• Schwim Dandy@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • LoafyLemon@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      https://pastebin.com/TqjzbqQE

      • Schwim Dandy@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        I’m sorry but I don’t see how that check is browser-specific. Is that part happening on the browser side?

        • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • phx@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            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

            • TastehWaffleZ@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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

              • phx@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                Yeah, and also Edge or an older version of Chrome etc just to be sure.

            • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I don’t know, nor am I speculating. The person I was replying to said they didn’t see a browser check in the code, which isn’t enough to dismiss it.

    • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I’ve duplicated it on 4 machines across 3 OS’s (windows 11, macOS, steamOS). Glad you got lucky. I’m sure you’re also familiar with A/B testing but if not I’m happy to explain it.

          It is absolutely possible there is a reasonable explanation but for you to say 1) nothing is happening and 2) it’s “bandwagoning” is, again, ridiculous. Especially if your evidence is “well mine is fine,” which is not acceptable troubleshooting procedure.

        • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Not all regions are served with the same scripts. That’s why the ad-block pop-up was shown for some users but not for others or at a later time for others. This also affected the update cycle of those anti-adblock scripts.

          The reason for that is quite simple. New stuff is rolled out to only some users at first as some sort of beta testing procedure. If many people complain about functionality issues and all of those have the new version of the script, Google knows there is something wrong with it.

        • Aradina [She/They]@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          “works fine on my machine lol” is unhelpful and useless.

          It’s very well known that Google makes heavy use of a/b testing. They did it with the adblock block and they’re doing it with this

    • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • sibachian@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        it was already made public in the lawsuit some weeks ago that they are indeed slowing down youtube for firefox.

        • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Source?

          I’ve read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.

          There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using…

          There’s also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn’t been able to keep up.

          I don’t see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there’s nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.

          So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I’m not ready to jump to that conclusion until there’s actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. “Someone said they are” is not going to convince me. Especially if you can’t even point to that someone saying that thing.