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Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

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Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#31
post #17

Another example of https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... : > "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. > "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner,…

> > "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops.

I see the third option here besides malice and incompetence: indifference. I don't think they really aiming to eradicate Firefox, the last few % of users do not matter that much. But they certainly do seem to be indifferent about the experience of those users.

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#32

In Firefox you can just add their opensearch plugin and submit queries straight from the address bar. It even supports having shortcuts like 'yt' assigned.

You don't need a plugin for that, it works out of the box.

[Edit] doc: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#33
post #17

Another example of https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... : > "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. > "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner,…

Great link, thanks.

The line about “all of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course” (from the Firefox exec) reads like a winking acknowledgement that Google’s behavior is dangerously anti-competitive and deserves a federal antitrust investigation. Google has a pattern of abusing their uncontested market dominance in search engines, and considerable leverage in office web applications, to shore up one of the few product lines where the competition is steep.

IANAL but it does seem like textbook stuff you’re not allowed to do to compete.

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#34
A closely-related issue: Space has long been partially broken in YouTube: if a button is focused, then Space toggles the play state and lets that button activate (the browser default behaviour). This is probably most frustrating if you clicked on the play/pause button with your mouse, so that it’s focused: now pressing Space will pause and immediately resume (or resume and immediately pause again). So I got used to using k instead of Space. Someone should put an event.preventDefault() somewhere.

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#35
post #31
post #17

Another example of https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... : > "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. > "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner,…

> > "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. I see the third option here besides malice and incompetence: indifference. I don't think they really aiming to eradicate Firefox, the last few % of users do not matter that much. But they certainly do seem to be ind…

Selective indifference is malice.

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if Youtube doesn't run CI tests against other browsers than Chrome They have a strong financial incentive to break functionality in browsers that aren't theirs. Why would they ever care to test?

Not really. They have a strong financial interest to have as many eyeballs as possible watching YouTube, because only then can they show ads. I don't see how breaking YouTube for a portion of the world population is a sensible part of that plan.

A lot of people have Chrome installed alongside Firefox or Edge or whatever and will just try the video somewhere else. So YouTube actually gets more revenue and Chrome gets free advertising. If a major website works on Chrome but doesn’t work correctly on Firefox most users will tend to blame the browser instead of the website and think “I stopped using Chrome because of the memory issues but at least it’s reliable.” The logic even sounds superficially reasonable.

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if Youtube doesn't run CI tests against other browsers than Chrome They have a strong financial incentive to break functionality in browsers that aren't theirs. Why would they ever care to test?

Making the web buggy on firefox means we're in the extinguish phase for alternate web engines. Soon there will only be chrome based browsers. And then once that happens, they'll make it harder and harder to build alternative browsers around chrome.

Microsoft will fork Chromium in that case.

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#38

A closely-related issue: Space has long been partially broken in YouTube: if a button is focused, then Space toggles the play state and lets that button activate (the browser default behaviour). This is probably most frustrating if you clicked on the play/pause button with your mouse, so that it’s focused: now pressing Space will pause and immediately resume (or resume and immediately pause again). So I got used to u…

There's another long-standing YouTube space bug too: space doesn't scroll down when the page itself has the focus, like it does on every other web page. It just plays/pauses the video, even if you're way down in the comments.

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if Youtube doesn't run CI tests against other browsers than Chrome They have a strong financial incentive to break functionality in browsers that aren't theirs. Why would they ever care to test?

Not really. They have a strong financial interest to have as many eyeballs as possible watching YouTube, because only then can they show ads. I don't see how breaking YouTube for a portion of the world population is a sensible part of that plan.

For most people, if YouTube does not work in Firefox, they will not switch to a different video platform. They will switch to Chrome.

Re: Space bar does not work on YouTube search at the moment

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if Youtube doesn't run CI tests against other browsers than Chrome They have a strong financial incentive to break functionality in browsers that aren't theirs. Why would they ever care to test?

Not really. They have a strong financial interest to have as many eyeballs as possible watching YouTube, because only then can they show ads. I don't see how breaking YouTube for a portion of the world population is a sensible part of that plan.

It's a trade-off. Which way do they gain more money? From showing the YouTube ads to Firefox users, or from getting users into the Chrome ecosystem for however that is monetized?
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