Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away.
Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away.
Posted in r/youtube by u/vk6_ • 2,933 points and 264 comments
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Not trying to defend Chrome here as I dislike their other behaviours, but just from what's presented in the video, an alternative explanation would be caching. That is, when the reloading is triggered by the switch of user-agent, the cache is reused and thus a shorter load time.
To exclude this effect, the user needs to either
- Spoof the user-agent and at the same time clear cache (you can disable cache when reloading through the developer's tool), or
- Clear cache, spoof the user-agent to Chrome. Load page, disable the spoofing, reload.
Have you seen this?
https://feddit.it/pictrs/image/0e13c670-4966-4073-89df-f042fe9cc6de.webp
Yes. I'm not a frontend dev, so not familiar with JS code (let alone an obfuscated fragment), but according to this HN comment, it's used for a different ad block detection function.
That makes a lot of sense. It’s still exclusive to Firefox, though
