Google slows down Firefox users when watching YouTube…
I know everyone wants to be mad, and I’m no fan of Google. But this is almost certainly an unintentional bug.
Google, more than anything, wants watch hours for ad money. They don’t want you frustrated by the alow ux. They want you watching advertisements.
wants watch hours for ad money
Ads which can still be blocked fairly easily on Firefox, unlike in Chrome, which is banning ublock(& likely all other blockers) browser-wide next year. They want to make the firefox experience worse so people have a reason to go back to their ad infested browser.
Nah this doesn’t make sense. You, and everyone else, will sit through five seconds of loading vs watching an ad. You know this, Google know this.
Occams razor is at play here. If they want to to be conspiratorial, they have better and smarter ways to do it.
Guys relax. Most of the ‘research’ comes from this reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
It points out following code in youtube’s polymer script:
setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);But exactly this code does show up on a stock installation of chrome too, and it does not check for the user agent. One of the responses goes a bit deeper into what the code above could do: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/ka08uqj/
It is rather clear, that this code is not aimed at firefox users to slow down their loading time.
Might be a very dumb financial decision but maybe it’s time to rethink that whole google search contract renewal coming up in a year or so. Feeling like a toxic relationship
Edit: the time frame is just an assumption due to it being a 3 year contract made in 2020. I would try to seek a relationship with bing tbh, it sucks with privacy but would be a kick to google’s balls. Plus the majority of firefox users who start giving a crap about their privacy, change to duckduckgo in the beginning of their journey so it wont be a massive shift from bing imo in terms of searching experience.
The biggest problem is the loss of users that that incurs… it would be long term damage for temporary financial boost. I think they already tried once to switch to yahoo and it was an unmitigated disaster
Yeah I expect that would be the case but I honestly think out of all the other longterm rivals with deep pockets, bing is firefox’s best chance of maintaining most of it’s current userbase and maybe even growing it in the longterm especially if bing ai’s features keep expanding. Else why would bard be a thing if google didn’t feel a bit threatened. Again just my thoughts would like to hear what other opinions are out there.
Edit: would also be a big win for microsoft since a respectable browser is now using it’s search engine and not just a butt of the joke like edge is, so maybe firefox can leveage a good chunk of change from them to keep their browser running for a while unlike the deal they did with google. Think it would ultimately destroy edge though but since edge can now be user uninstalled thats bound to happen in a couple of years anyways and with this deal bing will still get some traffic so still a win for microsoft.
Ah, even more reason for me to use less Youtube.
Been substituting it with Nebula, Odysee, and just watching less video content.
@BombOmOm @furycd001
I am sort of in a content slump right now. The YouTube adblocker blocker has me watching much less and noticing the content actually kinda sucks.Most news sites are either paywalled or adblocked blocked or so stuffed with ads it’s unreadable.
Even my library app doesn’t have books newer than like 2019.
This DRM shit totally sucks.
What ad blocker are you using? I’m using ublock origin and I still haven’t seen the ad blocker blocker thing on anything.
Here’s the actual source: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
The link in the post is just recycling the reddit content.
