On Monday, a Redditor demonstrated {that a} just lately noticed five-second video loading delay, seen when utilizing YouTube in Firefox, may very well be eradicated by altering the consumer agent to Chrome. At the moment, YouTube responded with a press release acquired by Android Authority conflating non-Chrome video loading delay points with using advert blockers.
“To assist a various ecosystem of creators globally and permit billions to entry their favourite content material on YouTube, we’ve launched an effort to induce viewers with advert blockers enabled to permit advertisements on YouTube or strive YouTube Premium for an ad-free expertise. Customers who’ve advert blockers put in might expertise suboptimal viewing, whatever the browser they’re utilizing.”
YouTube assertion through Android Authority
For those who take a look at the Reddit put up by vk6_ you will notice a succinct video seize of YouTube being examined in Mozilla Firefox. It’s onerous to elucidate why a plain vanilla Firefox set up would undergo an “synthetic five-second delay,” however you’ll be able to see that there’s one. Miraculously, the YouTube video loading delay disappears when the browser self-identifies as Chrome through an extension which facilitates these sorts of changes.
In an extensions-free Firefox session we tried, the video delay wasn’t noticed. Nevertheless, within the over 800 feedback on the Reddit thread and from the YouTube assertion, one thing is definitely occurring right here. Maybe, like with the advert block warnings, this Firefox throttling conduct targets a set or subset of customers with a sure profile, location, or utilization sample.
If that is Google making pro-Chrome tweaks to how YouTube runs, you’ll additionally maybe count on delays in Edge. Certainly, some Redditors have reported comparable delays in Edge.
One of the helpful Reddit responses highlights one other thread that was began by the uBlock Origin (advert blocking extension) group. Apparently, Firefox customers can stamp on the video delay challenge by including a filter to the uBlock Origin configuration as follows:
www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)
The above code appears to regulate the noticed synthetic delay of 5,000 ms (5 seconds) to a measly 0.001 ms, which is a negligible quantity of anybody’s time, even for a mayfly.
Historical past Repeats
This isn’t the primary reported slowing of YouTube in non-Chrome browsers. About 5 years in the past, there was additionally some controversy when YouTube adopted the Polymer design, making the video web site a lot sooner in Chrome than Firefox or Edge.
Furthermore, in 2019, ZDNet talked to a former Mozilla exec who bemoaned intentional sabotage from the Google camp over a number of years. Johnathan Nightingale, who labored as a GM & VP on Firefox, noticed relations between Google and Firefox bitter as the previous grew extra bold for browser market share. Not solely did YouTube undergo, he noticed “oopses” hitting performance and efficiency in different common Google properties like Gmail and Google Docs.
Equally, in 2017, ex-Microsoft Edge developer Joshua Bakita asserted that “Google saved making adjustments to its websites that broke different browsers, and we could not sustain.” This cat-and-mouse recreation was claimed to be one of many causes Edge moved from its personal renderer to Chromium.