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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by voxel@infosec.exchange to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

#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

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[-] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is that from Google? I was expecting much better code given the average engineer salary. That code looks pretty ugly.

[-] pipows@lemmy.today 20 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the explanation!

this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
245 points (100.0% liked)

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