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

421–430 of 486 posts

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#421

Post by brailsafe »

n4r9 wrote: post #98
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…

Very good point. It's important to recognise that developers in many companies are often not fully aware of the intended use of features they're asked to create. Another example that springs to mind is Uber, who used a tool called "Greyball" to avoid contact between drivers and authorities: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-greyball-idUKKBN16B0... My initial reaction was astonishment that the engineers would ha…

Why would you be surprised that they'd implement this? It's their job to implement things.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#423

Post by hooverd »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #382
Jensson wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nah, they're totally incentivized to make sure tracking works while still having plenty of oopsies that could cause people to switch.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#424

Post by Vicinity9635 »

david-gpu wrote: post #198
jiggawatts wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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 I'm on the same boat and I hear you. And since we are on this subject, do you know what else grinds my gears? The whole idea of cultural appropriation. So if your ancestry is X then you can't do/wear/celebrate Y. So when you ask these people something like: Is it okay for m…

I consider this to be the answer to "cultural appropraition" which people seem to have made up because their hobby is being offended: https://rumble.com/v3wx1mz-is-this-outfit-offensive-students...

I've seen similar videos with Japanese garb too. The offendatrons hate it. The actual Japanese people love that you're enjoying their culture.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#427

Post by jahsome »

duringmath wrote: post #426

> For me, YouTube works equally well across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Other team members also could not replicate this delayed behavior across browsers. "Reportedly" also known as: "unable to confirm but we saw it on reddit so it must be true"

I am so damn sick of "news" articles summarizing social media posts. Worse, the posts are seemingly chosen at random without even going to the effort of contacting the poster, not that such an interview would improve anything.

If I wanted to read what random Twitter users thought about a topic, I'd just read Twitter. I read news articles to learn from experts I wouldn't otherwise have access to, not random Reddit trolls, Instagram moms, and Russian Twitter bots.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#428

Post by Hamuko »

duringmath wrote: post #426

> For me, YouTube works equally well across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Other team members also could not replicate this delayed behavior across browsers. "Reportedly" also known as: "unable to confirm but we saw it on reddit so it must be true"

Google is constantly running "experiments" in their products so even if you and your friends can't replicate it, doesn't mean that it's not happening.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#429

Post by duringmath »

Hamuko wrote: post #428
duringmath wrote: post #426

> For me, YouTube works equally well across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Other team members also could not replicate this delayed behavior across browsers. "Reportedly" also known as: "unable to confirm but we saw it on reddit so it must be true"

Google is constantly running "experiments" in their products so even if you and your friends can't replicate it, doesn't mean that it's not happening.

Doesn't mean it is happening either especially since the code in question is still present.

At any rare you should probably confirm/disconfirm these kinds of allegations before you decide to publish it verbatim.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#430

Post by dmonitor »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #132
ayhanfuat wrote: post #3

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...

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)})}…

if it’s anti-adblock, does it run even with premium?
Post reply on HN