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

281–290 of 486 posts

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#281

Post by shantara »

GuB-42 wrote: post #263
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...

Probably because there are other methods for Chrome that don't apply to Firefox. Like when I noticed that some sites did some URL rewriting trickery on Firefox and others browsers, but not for Chrome. The trick is to show you the proper URL the link points to, but as you click, it is substituted for one that is a redirection, for tracking purposes (ex: " https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http:://actualsite ..."). On Chr…

I've also noticed this behavior popping up a lot lately, but I had no idea why. The URL with tracking included was still blocked by uBlock Origin, but having to manually copy-paste the relevant portion was an annoyance.

Thanks for the context!

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#282

Post by neonsunset »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #197
neonsunset wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. Google has been breaking non-Chromium (or sometimes even just non-Google Chrome) browsers for years on YouTube and their other websites. It was especially egregious when MSFT was trying their own EdgeHTML/Trident-based Edge. Issues would go away by faking user-agent.

> It was especially egregious when MSFT was trying their own EdgeHTML/Trident-based Edge. Issues would go away by faking user-agent. Why is there more than one user-agent? Does somebody still expect to receive different content based on the user-agent, and furthermore expect that the difference will be beneficial to them? What was Microsoft trying to achieve by sending a non-Chrome user-agent?

It is normal practice for each browser to have its own user-agent, no? But the fact that Google intentionally detected it and used polyfills or straight up invalid JS at the time was insane. A similar spin today is "Your browser is unsupported" you see here and there. When a major platform such as YouTube does it, it is really impactful.

It would never do feature detection, would give lower quality h264 video, etc. Back then, there was really nice third-party application myTube which had made this less of an issue but it was eventually killed through API changes.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#283

Post by [deleted] »

chii wrote: post #141
bambax wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented version? This isn't the future we were promised, but it sure is the future we have.

> Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented version? in which case, why buy it at all? A torrent isn't going to load as fast as what you paid YT for.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#284

Post by GTP »

dash2 wrote: post #214
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...

Does Firefox allow a wider range of plugins, including adblockers?

Yes, there are plenty. You can have a look here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#285

Post by sofixa »

jiggawatts wrote: post #151
sofixa wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out Did they? Both Prime Video and Disney+ have very very narrow subtitle and audio language choices. > If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright…

Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I can be bothered to count, certainly. Are you saying it's some sort of challenge beyond the abilities of a Senior Technical Lead with total comp in the seven digits to figure out how to make a list of items more than 4 or 5 entries long? Too many megabytes of JSON to shove down the wire for more? > Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright? They definitely do not.…

> They definitely do not. That's not how work-for-hire translations work. You pay someone to translate your shows' subtitles for you, then you own the copyright on that work that you paid for. That's how that works. No weird region-locked silliness.

If you skip the fact that Netflix do regional deals with local content houses to sell Netflix-made stuff either in theatres or get TV releases, in which case translations could be a part of the deal to be be provided by the local entity who's getting the rights; or the other, more common scenario, where Netflix acquire local content for wider publication (e.g. Casa de Papel/Money Heist is a very popular example), where again, there might be complications.

> Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I can be bothered to count, certainly.

I haven't found that to be the case, but had Apple TV only briefly because of the general poor quality (watched 3 series on it, all three devolved into trope after trope barely going below the obvious surface).

> Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this profoundly against inter-racial love. On purpose. They wrote the code to do this.

Is woke in the room with us right now? Can you point it out and explain what it is? For the record, "races" are a stupid social construct that should have died out with the Nazis. And people can be of different ethnicities while speaking the same language(s), or inversely of the same ethnicity while speaking different languages. Being "woke", "inter-racial" and different languages are completely orthogonal topics.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#286

Post by goku12 »

progval wrote: post #63
throwaw12 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, this kind of things are not done by engineers. * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue" * engineer adds a flag, with different control parameters * Some genius in Product figures this out and updates the experiment to slow down for competitors When company gets a backlash from public: "oops, we forgot to clean up a…

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

This should be a top level comment on news like this. Everyone needs to be reminded that this is neither a new behavior nor something unintentional.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#287

Post by orbisvicis »

foob wrote: post #219

I use Firefox, and Google's sites are literally the only ones where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken for me, the map wouldn't update at all when attempting to search or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript code spinning the CPU nonstop. It's l…

Recently, play store images don't load (about 60% - 80% missing per app) in Firefox.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#288

Post by laserbeam »

jug wrote: post #140
laserbeam wrote: post #120

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 don't know what your problem is exactly but this is not normal behavior on Firefox at least. Check your extensions to begin with, or for a quick test, try watching a video in a prvivate tab.

Just, ublock origin, a password manager, and the kagi extension for my search engine. ublock origin was installed on all browsers. I'm not even trying to watch it without ublock, as that would be an unreasonable thing to do in general.

I know this is not normal behaviour, and it's likely unintetional, but I'll be damn sure google won't bother to fix it. I'm most surprised by Edge as it's running chromium and it should share some similarity to chrome.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#289

Post by whalesalad »

foob wrote: post #219

I use Firefox, and Google's sites are literally the only ones where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken for me, the map wouldn't update at all when attempting to search or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript code spinning the CPU nonstop. It's l…

bigquery console in ffx has like +120 latency potion

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#290

Post by bee_rider »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #66
dschuetz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now. Google is working on making a premium internet based on their services that permeate the whole web which they plan to serve only to "trusted devices" running Chrome - I do not think this is going to work out well for them.

I hope not, but I suspect they will succeed. My observation is that the vast majority of people around me here in Europe see Google as completely trustworthy. It's truly profound how split-second loading delays contribute to a negative impression about digital products. I guess we're all worn out from using our devices. Most of us just want "thing" ASAP, and we'll compulsively click 'agree' to anything that happens t…

I’m aware that it is quite popular, so I guess I must be weird, but YouTube being slow (and consuming lots of CPU due to that ambient mode stunt), when every other video site works fine in Firefox, and embedded YouTube videos on other sites work fine in Firefox, has just made me think YouTube is a pretty crappy site.

I’d never dream of changing browsers because some video site (mostly full of low-effort distracting silliness), didn’t work well in mine.

Post reply on HN