#YouTube is making the watching experience worse on #Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
I didn’t believe it the first time I heard abt it, since it sounded more like a conspiracy theory than a actual thing, but it’s true. Google does add 5s timeout specifically to Firefox and Edge users when they try to watch a video on YT. If you want to know more about it, Mental Outlaw make a very good video abt it (Link: https://youtu.be/v4gXhmzQztE ). I think Google did this, to get people moving to Chrome since the majority will think this is a browser issue, nobody would expect YouTube to purposely doing this. In the attached Screenshot you can see that YouTube checks the user agent of browsers to see if it’s Edge, Firefox or not. You can bypass this by changing your User agent to chrome.
Edit: Due a lot of people saying a lot of different things abt it, I want to say that I’m not 100% sure abt how exactly this works, there is a inbuild delay by Google, but who is actually affected, there are a lot of different opinions abt it. I wasn’t able to verify this myself in LibreWolf, but this could be the case due my intensive hardening I did and this is just a result of what I found in the code and what Mental Outlaw and others shared across social media, if you got different or additional infos abt this feel free to comment and I suggest everyone ti also check the comment section.
#privacy #youtube #google #dataprotection #firefox #msedge #browser @privacy
I’ve been using freetube for almost 2 years now and as long as google doesn’t find a way to restrict that access I couldn’t give less of a fuck about every dumb restriction they introduce. Freetube on desktop and newpipe on mobile devices for when you wanna ruin your eyes and you’ll never see an ad again that’s not product placement. I genuinely don’t understand how people still use google products when they have the option to just don’t?!
FreeTube has built in SponsorBlock, you can tell it to automatically and seamlessly skip sections of videos, such as sponsors, self ads, intros, outros,…
And Newpipe has a forked version with Sponsorblock integration. Or, Libretube has it built in as well.
Yeah I know, but for some of my channels the sponsors are part of the storytelling and I’d miss stuff if I autoskip them. I’m not too bothered by sponsors most of the time either and I think it’s kinda interesting to see which company is currently trying to establish itself in which bubble, but I also totally understand why people would use that feature.
This looks to me like some bog standard browser detection code. I personally think it’s not great to have this kind of thing, but purely for technical reasons. There’s no clear indication what they are doing with the result of this function. Maybe the YT link has more damning evidence, but I certainly don’t see it in this code.
Fuck google tho
I’m not even sure the code in this image is related to YouTube at all. Seems like a bog standard code copy pasted from somewhere. The video doesn’t really go into any detail anyways, except to show there is a 5 sec delay inserted, but the code seems te be related to ads and not anything about which browser is used.
This whole story is just made up, someone put two unrelated things together based on a poor understanding of the code and the internet ran with Google bad Firefox good!
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lmao
Yes, but omg that font and color scheme.
Not my ss
piped and yt-dlp are also good
NUKED the problem in a SINGLE post 😜
I have never experienced that… Maybe ublock blocks that? I for sure haven’t changed my user agend
@SaltyIceteaMaker Same, I think it’s bc of uBO or other modifications from or which I made to LibreWolf, but other people made reports on Reddit and other Social Media platforms that they expierenced that and the code obviously shows that YT is doing that stuff.
Yes, uBlock devs said that they fixed the problem
@Bear_with_a_hammer Ah alright, goos to know. Do you have a link to it?
This just seems to be detecting if the browser is Firefox. The function is even named isGecko which is Mozilla’s browser engine used by Firefox. Edge, IE (Trident) don’t return true from isGecko
Unless I’m missing something I don’t see where the delay is added
@GentriFriedRice There are multiply dectections and like mentioned in another comment there was multiply reports from Edge and Firefox users that they experienced the same issue.
It would be a lot more conclusive if you could find somewhere the isGecko function is being used in association with a delay though, there are other things they could use it for.
I personally use Invidious (Privacy front-end of YouTube) using Docker. Though it can be compiled and run standalone as well.
It doesn’t take much resource (< 100 MB) to run on my system. There is NO ad or no pause.
It’s like YouTube Premium account with ZERO tracking.
I think the function in the image only checks for firefox browser and not Edge. It explicitly returns false if it finds
Edgein your user agent.Hopefully youtube only checks the user agent which can be changed with just a few clicks using an addon.
@programmer_belch Not sure since I’m not so good at javascript, but I know abt several reports and articles that Edge users has the same issue as Firefox users.
Yes, I don’t deny that, I thought the javascript in the image was presented as the offending code that checks for the browser before giving the delay
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yt plays a funny game with anti ad people.
imo, I’ll just wait until the uBO filter masters sort this out. Or another yt-like platform appears.
uBO filters won’t work the way they used to because Chrome’s v3 manifest will explicitly prevent them from working the way they have been.
They will continue working on everything not chromium, so 50% of the platforms they are targeting.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/v4gXhmzQztE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Is that from Google? I was expecting much better code given the average engineer salary. That code looks pretty ugly.
This looks like code after being compiled and transpiled from something like Typescript and Babel, it’s not what the engineer actually wrote.
For people that are not programmers: this code probably was generated by a program based on a different, supposedly better code. This is done because many browsers will only execute legacy JavaScript, and that is a pain in the ass to work with, so people work with better different languages or newer versions of JavaScript and a program just translates that to the lagacy JavaScript that old browsers will support.
Thanks for the explanation!
My Firefox only gets the delay when I’m in private browsing mode. When I’m logged in to Youtube, no delay.
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for toi ?
@poudlardo
I’m not sure I understand you?I thought you were speaking french. “moi” is “me” in french
Well, actually, many google services perform worse on my computers when I’m using firefox than when I’m using some chromium based browser.
Wow, I thought the same op. Incredible.
@voxel @privacy This video explains that it’s not just #Firefox users being affected by the delay, but #Safari, #Edge, #Brave and even #Chrome itself. It also has nothing to do solely with the #browser you use, but rather a combination of that and your #ad blocker. #Google’s testing this with different groups of people, that’s why changing your agent string seems to help.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/xJxrN3CaTs4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
 is making the watching experience worse on [#Firefox](https://infosec.exchange/tags/Firefox) and Microsoft Edge.](https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/111/465/537/377/547/676/original/f12bd44c1339a23a.png){kind=link}