Is this arguably anticompetitive and illegal?
Nobody can even state that it's actually happening "for competitive browsers" as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it's just wild speculation and bandwagoning.
You absolutely can tell what's happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when ontimeupdate promise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.
I'm sorry but I don't see how that check is browser-specific. Is that part happening on the browser side?
They don't need to put incriminating "if Firefox" statements in their code -- the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.
Easy enough to test though. Load the page with a UA changer and see if it still shows up when Firefox pretends to be Chrome
The video in the linked article does just that. The page takes 5 seconds to load the video, the user changes the UA, they refresh the page and suddenly the video loads instantly. I would have liked to see them change the UA back to Firefox to prove it's not some weird caching issue though
Well, at least I learned that javascript understands exponential notation. I never even bothered to try that lol
It’s not wild speculation as there is compelling, if incomplete, evidence. And to describe everyone’s reaction as “bandwagoning” is ridiculous. Firefox and Mullvad are my daily drivers. This directly impacts me. The fediverse is going to have a disproportionate number of non-chrome users.
There's been multiple posts pointing to some possibly "wait for ads to finish loading" type code. It's quite possible that it's just bugged in Firefox etc since browsers are horrendously inconsistent etc.
But that doesn't make a cool headline so instead the "it's Google being evil" story is the popular one.
it was already made public in the lawsuit some weeks ago that they are indeed slowing down youtube for firefox.
Link?
So Alphabet:
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
has the most used video platform online, with no close second (unless you count porn, but i'd still argue its not close)
has the biggest share of devices relying on its platform worldwide (android)
has the most used search engine worldwide.
Alphabet has to be split up. Alphabet alone is deciding what shape internet will take in the future.
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
Which was branched from Apple’s open Webkit base, but let’s all also forget about that.
They take the IP of others, spin it a bit and then block everyone. Burn them down.
Acting like Apple didn't do the same thing with khtml to make WebKit.
All of those are meaningless peanuts versus
My long bet: The EU will force Google Search + Ads, to separate from Youtube within a decade.
It’s fucking incredible watching Google change from a fairly well-liked company into essentially fucking Comcast. Fucking incredible.
Unchecked capitalism is a real motherfucker ain't it?
Again? I remember they did this years ago when releasing Chrome.
Incidentally, I dropped Youtube's web app like a rock when they started messing with adblockers and today they emailed me to say they're cutting down features in my account because "I don't have enough of a history".
I swear, these decaying tech firms just don't get the value of not appearing to be flailing in desperation.
The delay also does not trigger just once; it is reportedly triggered every time YouTube links are opened in a new tab.
This part got me yesterday as I was listening to music. I loaded a new video in a tab and the other tab waited 5 seconds. I thought I had paused it or something but nope, every time you load a new tab it delays all the other tabs by 5 seconds.
This is the exact reason I don't trust anything hosted online. If it's something I want to enjoy more than once, I download it.
Companies hosting things online tend to become authoritarian dictators in all but name, which is their right as they own the services and hardware. But it almost always makes the end user experience shitty and overly complicated, or filled with spyware, or requires you give away your rights to privacy or lawsuit, etc..
So if there's a song or something that I like online, I'm downloading that and keeping it on my computer to listen to whenever I feel like it. I don't have the time or energy to play games with these greedy ass corporations.
And the ironic part is, that while they would absolutely froth the mouth about me doing this, they're the ones that drove me to it. It feels like an emotionally abusive relationship, are they keep making our just a man some gaslighting me, then getting angry when I fight back or tell them no.
It it legal? I remember when China's tech giants started infighting and the party ended up dividing them and phorbiding them to do so.
They where creating tech exclusive for their devices and internally block all other out.
I just figured if we aren't doing it here there should be a reason. (Apple appart)
Edit:guys what I'm saying matters the orthographic mistakes can be easily attribute to my lack of interest in writing the proper queen's English when any shit will do
I’m sorry to be the spelling guy but it’s “forbid” not “phorbid”
Do you have poor spelling fobia?
If it's happening it's not doing so for everyone. I use Firefox and I have never seen this delay.
I haven’t experienced it either, but Google also typically rolls out changes in waves. They rarely just push to prod and call it a day. They push changes in waves, so they can pull the update or make adjustments if the early waves have issues.
TBF I've seen a rare behavior in FF that makes some websites load slowly for no good reason (not an adblock thing). Anticompetitive either way but Google could be exploiting this bug.
Someone should investigate deeply. My combo of a whitelist firewall on an OpenWRT variant and Graphene often has a bandwidth issue that is clearly software related only after watching something from YT. I can stop the apps manually and close everything related to browsing and the connection issue still exists. I can disconnect the internet from my router and the problem still persists. However, if I shutdown all 3 devices for a few minutes and bring them up fresh, the network connection is flawless. Something is running in memory, and I believe it is related to YT, but I lack the skills to break it down further. I like to run an AI server and it is simply useless if anything on the network has connected to YT since booting.
I've also noticed when family is watching YT premium (not something I use) and I am downloading a LLM from HF, the internet bandwidth of our network more than doubles on my wired connection. In between the streaming packets from YT the speed on the download jumps massively. If family is watching YT, I can actually download a LLM faster. That just seems odd to me that those are connected.
While this is abhorrent, I have to say in general Firefox is just painfully slow on mobile compared to other browsers. Don't know what it's doing but I stopped using it because it's noticeably slow.
90% of the time I go to search something in Firefox it just straight up refuses to load anything and I have to close the tab and start another...
The worst part is that a Youtube Premium Subscription costs more than Netflix or other streaming providers here in Australia.. And you're basically paying for ad removal of a metric ton of low quality content (and their music service, which isn't as good as others I found)
That being said, this might not be true (I've seen lots of BS online regarding browsers in the past)
I post videos a few times a year to share events with family. I just posted a few yesterday. I can't in good faith continue to post to YT and encourage my family to use it as the platform declares war on their users.
But what else is there that allows me to post videos for free and my family can just watch them without having to install a new app, register for yet another service or configure some obscure plug in?
There's other services, but they're populated largely by the sort of people Youtube has kicked off entirely, which some people don't like.
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