YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users
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404media.co
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
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"They're the same picture."
Also, that does not explain why:
Now, if only we knew who made Chrome and YouTube... The mind boggles.
Given that Google's been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays...
Nope, I'm not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.
It's more obvious than that even; their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits. That's more than enough info to assume they're going to go to war in the near future (now) with them.
They've always been at war with ad blockers. It's just most major multinationals have matured or diversified to a point where they are functional monopolies, and no longer gain any value in competition or service improvement.
At this stage of the merger and consolidation phase of global capitalism, with captured governments that won't dare break them up or fine them more than a meek virtue signal, the most cost effective way to satiate the infinite growth of capitalism is to increase the exploitation and value extraction of their existing user base as much as possible (aka enshittification).
Concluding implicitly: "... and therefore a threat to all your computers' security" :-)
Sounds like the single best reason to use one.
Dear God, won't anyone think of the shareholders?
Just for clarity, they already switched protocols (Manifest v3), they just have continued to support the old format (v2) that allows unlock origin to work. They are discontinuing support for v2 next year.
What really pisses me off is that mv3 is becoming a standard that Vivaldi, Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc. will use.
Mind you that Firefox will adjust it to be able to fully support ad blocker.
The last scenario is clearly a breach of anti-trust laws. It is time for alphabet to be broken up. Their monopoly is way worse than AT&T every was.
Alphabet's monopoly is bad, make no mistake.
But they aren't controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma' bell and pa' bell days.
Google controls over 90% of the search business in the US and that's the way the vast majority of people begin their browsing. It's why US v Google is currently in the courts
MS vs US back in the 90's did not result in anything significant. This pretty much will happen again with Google. Some lobbyists will just do their thing, some minor slaps in the wrist and concessments between DoJ and Alohabet etc and Google will continue to Googling around.
I'm not trying to argue there's appetite to break up Google among the people with the power to do it. I'm just arguing Google has a monopoly similar to Ma Bell.
Yeah I agree
Adsense is literally 90% of the market. Let alone android...
Uh... Gmail, Ad sense, search?
They've got like a dozen duopolies going on, they have far more control and ability to leverage it than Bell ever did
I am a Firefox user who uses adblock and I don't get the issue.
I think uBlock might already be blocking that code.
I was getting the delay early yesterday and then it went away. I guess they must have done something in uBO.
Just turned it off. No difference.
YouTube rolls features out in waves
Same here. Firefox, ublock origin, privacy badger. Videos start playing in under 2 seconds. I've also never got the adblock warning.
Lucky I guess.
They just haven't rolled it out to you yet.
Chrome sends every single website you visit to Google. You already pay with your privacy.
I know several websites consider firefox's built-in privacy settings an adblocker in certain configurations. I get notices on many sites and use no adblocker. Not sure if it's the case here.
What do you mean by change user agent to chrome? Asking 4 a friend
For a specific how to, there's a bunch of firefox addons that do it, but the mozilla recommended one is this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
It's super easy to use, just open it and it gives a bunch of options.
This is my current (fake) user agent;
With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;
A few more clicks;
And finally;
Now, that last one is making it look like I'm using internet explorer... Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.
I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)
Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with "fancy" features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.
Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it's absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like "See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn't bother to support it anymore".
This is a good summary of this mess: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
I personally like seeing Mozilla loud and proud in all the user agents.
It's a mess, but also an echo of history.
When you browse to a website, your browser passes info about itself to the server hosting that site. This info is intended to help the server provide the best rendering code for your browser. This is called your User Agent.
However, Google is using it here to identify Firefox users, and is apparently choosing to lump them all in a box called "adblock users" instead of trying to identify an ad blocker more accurately.
If you do change your user agent, I would use an extension that does it only on YouTube domains.
We want independent metrics to show rising Firefox use, not falling.
Yeah cool Iβll have a look. Any extensions spring to mind?
That's because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU, so they might have thought that they're super crafty and used markers such as user agent for their cool coercion delay code thingy
To add on
You can spoof this user agent to see if a website does something shady depending on which browser you're using.
So if you keep all other variables the same, and just toggle the user agent value, YouTube behaves differently
How can we do that?
I haven't tried it in a while, but I think there are browser extensions for it. Might need to ask someone else for how to do it these days
Supposedly Firefox users spoofing the Chrome user agent don't get the issue because the script tries to execute the 5s delay in a way that works on Chrome but not on FF. Because the Chrome method doesn't work on FF, it just gets skipped entirely. But I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate, just read about it.
But then shouldn't there be a delay when using actual Chrome?
There's people reporting exactly that if they're using certain ad-blocking tools.
I did see Chrome users mention a delay (on lemmy) but I haven't personally checked it out
My understanding is the method they can use on chrome is near instant, but the alternative they use on Firefox is slower, hence the delay. Is this BS? Yeah probably, but it does at least logically follow.
It could be as simple as for Chrome assuming there is a certain API, while for Firefox, give it a try and assume no if no response in 5sec