I'm not even mad about Google making my artificially wait 5s for using firefox.
I'm mad that such a big company with suposelly decent engineers, are making me wait 5s with literally a sleep, how is even possible to do such thing in such a rudimentary way? I would be like damn that was smart, this feels like, seriously this is the level?
IMHO, this kind of things are not done by engineers.
* Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue"
* engineer adds a flag, with different control parameters
* Some genius in Product figures this out and updates the experiment to slow down for competitors
* Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue"
“Research”
They have done such research before, Google published this at a time when developers were all "100 ms more or less web load time doesn't matter". Since then webpages has gotten much more focused on performance.
The dog slow load times of ad infested AMP pages would suggest otherwise.
The prevailing developer discussions going from "Load speed doesn't matter, stop complaining about useless stuff" to "load times matters, but here we choose to make it slow for other reasons" is a massive improvement though. Today speed is valued, it wasn't back then.
There are many such tests being written about in blogs today. So now a developer can get time to optimize load times based on those blog posts while before managers would say it was worthless.
Untrue. I optimized pages pre-2000, and it had always mattered.
It's always, always mattered. If anything, people care less today, with the entire ridiculous 100 loads per page.
Researching how best to fuck with your competitors.
Next: researching regulatory capture?
Google stopped testing stuff in Firefox, that is all they did afaik. We all should know how many bugs and "oppsies" you get when you don't test before releasing new features. Test code snippets being pushed to prod etc.
Engineers tend to create paper trails on what they work on, code reviews and bug logs etc are everywhere, so I doubt there is any of those where they say "Make things shit for Firefox to hurt our competitors", that would net them an easy loss in court. But not testing in browsers with small userbases will hold in court.
Firefox has a small userbase partly because of the early "oopses" described in the article I linked. Those happened a while ago, when Firefox had more users than Chrome.
Chrome was bigger than Firefox by 2012, the accusations that Google intentionally made things worse for Firefox came many years after that.
But they referred to behaviour that was present pretty much from the start. It's just that Mozilla folks were extremely tolerant and assumed good faith for a very long time.
Google have been disgustingly anticompetitive for a very, very long time at this point.
This should be a top level comment on news like this. Everyone needs to be reminded that this is neither a new behavior nor something unintentional.
Very good point. It's important to recognise that developers in many companies are often not fully aware of the intended use of features they're asked to create.
Another example that springs to mind is Uber, who used a tool called "Greyball" to avoid contact between drivers and authorities: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uber-greyball-idUKKBN16B0...
My initial reaction was astonishment that the engineers would happily implement this. And maybe that is what happened. But the alternative possibility is that product and senior management assigned different parts of the feature to different teams e.g. one team develops a pattern recognition system to detect users' professions, another team develops a spoofing system for use in demos, etc...
Because it works.
Good engineering isn't about being obtuse and convoluted, it's about making stuff that works.
when the purpose is to abuse your monopoly to further your business interests in another area, being obtuse and convoluted to get plausible deniability is good engineering. This is just sloppy.
I think this is a good example of corporations being made up of people, rather than being contiguous coordinated entities as many of us sometimes think of them.
An engineer doing "good engineering" on a feature typically depends not only on them being a "good engineer" but also on them having some actual interest in implementing that feature.
I would imagine that in a well coordinated company engaging in this kind of thing, the order wouldn't be "slow down firefox", but something along the lines of "use XYZ feature that firefox doesn't support and then use this polyfill for FF, which happens to be slow". Something that doesn't look too incriminating during any potential discovery process, while still getting you what you want.
Nah, that's got a risk profile. They could implement whatever your strategy is in the next release. You aren't going to necessarily get the longevity of the naive approach.
Plus a Firefox dev would discover that more easily as opposed to this version which they can just dismiss as some JavaScript bug on YouTube's part
that's the beautiful thing, you make the polyfill contingent on the browser being firefox rather than probing for the feature and then you forget to remove it once they implement the feature
That's assuming a degree of engineering competency at the product decision making level that is usually absent in companies that are structured as Google is, with pretty strong demarcations of competencies across teams.
