This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I've been using Firefox for about a year now, and I've definitely seen that 5 second loading delay in Firefox. Every time, the page partially loads like it does in the video, then sits for 5 seconds, then populates all the video thumb nails. It was driving me knows, made me think my Firefox was screwed up, or internet routing issues between me and Youtube.
Those assholes, how malicious!
Is it messing up in Smarttube too? Smarttube keeps buffering for me, or maybe it's just a bug.
Not that I think Google is a great company, but why is this on its own proof of anything based on this single persons video evidence? In my single person test I don't see that 5 second delay when using Firefox and browsing around Youtube. Seems far more likely to be an issue with this persons browser setup than something Google did to me.
And this is precisely why they use an A/B architecture to implement these sorts of changes. "It's not happening on mine, must be in your setup." delays/prevents people from recognizing the bad behavior, and instead of them being called out on it or forced to behave properly, the users they abuse just give up and switch back to Chrome because it "works better", then the A/B lists are shuffled again and the process repeats.
This would be a good point if the problem did not immediately go away completely by simply spoofing the user agent. As soon as youtube thinks that the browser accessing it is Chrome, it behaves perfectly well. Note that the actual web engine used to render the page is not different, just the reported web engine.
Oh, this is about the delay if you're using a full adblocker? I'd assumed this was about the awful choppy rendering performance I get in FF Mobile when it's just starting up a vid (which smooths out after about 5 seconds). I just use FF on Android to be able to run YT vids in the background or with my phone-screen locked.
Wait. Again?
I'm A YouTube Premium subscriber, and I've been noticing this delay on my TV for a few days now - a very noticeable, long pause when opening the home screen until the thumbnails are loaded. I'll explicitly check other places too now, I'm not sure if it's also happening in Firefox for me.
sounds desperate. I'd be selling google stock if I had any, are they really so dependent on loans that interest rates are killing them or is this more AI fuelled bullshit?
Did not notice it today, but I am running ublock origin and they got my back.
I noticed a delay on Opera with uBlock. I attributed it to invisible fights between the adblock and youtube. But idk if that's relevant, I think Opera GX is chromium based.
i was wondering about this! very dumb.
If Chrome is known for one thing, it's absurd User-Agent strings. Why not make it even more absurd???
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (Ahahaha; Fuck you Google; This is actually) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0
