this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023

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Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away. (old.reddit.com)

submitted 1 year ago by db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] mintiefresh@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What if we are already using YouTube premium and have ublock on FF. Would user agent spoof still be needed??

How annoying.

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[–] x4740N@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No wonder why YouTube got weird for me

[–] jigsaw250@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I was wondering the same. Thought it was something on my end.

[–] GenBlob@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

I had a feeling this was the case. Youtube has been painful for the past month now.

[–] joyjoy@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Once upon a time, Google wanted to kill the user-agent.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any extensions you'd recommend for having Firefox spoof chrome?

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[–] SuperCub@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Fuck Google

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does not happen for me Safari or Firefox.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

They may not be deploying this to all users

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[–] llama@midwest.social 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The YouTube viewing experience on FF is terrible. I have premium no ads and still manage to break the interface occasionally by clicking a new video or seeking the video playing.

[–] blahsay@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Firefox is great for YouTube. Don't support google via premium - those guys aren't exactly short of a dime. Addblockers are flawless.

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[–] corey389@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I feel like Reddit is doing the same shit.

[–] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Guster@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I'm not seeing this issue on Firefox?

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