I dunno. How long has it been there without anybody noticing?
5 years? 7? Longer?
No matter how they approached it, you could demonstrate the pattern through the law of large numbers regardless. Might as well make the implementation straight forward.
Using an idle timer, like window: requestIdleCallback [1], is good engineering. If anything passes that's not good engineering, it's laziness.
I'm not even a JS programmer but I know about timers, idle wait in UI programming is a common pattern. It's the attitude of mediocre engineers not bothering to lookup or learn new things.
If every OS/browser/stock market dev did what they want "because it works" we don't have a working system. We'll have systemic lags making the system sluggish and eventually unusable as more engineers follow the same mantra.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/requ...
Nah, then it doesn't work.
"It works" is The high engineering bar and it's the hard one to hit.
Oftentimes it's replaced these days with imagined complexity, ideological conformity or some arbitrarily defined set of virtues and then you get a really complicated thing that maybe works some of the time and breaks in really hard to understand ways.
Transcompiled frameworks inside of microservices talking to DBMS adapters over virtual networks to do a "select *" from a table and then pipe things in the reverse direction to talk to a variety of services and providers with their own APIs and separate dependencies sitting in different microservices as it just shepherds a JSON string through a dozen wrapper functions on 5 docker containers to just send it back to the browser is The way things are done these days. This is the crap that passes for "proper" engineering. Like the programming version of the pre-revolutionary French Court.
A simple solution, fit for purpose, that works as intended, easy to understand, remove, debug and modify with a no-bus factor, that's the actual high end solution, not the spaghetti stacked as lasagna that is software haute couture these days.
Sometimes, in practice, the dumb solution can also be the smart one. True mastery is in what you choose Not to do.
I agree with the spirit of your comment; I too hate over-engineering. Choose your battles is an important step in mastery, yes, but being lazy can't be chalked up to mastery.
In this particular case I disagree with using `sleep`; using the idle timer it's not as roundabout as you put it: _Transcompiled frameworks inside of microservices talking to DBMS adapters over virtual networks_. It's a straight-forward callback, some lower-level timekeeper signals you and you do your thing: it's nowhere close to the convoluted jumping through hoops you explain.
Mastery comes with balance: putting in the optimal effort, not more, not less either. Of course, depends on what one's trying to master: job or programming. Former means do the minimum and get maximum benefits from your job/boss, latter means enjoy learning/programming and arrive at the most optimal solution (for no reason, just because you're passionate).
Speaking as someone who only very occasionally does browser related programming, what is the supposed sin committed here by implementing it this way?
In programming in general, sleeps are generally considered....(I'm lacking the word)...distasteful?
If your code needs to wait for something, it's better done with some sort of event system or interrupt or similar; the reason being that a 5s wait is a 5s wait, but if, say the thing you're waiting for returned in 10ms, if you're using an alternative solution you can carry on immediately, not wait the remaining 4.99 seconds. Conversely, if it takes longer than 5s, who knows what happens?
Sure, but assuming we take it as face value that this is a straightforward attempt to force a UX-destroying delay, I don't see what makes this so terrible. It's meant to force a 5 second wait, and it does it. Problem solved.
For one, they didn't use React.
I don't know if this is what was meant, but my assumption is that it is quite brazen and crude.
But then I think of some alternative method where they send an ajax request to "sleep.google.com/?t=5" and get a response like "" after five seconds.
Yep, curious to know the same thing myself.
It is not literally a sleep though, isn't setTimeout more like a creating a delayed event? (I am not a webdev)
That's Javascript for you. Don't want to block the one thread from doing other things in the meanwhile.
