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YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

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Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#181

I've recently done a pc upgrade and am now enjoying 64 gigs of ram. Decided to watch a live stream on youtube this weekend. Firefox: 22 GB of ram usage for the youtube tab after ~15 minutes. Tab became unresponsive. Edge: Out of memory error after ~5 minutes. Chrome: working fine, the youtube tab sitting peacefully ay 400-600 MB.

I had the same issue, it turned out to be some random addon I installed years ago. Check if the problem also occurs with everything but uBlock Origin disabled.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#184
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How come switching to User Agent to Chrome fixed it for that Reddit OP? Does it omit this if UA is changed?

When they first introduced anti-adblock crap, you could evade the banner by switching UAs. I'd say it's fair to assume that switching UAs triggers some other code path and this function never gets called.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#185
As a JavaScript Dev, around 2010-2012 it was not uncommon to see `setTimeout(..., n)` hacks, often with n=0 but sometimes even n=1000, n=5000 into a codebase. This could workaround some bugs, and given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back then, often a last-resort.

And yes, am guilty too of committing this to prod back then. I think I haven't had a case where this was deployed in the last decade, but in the ugly SPA days pre angular v1 (and even during angular v1), where you code was this big glued-together conglomerate of various 3rd party UI libraries, this was common. Its ugly as hell, and you really had to be there at that time to understand this. But often it was just a cheap alternative, while debugging and fixing the truly underlying cause would be several man-days or even weeks.

My point being: It might have slipped their QA cracks and was at some point intended to workaround a bug of some obscure Firefox behavior. For a company at youtube's scale this is however pretty embarrassing.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#186
post #170

Another "Youtube is doing shit" thread and yet not a single mention of Peertube. https://joinpeertube.org/en So for all people uploading videos, please have a look at Peertube. It is to Youtube what Mastodon is to Twitter. (and more: it is compatible with Mastodon, one can subscribe to your Peertube channel through his/her mastodon account). I’m not arguing to leave Youtube completely but to offer an alternative to y…

I'd love to see real competition to YouTube. I'm afraid this seems not, the UX isn't great, homepage is useless, you need to click on Browse content then enter some keywords on a blank page, search results limited to 2 items and then you need to click on "Display more videos". I might be to used to youtube homepage, for me it's perfect I get videos right away and suggestions are good. I'm pretty sure this project, Mastodon and others are in good will, but they lack great ux/ui, it seems to me that ux isn't even researched, how can it be a viable competitor?

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use adblockers perfectly fine on Youtube. There was never a real interruption in adblocking either. You just need ublock origin + bypass paywalls.

I think they only disabled adblockers to logged users probably because non logged users don't have to agree to terms of services.

I'm always logged on and using adblockers. So no, that's not it. I also use Youtube probably every day and am a very active user.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#188

From reddit discussion ( https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9... ): > To clarify it more, it's simply this code in their polymer script link: > setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); > which doesn't do anything except making you wait 5s (5E3 = 5000ms = 5s). You can search for it easily in https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/96766c85/jsbin/desktop_pol...

I'm not even mad about Google making my artificially wait 5s for using firefox. I'm mad that such a big company with suposelly decent engineers, are making me wait 5s with literally a sleep, how is even possible to do such thing in such a rudimentary way? I would be like damn that was smart, this feels like, seriously this is the level?

Speaking as someone who only very occasionally does browser related programming, what is the supposed sin committed here by implementing it this way?

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not correct. The surrounding code gives some more context: h=document.createElement("video");l=new Blob([new Uint8Array([/* snip */])],{type:"video/webm"}); h.src=lc(Mia(l));h.ontimeupdate=function(){c();a.resolve(0)}; e.appendChild(h);h.classList.add("html5-main-video");setTimeout(function(){e.classList.add("ad-interrupting")},200); setTimeout(function(){c();a.resolve(1)},5E3); return m.return(a.promise)})}…

Why is it only trying to detect ads when the user agent is Firefox? https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17zdpkl/this_behav...

I would suspect because Google can do the detection in Chrome itself, but not in Firefox.
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