YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on ARM systems

whfsdude@dmv.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 1189 points –
Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
social.treehouse.systems
212

You are viewing a single comment

From what I can understand from the thread, they aren't deliberatly crippling FF.

The way I read it is Chrome gets a pass on the architecture crippling, the others don't.

Someone correct me if I got the wrong idea.

So Google is saying out loud they are trying to be Microsoft and abuse its near monopoy to push their other products.

Got it.

It looks like also this was against adblocker so, again, not specifically Firefox. Quote from the article itself:

The issue was initially reported as targeting Firefox users, but users online have said they’re seeing the delay in Chrome and Edge, too. Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use. Mozilla’s senior brand manager Damiano DeMonte wrote in an email to The Verge that “there’s no evidence that this is a Firefox-specific issue.

Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use

That means nothing, this check could be done on the server side and noone would know

I mean... We can we can invent a thousand conspiracies if we want to...

Except that the delay and ad blocker check is literally in the JavaScript code, you can see it.

Indeed, but google can just transmit different javascript to different users/browsers/regions etc (that's why browsers have useragents, so websites can improve browser compatibility according to the circumstances). It can be decided on a whim and noone would know except some coders at google

Except everyone would know. Multiple people across the globe testing different browsers have looked at the same JavaScript code that is being sent to the browser. The check is there, client-side, google isn’t sending a different JavaScript payload for different browsers. Like you said, they could, but that’s not how it currently functions

Which turned out to also have nothing to do with FF but is targeting adblockers.