You can't directly do a sleep in Javascript because it runs in the same thread as the UI - it would block the user from interacting with the page. This is effectively a sleep because after 5 seconds it's running the code in the passed-in function (not firing an event). The code in the function then resolves a promise, which runs other functions that can be specified later by what called the one using setTimeout.
At least they didn't rewrite the sleep code to do crypto mining.
You're mad that they're using a function for its intended purpose?
Google employs 30000 engineers, it's impossible for them all to be decent.
follow the money
employees will follow orders, orders are made by people who control the money
Maybe the engineer that was tasked with implementing was annoyed with the task and did it on purpose this way.
I'm more mad about the complete failure of regulators to break up an obvious monopoly than I am with the engineers (though they're not saints either)
This is interesting as I had noticed this happening to me (in Chrome) when the anti-ad-blocking started. I assumed that it was YT's way of "annoying" me still while no ads were shown... It was eventually replaced with the "You cant use Adblockers modal" and now I just tolerate the ads.
So I wonder if that 5s delay has always been there.
When I ran into the adblocker-blocker (Firefox + uBlock Origin), I noticed that I could watch videos if logged out. So I just stayed logged out, and haven't seen an anti-adblock message since. Or an ad.
Added bonus, I'm less tempted to venture into the comments section...
I'm using Firefox + uBlock Origin logged in and it works totally fine. Maybe Youtube removed the anti-adblocker on select accounts? I remember I once entertained myself with writing a report in which I sounded like I'm sitting in a retirement home and have no clue what's going on with "ad block." Did perhaps someone actually read this?
It seems to be something which is randomly deployed. Not everybody gets the warning.
I got it in the past for weeks, though.
Same here . No problem with anti Adblock. It was shown twice to me and I googled „YouTube alternatives“ then tried Vimeo and it was nice. Maybe they did register this ? :D
I think you have simply been lucky, the full story is that uBlock Origin and Youtube have been tying to outpatch the other, with uBlock rolling out a bypass to the filters every one-two days since late October (https://github.com/stephenhawk8054/misc/commits/main/yt-fix....).
Depending on if you've set up uBlock to auto-update and when you've watched youtube relative to when the block filters got updated you might just not have been hit with the latest detectors while they were active. Personally I know I got the "accept ads or leave" modal with firefox + uBlock, locking me out completely on one of my devices.
Same, I use Firefox + uBlock Origin + YouTube Unhook for a cleaner interface. I also always watch videos on private navigation windows (my default way of browsing the internet) and I manage subscriptions with the RSS feed of the channels, much better to track what I have watched since the default homepage of YouTube does not display the last videos of your subscriptions.
Edit: I have forgotten to add sponsorblock to the list of extensions
I've been randomly getting the situation where the video on Firefox doesn't work, but the sound does. It says something like "Sorry something's gone wrong", but for a brief second I can see the video. I think it's connected to the ad-blocker changes, but it doesn't actually have a message about having an ad-blocker on.
One of the benefits of ublock origin for me is blocking the youtube comments section, along with all of the video overlay elements.
Just install adblocker?
Meh.. I could but I have to tolerate them on TV anyway. I may look to install pi-hole one day.
If you have an Android TV, You can use SmartTube[1] that has Adblock + Sponsorblock
pihole doesnt work for youtube because ads and content are served from the same domains.
Pi hole doesn't help, but there are various Android TV apps that do block ads. I still prefer the Roku eco system but I switched after they started putting ads in the middle of music videos.
Or Freetube / Newpipe
no need to go that extreme, the fix is to just update ublock orgins filters
Go into ublock origin addon > click filter lists > purge all caches then update now
all done
I still use adblockers perfectly fine on Youtube. There was never a real interruption in adblocking either. You just need ublock origin + bypass paywalls.
I think they only disabled adblockers to logged users probably because non logged users don't have to agree to terms of services.
I'm always logged on and using adblockers. So no, that's not it. I also use Youtube probably every day and am a very active user.
