YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users

So Alphabet:

• is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)

• has the most used video platform online, with no close second (unless you count porn, but i'd still argue its not close)

• has the biggest share of devices relying on its platform worldwide (android)

• has the most used search engine worldwide.

Alphabet has to be split up. Alphabet alone is deciding what shape internet will take in the future.

Is this arguably anticompetitive and illegal?

It’s fucking incredible watching Google change from a fairly well-liked company into essentially fucking Comcast. Fucking incredible.

Again? I remember they did this years ago when releasing Chrome.

Incidentally, I dropped Youtube's web app like a rock when they started messing with adblockers and today they emailed me to say they're cutting down features in my account because "I don't have enough of a history".

I swear, these decaying tech firms just don't get the value of not appearing to be flailing in desperation.

All I have left to say about Google and Youtube in particular is that Youtubes ads have become so problematic, both in amount and quality (like seriously, people get banned for using innocuous words in videos targeted at adult audiences, yet completely fucked up ads are squarely targeted at children) and at this point, it's time for YouTube to die.

A new platform needs to come along.

Which will be hard since Google has such a stranglehold on the datacenter and backbone level that they have an absolute advantage when it comes to bandwidth and storage costs. Which is the main cost for video platforms like YouTube.

The delay also does not trigger just once; it is reportedly triggered every time YouTube links are opened in a new tab.

This part got me yesterday as I was listening to music. I loaded a new video in a tab and the other tab waited 5 seconds. I thought I had paused it or something but nope, every time you load a new tab it delays all the other tabs by 5 seconds.

It it legal? I remember when China's tech giants started infighting and the party ended up dividing them and phorbiding them to do so.

They where creating tech exclusive for their devices and internally block all other out.

I just figured if we aren't doing it here there should be a reason. (Apple appart)

Edit:guys what I'm saying matters the orthographic mistakes can be easily attribute to my lack of interest in writing the proper queen's English when any shit will do

If it's happening it's not doing so for everyone. I use Firefox and I have never seen this delay.

I suspect this is less of a slowdown and more of a "we're trying to detect adblockers and in Chrome we can do most of this check on the application level which is fast, while on Firefox we have to do it the extra slow way and we CBA to optimize any of it because the delay is to our advantage."

TBF I've seen a rare behavior in FF that makes some websites load slowly for no good reason (not an adblock thing). Anticompetitive either way but Google could be exploiting this bug.

Someone should investigate deeply. My combo of a whitelist firewall on an OpenWRT variant and Graphene often has a bandwidth issue that is clearly software related only after watching something from YT. I can stop the apps manually and close everything related to browsing and the connection issue still exists. I can disconnect the internet from my router and the problem still persists. However, if I shutdown all 3 devices for a few minutes and bring them up fresh, the network connection is flawless. Something is running in memory, and I believe it is related to YT, but I lack the skills to break it down further. I like to run an AI server and it is simply useless if anything on the network has connected to YT since booting.

I've also noticed when family is watching YT premium (not something I use) and I am downloading a LLM from HF, the internet bandwidth of our network more than doubles on my wired connection. In between the streaming packets from YT the speed on the download jumps massively. If family is watching YT, I can actually download a LLM faster. That just seems odd to me that those are connected.

The worst part is that a Youtube Premium Subscription costs more than Netflix or other streaming providers here in Australia.. And you're basically paying for ad removal of a metric ton of low quality content (and their music service, which isn't as good as others I found)

That being said, this might not be true (I've seen lots of BS online regarding browsers in the past)

Use Invidious or Piped in combination with LibRedirect in order to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Invidious or Piped.

I post videos a few times a year to share events with family. I just posted a few yesterday. I can't in good faith continue to post to YT and encourage my family to use it as the platform declares war on their users.

But what else is there that allows me to post videos for free and my family can just watch them without having to install a new app, register for yet another service or configure some obscure plug in?

Permanently Deleted

Decided to test it out myself on Firefox and Edge. Didn't get the delay, but did get ads both times because I don't have adblockers set up over there. The second was unskippable. Ugh.

That’s been the case since Chrome was released.

Surely this is against anti-trust laws.

Imagine if Microsoft slowed down everything that wasn't on their services, it's insane.

That's odd

"Reportedly"? Could they not just open Firefox and confirm?

User-Agent switcher.

While this is abhorrent, I have to say in general Firefox is just painfully slow on mobile compared to other browsers. Don't know what it's doing but I stopped using it because it's noticeably slow.