Google slows down Firefox users when watching YouTube…

  • middlemanSI@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    First thing that comes to mind is user agent spoofer. Anyway I say let them, it’s their company with userbase content and it’s based in US. They can do whatever they want with it because terms of service. I can just look at my sexy John Oliver poster on the wall for 30 min and replace their service.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        1 year ago

        If we all go ahead and spoof our user agents to Chrome, Google will say ‘No one uses Firefox’. Use better solutions like Invidious and Piped in combination wit LibRedirect instead.

        Do these pass through the user agent to YouTube? Otherwise they’ll have the same issue with Firefox being underrepresented.

        • YouTube doesn’t actually throttle the video stream on the server, they just use some JavaScript on their official website that adds delay to the playback when Firefox is detected. The Invidious client directly connects to Google servers for video streaming, but it just displays the raw video stream without any ads, artificial delay or any crap like that.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            1 year ago

            I was replying to this part of the comment:

            If we all go ahead and spoof our user agents to Chrome, Google will say ‘No one uses Firefox’.

            If the alternatives don’t use a Firefox user-agent, it’ll also have the same effect in reducing the amount of Firefox traffic in their logs.

            I edited my comment a bit to clarify :)

            • If the alternatives don’t use a Firefox user-agent, it’ll also have the same effect in reducing the amount of Firefox traffic in their logs.

              When you stream a video from Google servers through the Invidious frontend and you use Firefox, the user-agent that gets reported to googlevideo.com (the domain that the requests for YouTube video streams are sent to) is Firefox. You can easily verify that yourself, go to an Invidious instance using Firefox, make sure to disable ‘Proxy videos’ in the Invidious settings, open the Developer Tools, go the Network tab and load a video. Click on any request to *.googlevideo.com and look at the user-agent, you can see, it’s a Firefox user-agent. This thread explains how the slowdown is introduced in YouTube JavaScript:

              Using Invidious avoids this.

              • dan@upvote.au
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                1 year ago

                Wow! I thought it was a bug, but that code does it intentionally. Amazing.

                • Obviously it’s intentional, it’s Google, what do you expect from this piece of shit Big Tech corporation? Don’t be evil has already belonged to the past for a long time.

    • GrapesOfAss@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s actually how the discovered this, user agent was changed to chrome and it was no longer slowed down