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

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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

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[–] [email protected] 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.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 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.