Blockers work with my throw away Google accounts that I use for this and that. So maybe it's restricted further still to very entrenched users.
ABP also still works just fine. I prefer the armsrace being taken care of someone else
It's weird but I saw the anti-blocker modal a week or two but them it stopped appearing and never saw it since shrug
Might be because of the EU ruling, if you're in the EU.
I'm in the US, and had the same experience.
I got the you can't use an adblocker message, but was able to close and/or reload the page to watch videos without ads. After a week or so it stopped popping up.
US, Firefox, uBlockOrgin.
Another way I noticed is good at skipping ads when adblocker fails is to refresh the page. When it loads again it does not play the ad.
It's still trivial to block ads, but the delay has recently started for me, after never happening before. So presumably a very intentional volley in the ongoing war to own your attention.
Trying to be charitable here: could this be a debug/test artefact that inadvertantly got into production?
Without studying the minified code I wouldn't assume malice just yet, this could be just an inexperienced developer trying to lazily fix some browser-specific bug, or something that accidentally made it to production like you say
You think they let inexperienced developers touch the YT code base without proper code review? Even if that were the case, which is an extremely charitable assumption, that itself would be malice in my opinion.
You think they let inexperienced developers touch the YT code base
Uh, yes? We were all inexperienced at some point. Just the linked file is like 300k lines of unminified code, I doubt it's all written by PHDs with 20 years of experience
Some would argue that owning a PhD degree does not necessarily guarantee half decent engineering skills.
It's the "without proper code review" part that I consider malice, not being inexperienced.
lol
This reply is for everyone who has ever worked on the codebase...
Should be: LOL LGTM
You think they let inexperienced developers touch the YT code base without proper code review?
Yes
As the saying goes: "we like naked girls, not naked sleep". Even the interns should know that, naked sleep is just bad - not fixing anything.
It could even just be a timeout as part of retry logic or similar. A lot of people seem to be saying that there is no reasonable reason to have a `sleep` in a production application. But there are many legitimate reasons to need to delay execution of some code for a while.
there is such a thing as overextending the benefit of the doubt, to the point that malicious actors will abuse it.
Unlikely. Google has been breaking non-Chromium (or sometimes even just non-Google Chrome) browsers for years on YouTube and their other websites. It was especially egregious when MSFT was trying their own EdgeHTML/Trident-based Edge. Issues would go away by faking user-agent.
It was especially egregious when MSFT was trying their own EdgeHTML/Trident-based Edge. Issues would go away by faking user-agent.
Why is there more than one user-agent? Does somebody still expect to receive different content based on the user-agent, and furthermore expect that the difference will be beneficial to them?
What was Microsoft trying to achieve by sending a non-Chrome user-agent?
User agents are useful. However they tend to be abused much more often than effectively used
1. They are useful for working around bugs. You can match the user agent to work around the bugs on known-buggy browser versions. Ideally this would be a handful of specific matches (like Firefox versions 12-14). You can't do feature detection for many bugs because they may only trigger in very specific situations. Ideally this blacklist would only be confirmed entries and manually tested if the new versions have the same problem. (Unfortunately these often end up open-ended because testing each new release for a bug that isn't on the priority list is tedious.)
2. Diagnosing problems. Often times you see that some specific group of user-agents is hammering some API or fails to load a page. It is much easier to track down if this user agent is a precise identifier of the client for which your site doesn't work correctly.
3. Understanding users. For example if you see that a browser you have never heard of is a significant amount of traffic you may want to add it to your testing routine.
But yes, the abuse of if (/Chrome/.test(navigator.userAgent)) { mainCode() } else { untestedFallback() } is a major issue.
Only option 1 is something that users, who are the people who decide what user-agent to send, might care about. And as you yourself point out, it doesn't happen.
I'm pretty sure that users care that websites can fix bugs affecting their browser. In fact option 1 is very difficult to actually implement when you can't figure out which browser is having problems in the first place.
