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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

#381

Post by tzs »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #250
kevincox wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User agents are useful. However they tend to be abused much more often than effectively used 1. They are useful for working around bugs. You can match the user agent to work around the bugs on known-buggy browser versions. Ideally this would be a handful of specific matches (like Firefox versions 12-14). You can't do feature detection for many bugs because they may only trigger in very specific situations. Ideally th…

Only option 1 is something that users, who are the people who decide what user-agent to send, might care about. And as you yourself point out, it doesn't happen.

Why do you think users wouldn't care about sites diagnosing problems that are making pages fail to load (#2) or sites testing the site on the browser that the user uses (#3)?

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#382

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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…

Another person is claiming that Google writes custom code for Firefox (or other browsers) to enable tracking, because of the feature difference between Firefox and Chrome [1]. Only one of you can be correct.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347364

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#383

Post by babypuncher »

vsnf wrote: post #188
kjhgksjdfhg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

they are a lazy man's solution to race conditions that does not actually solve the problem of race conditions, only makes them less likely to cause a problem at an often extreme cost to responsiveness as seen here.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#384

Post by acdha »

toyg wrote: post #306
Jensson wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome was bigger than Firefox by 2012, the accusations that Google intentionally made things worse for Firefox came many years after that.

But they referred to behaviour that was present pretty much from the start. It's just that Mozilla folks were extremely tolerant and assumed good faith for a very long time. Google have been disgustingly anticompetitive for a very, very long time at this point.

Yeah, one of the biggest examples being the HTML 5 video push and Chrome’s claims around H.264: Google promised they were going all in on WebM and would remove support soon, but never did. That meant that Firefox users got more errors outright but also that for years even sites like YouTube would leave Firefox using 100% CPU with your laptop fans on high doing software WebM while Chrome users got hardware accelerated H.264. That became moot after Mozilla and Cisco struck that deal and video hardware acceleration for other formats shipped but there was a multi-year period where Firefox suffered badly in comparison to other browsers.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#385

Post by rsolva »

jiggawatts wrote: post #37

Oh, and they also falsely show "4K" in the video quality icon, but "accidentally" play a 720p or even worse quality stream. If you manually select the 4K stream quality, then and only then will YouTube deign to show 4K to you.

Yeah, this has bothered me for a while. Switching to alternative youtube interfaces solved that problem :)

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#386

Post by imiric »

jasode wrote: post #202
imiric wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. I really don't understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends. You get bombarded with ads, you're constantly tracked and experimented on, and your behavior is used to improve their algorithms in order to keep you on the site for as long as possible. It's a hostile user experience, just like most of the mainstream web. Whenever possible, I sugg…

>I really don't understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends. I'm a technically proficient user that's written custom bash scripts for youtube-dl combined with ffmpeg to download videos locally and I still use the official Youtube desktop web browser UI every day for several reasons: + transcripts and close-captioning (use Ctrl+F search for text to find the…

Most of those features are available in OSS tools as well. And for those that are not, there are alternative solutions that might take a bit of work to implement.

I'm not claiming that the OSS tools have feature parity with 1st party frontends, or that they won't require some sacrifices, or effort adjusting. I just think that the trade-off of losing some of the convenience in return for not being tracked and manipulated is well worth it to me, though I can see how it might not be worth it for others.

I do actually think that OSS tools provide a better UX. I can download the media and consume it offline, using any player of choice, on any device, at any time. I find YouTube's recommendations a nuisance, and I can turn those off in Invidious and Piped. Scrubbing in mpv is instantaneous for me for local files and even those served on the LAN, though there is a slight delay when playing directly from YT. There is also a solution for generating thumbnails[1], though I had some issues with it, and didn't end up using it.

At the end of the day, it's a personal choice depending on what you value most, and I'm not trying to convince anyone my choice is inherently better. Thanks for providing your perspective.

[1]: https://github.com/tomasklaen/uosc

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#387

Post by taylodl »

foob wrote: post #330
taylodl wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear Google is only testing for chrome engine and safari: which comprise 97% of the browsers being used. Would you increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test for 3% of the market?

As I said, the decisions are locally reasonable. However, if not supporting Firefox potentially exposed my company to scrutiny over anti-competitive behavior, then, yes, I would absolutely invest in testing procedures to mitigate that. It's also worth emphasizing that it isn't difficult to support Firefox. I'm pretty sure that many of the sites that I visit do so largely by accident. I do a fair bit of web developmen…

Serious question - does anti-competitive behavior even apply to open source? Also, it's the open source chromium, not necessarily the browser Chrome, that dominates the browser market. The largest players in the industry, except for Apple, have lined-up to support chromium. Firefox is going against the grain. Is it Google's job to help them with their mission? Loosely speaking, in anti-competitive scenarios you have to show how a significant faction of the consumers are being harmed. You're going to have a tough time with that one.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#388

Post by rsolva »

mighmi wrote: post #2

The most interesting part from the discussion was noting it's implemented in the most basic, easily avoidable way (just spoof chrome) implying engineers unhappy with these tasks. @dang or op, wrong link. Should be: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...

I sometimes wonder if the use of Firefox is under reported just because a lot of it's users are power users, installing extensions that spoof the user agent. I know I did for a long while, making my Firefox pretend it was Chrome on a Windows machine.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#389

Post by shadowgovt »

Thiez wrote: post #278
GuB-42 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, that is pretty disgusting behavior.

The web developer interprets missing features as damage and polyfills around them.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#390

Post by imiric »

jeroenhd wrote: post #175
imiric wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. I really don't understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends. You get bombarded with ads, you're constantly tracked and experimented on, and your behavior is used to improve their algorithms in order to keep you on the site for as long as possible. It's a hostile user experience, just like most of the mainstream web. Whenever possible, I sugg…

Because using the website is a better experience. None of those tools worked with Sponsorblock last time I tried, for one. I don't want to yt-dlp every video, Piped and Invidious both have awful frontends in comparison, even the Newpipe dev admitted to using Vanced at some point, and yt-dlp needs some massaging to get the right video quality (and it can't download some videos at all). If any of your solutions were be…

> Because using the website is a better experience.

That is debatable. I personally find that the combination of Piped, yt-dlp and mpv provides a far better experience than the official frontends. But this is a personal opinion, and I'm not trying to convince anyone my choice is better. I just didn't think other technical users would prefer using the official frontends.

Thanks for your perspective, though I think it's a bit outdated.

> None of those tools worked with Sponsorblock last time I tried, for one.

Piped, yt-dlp and mpv all support Sponsorblock.

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