Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 486 posts

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#251

Post by kevincox »

enlyth wrote: post #29
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to be charitable here: could this be a debug/test artefact that inadvertantly got into production?

Without studying the minified code I wouldn't assume malice just yet, this could be just an inexperienced developer trying to lazily fix some browser-specific bug, or something that accidentally made it to production like you say

It could even just be a timeout as part of retry logic or similar. A lot of people seem to be saying that there is no reasonable reason to have a `sleep` in a production application. But there are many legitimate reasons to need to delay execution of some code for a while.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#252

Post by Obscurity4340 »

MereInterest wrote: post #228
Obscurity4340 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that fraudulent? Its amazing how an individual can commit fraud one time and its FRAUD! But a company can do the exact same thing en masse as like a business model over and over and its only ever a misunderstanding that they get a chance to correct and a gentleman's handshake. aAnd even if they didn't, it seems impossible to adjust the dial from civil to criminal as its often left in the consumers hands. Its no…

To my not-a-lawyer understanding, it is fraudulent. Fine print is allowed to clarify an offer, but may not substantially alter the offer as originally made. I could see an argument made that a reasonable person would know an offer to be limited to supported platforms, and that the fine print clarifies which platforms are supported. To me, though, I’d draw a line between unsupported due to underlying limitations (e.g.…

Even if it doesn't technically apply here, the larger point remains that people get handcuffs and corporations get handshakes...

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#253

Post by Kiro »

jb1991 wrote: post #24

I noticed Youtube started doing this in the last couple days, and I use FF. What a silly thing to do, about as juvenile as a company can be.

It's been happening on Chrome as well for the past few days so I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#254

Post by smoldesu »

dschuetz wrote: post #74
csydas wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there maybe some road map or purpose statement on this? it’s not that i don’t believe that this is absolutely true (i’m sure it’s the wet dream of all SV companies…) but google’s offerings are so inconsistent that if that’s really their goal i just can’t see how they mean to get there. every answer to competition is a half baked answer in my experience and i truly just can’t see how google means to do this. google…

Oh yes, it's called WEI as in Web Environment Integrity - https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/25/google_web_environmen... some of its code landed in production Chrome, leading to an outcry. V3 Manifest and WEI are all part of Google's push to make Chrome mandatory to be able to use their services.

It's not just Google's goal, either: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3671132/what-is-manage...

Ensuring you only use the OEM's recommended browser looks like the endgame of the internet.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#256

Post by vanderZwan »

enlyth wrote: post #78
vanderZwan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they let inexperienced developers touch the YT code base without proper code review? Even if that were the case, which is an extremely charitable assumption, that itself would be malice in my opinion.

> You think they let inexperienced developers touch the YT code base Uh, yes? We were all inexperienced at some point. Just the linked file is like 300k lines of unminified code, I doubt it's all written by PHDs with 20 years of experience

It's the "without proper code review" part that I consider malice, not being inexperienced.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#257

Post by progval »

Jensson wrote: post #153
progval wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"oops" https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Google stopped testing stuff in Firefox, that is all they did afaik. We all should know how many bugs and "oppsies" you get when you don't test before releasing new features. Test code snippets being pushed to prod etc. Engineers tend to create paper trails on what they work on, code reviews and bug logs etc are everywhere, so I doubt there is any of those where they say "Make things shit for Firefox to hurt our comp…

Firefox has a small userbase partly because of the early "oopses" described in the article I linked. Those happened a while ago, when Firefox had more users than Chrome.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#258

Post by ayhanfuat »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #241
d3w4s9 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 5E3 is shorter than 5000, just like you can often see !0 to get "true" in minimize code because it saves two characters.

In js I thought 1==true, and 1 is shorter than !0 ?? Never seen the use of exponential notation for numbers in js though (not a surprise, I'm not really a programmer), it seems sensible to me from the point of shifting the domain from ms to seconds.

> In js I thought 1==true, and 1 is shorter than !0 ??

`1==true` but `1!==true` (`===` and `!==` check for type equality as well and while `!0` is a boolean, `1` is not.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#259

Post by c-fe »

timeon wrote: post #220
FoodWThrow wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is just anecdote, but sometimes (especially when I'm on slower internet) Safari + AdGuard will have glitch [0] on YouTube. Never happened with Firefox + Ublock Origin. [0] Unable to press play and showing image with Ad instead.

I experience the same glitch and i like it because you can just reload the page (cmd-r) and then the video starts so if you're used to it you can skip ads within less than a second and you dont get annoyed by the ad sound/video, just an image.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#260

Post by blacklight »

I said it already several times, but it's worth repeating.

Stop using the youtube.com frontend entirely. It's enshittified beyond redemption. If they could replace it with a big ads billboard with no added value while leaving their profits intact, they'll do it.

If you really have to watch some content that it's only on YouTube, use Piped, Invidious, or one of the many tools based on youtube-dl or any of its forks.

Google deserves piracy now because a big loss of revenue resulting from their hostile practices is the only thing that can stop this enshittification process. Google will stop only when users say that it's gone too far. Scraping them, pirating them and financially damaging them is a moral duty at this point.

Post reply on HN