It is normal practice for each browser to have its own user-agent, no? But the fact that Google intentionally detected it and used polyfills or straight up invalid JS at the time was insane. A similar spin today is "Your browser is unsupported" you see here and there. When a major platform such as YouTube does it, it is really impactful.
It would never do feature detection, would give lower quality h264 video, etc. Back then, there was really nice third-party application myTube which had made this less of an issue but it was eventually killed through API changes.
It may have been intended to be a normal practice, but as far back as IE vs Netscape everyone has been mucking with user agents for non-competitive (and counter-non-competetive) reasons
Trying to be charitable here [...]
There is no reason for charity with such a large power difference. For Firefox, "bugs" like this can really end up being a lost one-shot game.
It's like people walking by and casually reaching for your phone. It's always meant as a joke, unless you don't pull it away fast enough. Then suddenly it wasn't a joke - and your phone is gone.
This is not rooted in any reservation against Google in particular. If you are a mega-corporation with the power to casually crush competitors, you should really want to be held to a high standard. You do not want to be seen as the accidentally-fucking-others-up-occasionally kind of company.
If, with Youtube size, they do not test on Firefox, this is as much malice as doing this deliberately.
That is not correct. The surrounding code gives some more context:
h=document.createElement("video");l=new Blob([new Uint8Array([/* snip */])],{type:"video/webm"});
h.src=lc(Mia(l));h.ontimeupdate=function(){c();a.resolve(0)};
e.appendChild(h);h.classList.add("html5-main-video");setTimeout(function(){e.classList.add("ad-interrupting")},200);
setTimeout(function(){c();a.resolve(1)},5E3);
return m.return(a.promise)})}
Why is it only trying to detect ads when the user agent is Firefox?
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17zdpkl/this_behav...
Does Firefox allow a wider range of plugins, including adblockers?
Yes, Chrome is severely hobbled in this by comparison.
Yes, there are plenty. You can have a look here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
Probably because there are other methods for Chrome that don't apply to Firefox.
Like when I noticed that some sites did some URL rewriting trickery on Firefox and others browsers, but not for Chrome. The trick is to show you the proper URL the link points to, but as you click, it is substituted for one that is a redirection, for tracking purposes (ex: "https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http:://actualsite..."). On Chrome, they don't need to use these tricks as the browser supports the "ping" attribute of links, so they can do their tracking without rewriting the URL.
I've also noticed this behavior popping up a lot lately, but I had no idea why. The URL with tracking included was still blocked by uBlock Origin, but having to manually copy-paste the relevant portion was an annoyance.
Thanks for the context!
Wow, that is pretty disgusting behavior.
This is just anecdote, but sometimes (especially when I'm on slower internet) Safari + AdGuard will have glitch [0] on YouTube. Never happened with Firefox + Ublock Origin.
[0] Unable to press play and showing image with Ad instead.
I experience the same glitch and i like it because you can just reload the page (cmd-r) and then the video starts so if you're used to it you can skip ads within less than a second and you dont get annoyed by the ad sound/video, just an image.
I would suspect because Google can do the detection in Chrome itself, but not in Firefox.
I have no idea because I didn't experience anything like that both in Chrome and in Firefox (both with uBO though). But I'm confident that this particular code is not related to the actual slowdown, if it did happen to some Firefox users, because I received the same code even in Chrome.
It is still better to wait 5s without ad than with ad.
It has to be a background check, otherwise you can't explain cases (like me) where the code is running but users never noticed any delay.
I couldn't reproduce the 5s wait in multiple scenarios in Firefox (various combinations of being logged in / not being logged in / without adblocker / with adblocker) and couldn't reproduce a 5s wait time in any of them, it played back immediately in each case (when without adblocker, using a second video to have one start without ad). I tested on Linux.
What exact combination of circumstances is required to trigger the multi second wait time?
