this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 164 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Is this arguably anticompetitive and illegal?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 106 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I guess his question is "is that happening?"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Well, at least I learned that javascript understands exponential notation. I never even bothered to try that lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Can I have ublock block that? It seems simple enough to extract that code out.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I also use FF solely and have no slowdowns on YT. I guess they like my copy of the browser.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

"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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

"It happens all the time" and "they always do *" is also comically unhelpful and useless. I'm getting a pot/kettle vibe from those that seem to take offense at my comment.