backbone level that they have an absolute advantage when it comes to bandwidth and storage costs. Which is the main cost for video platforms like YouTube.
I think with everything that’s going on, self hosting will become kind of like a smartphone, everyone has a server. Then the creators host files, and you transcode them on your hardware
Not gonna happen
The delay also does not trigger just once; it is reportedly triggered every time YouTube links are opened in a new tab.
This part got me yesterday as I was listening to music. I loaded a new video in a tab and the other tab waited 5 seconds. I thought I had paused it or something but nope, every time you load a new tab it delays all the other tabs by 5 seconds.
This is the exact reason I don’t trust anything hosted online. If it’s something I want to enjoy more than once, I download it.
Companies hosting things online tend to become authoritarian dictators in all but name, which is their right as they own the services and hardware. But it almost always makes the end user experience shitty and overly complicated, or filled with spyware, or requires you give away your rights to privacy or lawsuit, etc…
So if there’s a song or something that I like online, I’m downloading that and keeping it on my computer to listen to whenever I feel like it. I don’t have the time or energy to play games with these greedy ass corporations.
And the ironic part is, that while they would absolutely froth the mouth about me doing this, they’re the ones that drove me to it. It feels like an emotionally abusive relationship, are they keep making our just a man some gaslighting me, then getting angry when I fight back or tell them no.
I would at least partially challenge they own the service and hardware if only because they are using taxpayer funded internet infrastructure.
Hm.
I think you probably have a point there. Not sure about the details and nuance, 'cause I’m not that smart, but there is something there.
It’s pretty simple actually. Big companies took billions upon billions of dollars in federal subsidies and grants handed out to them via taxation of the public, then when they got just about done building the thing they spent all our money on, they erected a nice shiny gate at the front and charged us admission. But not before
bribingdonating tocriminalspoliticians to ensure zero competition or risk to their non-investment. It’s rampant capitalism defined.It’s definitely nuanced and like I said it’s sort of an “ehhh kinda” statement haha so your pause is warranted
Oh, dang, that was civil and anticlimactic of us. Um…
I mean:
How dare you! This is the internet. You’re supposed to immediately call me Hitler for…reasons. This slight shall not stand. Expect a strongly worded letter from my emissary forthwith. Good day!
GOOD DAY
I suspect this is less of a slowdown and more of a “we’re trying to detect adblockers and in Chrome we can do most of this check on the application level which is fast, while on Firefox we have to do it the extra slow way and we CBA to optimize any of it because the delay is to our advantage.”
Nope, in the article it shows a hard coded 5 second delay.
It’s a standard timeout function without any context. Most likely thing is that it tries to load an ad and if that doesn’t work in these 5 seconds, then the anti adblock popup is displayed. If you don’t use an adblock, the site loads instantly cause the ad is detected. If you use ublock, you see neither the ad nor the popup, so everything that’s left is a 5 seconds timeout.
While it definitely is shady coding, it’s an anti adblock “feature” caused by incompetent design and not an anti Firefox thing.
It might be an anti Adblock feature caused by incompetent design, and it might be an anti Firefox thing. Or it might be something else altogether or some mixed version of the above. You don’t know, neither does anyone else.
Exactly, no one knows, but here we are on the 7th article saying Google is slowing down Firefox on purpose. That’s the least likely option by far. That would get them into multiple anti consumer and anti monopoly lawsuits while probably breaching their contract with FF at the same time. Alphabets board of advisors isn’t run by Elon musk, they know pretty much what they can get away with and wouldn’t be stupid enough to try something this big while they are already beeing monitored by the EU.
The articles clearly say that the cause is unclear and that it’s an ongoing controversy. If you had read the one for this thread you’d see that. They were very transparent about that.
You are the one here saying it’s definitely one way and not another.
it’s an anti adblock “feature” caused by incompetent design and not an anti Firefox thing.
I’m honestly not willing to give them that much benefit of the doubt at this stage. But I also acknowledge we don’t have concrete evidence of deliberate sabotage.
If thats the case then they still are not able to do it even with the delay cuz they havent blocked me yet
If it’s happening it’s not doing so for everyone. I use Firefox and I have never seen this delay.
I’d seen it in my Firefox/Win10 + uBlockO setup. I just used yt-dlp and then a uBlock “quick fixes” update sorted it.
Same.
The anti-adblock warnings only lasted a few days for me too, not seen them for a couple of weeks now.
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And it doesn’t remove promotions by the content creators, so you’re still seeing lots of ads. Still, since my kids spend so much time on YouTube I think it’s worth reducing the amount of brain washing, but I’m definitely not happy about the pricing. It’s ridiculous when you compare it to other streaming services who also have to produce or license their content.
How about seeing YouTube adverts to then watch a video that’s entirely an advertisement for the company that’s sponsoring the YouTuber.
when the email came through for the price hike, I told my wife we should drop the family plan and use more advanced adblocking and invidous etc - apparently my demo didn’t pass the wife and children test… so guess who’s continuing to pay for YT Premium?
Can you ditch the wife and kids?
J/K
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Decided to test it out myself on Firefox and Edge. Didn’t get the delay, but did get ads both times because I don’t have adblockers set up over there. The second was unskippable. Ugh.
I tested it in Firefox InPrivate, Edge, Brave, and Chrome and all are identical for me. I think they just fucked up YouTube. 😂
Could also just be a rolling release.
Been like this for a long time now. Both YT and YT Music are unusable on desktop due to the lag.
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Surely this is against anti-trust laws.
Imagine if Microsoft slowed down everything that wasn’t on their services, it’s insane.