I can't reproduce this either. YT on FF plays immediately for me
For the completeness, the omitted Uint8Array is the following 340-byte binary (here in base64):
GkXfo59ChoEBQveBAULygQRC84EIQoKEd2VibUKHgQRChYECGFOAZwH/////////FUmpZpkq17GD
D0JATYCGQ2hyb21lV0GGQ2hyb21lFlSua6mup9eBAXPFh89gnOoYna+DgQFV7oEBhoVWX1ZQOOCK
sIEBuoEBU8CBAR9DtnUB/////////+eBAKDMoaKBAAAAEAIAnQEqAQABAAvHCIWFiJmEiD+CAAwN
YAD+5WoAdaGlpqPugQGlnhACAJ0BKgEAAQALxwiFhYiZhIg/ggAMDWAA/uh4AKC7oZiBA+kAsQEA
LxH8ABgAMD/0DAAAAP7lagB1oZumme6BAaWUsQEALxH8ABgAMD/0DAAAAP7oeAD7gQCgvKGYgQfQ
ALEBAC8R/AAYADA/9AwAAAD+5WoAdaGbppnugQGllLEBAC8R/AAYADA/9AwAAAD+6HgA+4ID6Q==
v = document.createElement('video');
v.src = `data:video/webm;base64,<as above>`;
await new Promise(resolve => v.onloadedmetadata = resolve);
console.log(v.duration);Is the use of the "E" notation common in JS? I can see that it (could be) less bytes, obviously more efficient for bigger values... Looking at the script I can see it is minified or whatever we call that these days. I guess my question really is: did someone write "5E3" or did the minifier choose it?
(Sorry this is heading into the weeds, but I'm not really a web developer so maybe someone can tell me!)
Because 5E3 is shorter than 5000, just like you can often see !0 to get "true" in minimize code because it saves two characters.
In js I thought 1==true, and 1 is shorter than !0 ??
Never seen the use of exponential notation for numbers in js though (not a surprise, I'm not really a programmer), it seems sensible to me from the point of shifting the domain from ms to seconds.
Double-equals behaves differently than triple-equals. Minifiers probably can't swap them safely.
In js I thought 1==true, and 1 is shorter than !0 ??
`1==true` but `1!==true` (`===` and `!==` check for type equality as well and while `!0` is a boolean, `1` is not.
I wonder if this actually decreases the byte over wire. 5000 compresses a lot better.... sorry for OT
Almost certainly the minimizer
Totally possible that the minifier did this, yes.
How is this not blatant anticompetitive behavior?
How/When does that script get loaded? It’s not showing up in my network tab. Videos also load instant as usual.
Oh, and they also falsely show "4K" in the video quality icon, but "accidentally" play a 720p or even worse quality stream. If you manually select the 4K stream quality, then and only then will YouTube deign to show 4K to you.
Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is that I'm capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they can only be played back at 420p.
Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and there's nothing telling you about this not being supported in your browser until you've made the purchase (by just allowing 420p and needing to search for why it's broken)
see https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/pm0eqh/why_are_my_...
Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles.
They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That's it!
If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they've picked for you.
If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you.
You see, what actually happened, is that some too-smart UX guy at Netflix couldn't make a language picker look nice for that many options so he asked a too-smart data science (lol) guy to figure out the most common languages for each region.
Here in Australia they picked English, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese because we have a lot of immigrants from those countries. I'm sure they used very clever algorithms on big data clusters to figure that out. Good job, well done.
Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out. Netflix and their $500K total comp Stanford or wherever graduates couldn't. So they instructed their call centre staff to lie to their customers.
Then they had someone write this idiocy: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101798
"If subtitles for a title are offered in a language but do not display on your device, try another device."
Oh, oh, I'll go do that right now! Let me try my PC... nope four languages. On the TV? Four languages. Actually, I have a phone... and... oh... four languages.
