#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

  • GentriFriedRice@lemmy.world
    14·
    11 months ago

    This just seems to be detecting if the browser is Firefox. The function is even named isGecko which is Mozilla’s browser engine used by Firefox. Edge, IE (Trident) don’t return true from isGecko

    Unless I’m missing something I don’t see where the delay is added

    • Voxel@infosec.exchangeOP
      03·
      11 months ago

      @GentriFriedRice There are multiply dectections and like mentioned in another comment there was multiply reports from Edge and Firefox users that they experienced the same issue.

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        5·
        11 months ago

        It would be a lot more conclusive if you could find somewhere the isGecko function is being used in association with a delay though, there are other things they could use it for.