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Google slows down Firefox users when watching YouTube.... (fosspost.org)

submitted 11 months ago by furycd001@lemmy.ml to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

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Google slows down Firefox users when watching YouTube....

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[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] netchami@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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 :)

[–] netchami@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] netchami@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

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.