PS: Thai (only!) subtitles are "special" and use eye-searing HDR maximum white. Like 1,600 nits white that literally leaves green after-images etched into my retina. They have a support page and a pre-prepared set of lies for the support staff to read for that piece of shoddy engineering also.
Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out
Did they? Both Prime Video and Disney+ have very very narrow subtitle and audio language choices.
If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you.
Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright?
As someone who speaks multiple languages, and has the habit of watching with subtitles in the original language of the content if I speak it; otherwise default to English subtitles with original audio... none of the streaming companies have managed to handle that properly. Way too often the audio is only dubbed (often badly), or only my subtitles in my local language (French) are available, regardless of the original language of the content. I'd rather watch British movies with subtitles in English, not French, thank you very much.
Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I can be bothered to count, certainly.
Are you saying it's some sort of challenge beyond the abilities of a Senior Technical Lead with total comp in the seven digits to figure out how to make a list of items more than 4 or 5 entries long? Too many megabytes of JSON to shove down the wire for more?
Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright?
They definitely do not. That's not how work-for-hire translations work. You pay someone to translate your shows' subtitles for you, then you own the copyright on that work that you paid for. That's how that works. No weird region-locked silliness.
You can make other languages appear by changing the entire UI language of Netflix, which then shows some other "data driven" subset of the subtitle languages.
But then, the entire UI is in another language, which not everyone watching may understand.
Essentially there are audio-subtitle language combinations that are impossible to achieve, no matter what. That combo may not be common enough to make any top-5 list anywhere.
So if you love someone of a sufficiently small minority, or have an unusual racial makeup in your household, Netflix would rather you weren't so weird.
Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this profoundly against inter-racial love. On purpose. They wrote the code to do this.
Blows my mind.
They definitely do not. That's not how work-for-hire translations work. You pay someone to translate your shows' subtitles for you, then you own the copyright on that work that you paid for. That's how that works. No weird region-locked silliness.
If you skip the fact that Netflix do regional deals with local content houses to sell Netflix-made stuff either in theatres or get TV releases, in which case translations could be a part of the deal to be be provided by the local entity who's getting the rights; or the other, more common scenario, where Netflix acquire local content for wider publication (e.g. Casa de Papel/Money Heist is a very popular example), where again, there might be complications.
Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I can be bothered to count, certainly.
I haven't found that to be the case, but had Apple TV only briefly because of the general poor quality (watched 3 series on it, all three devolved into trope after trope barely going below the obvious surface).
Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this profoundly against inter-racial love. On purpose. They wrote the code to do this.
Is woke in the room with us right now? Can you point it out and explain what it is? For the record, "races" are a stupid social construct that should have died out with the Nazis. And people can be of different ethnicities while speaking the same language(s), or inversely of the same ethnicity while speaking different languages. Being "woke", "inter-racial" and different languages are completely orthogonal topics.
> Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this profoundly against inter-racial love
I'm on the same boat and I hear you. And since we are on this subject, do you know what else grinds my gears? The whole idea of cultural appropriation. So if your ancestry is X then you can't do/wear/celebrate Y.
So when you ask these people something like: Is it okay for my half-X, half-Y children to do this? they start feeling confused. But if you go: What about my grandchildren, who are 1/4 X and 1/4 Y and 1/2 Z?. Some of them begin to realize how racist and simplistic they are being.
Learn and enjoy other people's cultures, for goodness' sake. It's called being human.
Seems like they'd want people to, idk pick up to 4 languages themselves in settings if they are really attached to their picker. Which makes more sense to me.
A common thing where I live is for local companies to buy streaming rights for Netflix-created media, and then we can't watch Netflix-created media on Netflix because local-company bought streaming/playback rights. Netflix doesn't care about the customer. They care about money, and that won't change. They'll max out the bullshit until customers push back, leave it there for a bit, wait for customers to get used to the new-bullshit, then add more bullshit and repeat.
I don't know about browser options, but on the android app I can choose between 7 different audio languages and 29 subtitles. Looked it up just for you with an episode of "The good Doctor", which is not a netflix original. I live in Germany. Definitely not an UI issue.
is it still a thing that you have to use Edge on windows to get 4k HDR, but you can't on Chrome?
Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented version? This isn't the future we were promised, but it sure is the future we have.
Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented version?
in which case, why buy it at all? A torrent isn't going to load as fast as what you paid YT for.
The further time goes on toward segmented streaming platforms and DRM bullshit, the deeper my piracy hedge grows. Eventually there will be a streaming service aggregation service a la Cable channels and we're back at square 1. Add to that streaming services pushing new ad schemes now that they've captured enough market share for the risk to be worth it, and we've got a great storm brewing for a resurgence in piracy and media execs going "but y?"
BTW modern piracy setups are far more streamlined and easier to manage/use than modern streaming platforms. Assuming you have some tech ability anyway.
Jellyfin on a NAS is just great. You don't even need a NAS. A Pi with a large SSD attached will do fine.
A torrent isn't going to load as fast as what you paid YT for.
Unless you want to rewind the video without it re-buffering...
This sort of behavior should be an open-and-shut case of false advertising. You were told that the video would be a certain resolution. You gave money as a result of that statement. You received an inferior product to the one that was described.
Isn't that fraudulent? Its amazing how an individual can commit fraud one time and its FRAUD! But a company can do the exact same thing en masse as like a business model over and over and its only ever a misunderstanding that they get a chance to correct and a gentleman's handshake. aAnd even if they didn't, it seems impossible to adjust the dial from civil to criminal as its often left in the consumers hands. Its not like there are attorneys that, like, represent the State that could exercise their legal authority to protect consumers.
To my not-a-lawyer understanding, it is fraudulent. Fine print is allowed to clarify an offer, but may not substantially alter the offer as originally made.
I could see an argument made that a reasonable person would know an offer to be limited to supported platforms, and that the fine print clarifies which platforms are supported. To me, though, I’d draw a line between unsupported due to underlying limitations (e.g. can’t serve 4k video on a NES) and unsupported due to seller-side limitations (e.g. won’t serve 4k without remote attestation). I’d see the former as a reasonable clarification of the offer, and the latter as an unreasonable alteration of the offer.
Even if it doesn't technically apply here, the larger point remains that people get handcuffs and corporations get handshakes...
I haven't see this other than for brief periods during quality switching (it seems to play out the current buffer in lower quality but new chunks are downloaded at the displayed target quality). However for some reason it does often just load at a very low (sub-720p) resolution and I need to manually up the quality or it will never get to the highest quality (I'm watching on a 4k monitor with great internet and hardware decoding, 4k has never stuttered for me).
I remember them starting to do automatic lower-quality streams when this came out[0], but I'm not sure if this is still the cause for the situation. It could be a general "we see this ISP/ASN failing more often with x many concurrent 4k streams, let's throw some people on 720p and see if it helps".
0: https://www.pcworld.com/article/398929/youtube-defaults-to-l...
That has irked me for quite some time. I always manually select 1080p, because sometimes YT claims it's already playing 1080p, but it's obviously not and the video starts buffering anew when I select 1080p manually. Quite annoying
Roughly around the same time as the anti-adblocking effort, youtube started just not playing the video stream for me much of the time. I say play a video, it will start playing the audio, and the video will just be a frozen image.
In unrelated news, my youtube-dl usage is way, way up.
Wait, that's a Firefox-only issue ?!
No, it does it on Chrome too.
I have personally noticed this many times. I’d blink and wonder if it was just my eyes going bad but nope, soon as I select HD quality manually I can read text again.
It doesn't help that 720p quality seems subpar (to me) compared to some years ago.
Enhancer for Youtube allows you to select a min quality, also great for blocking shorts.
I use Firefox, and Google's sites are literally the only ones where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken for me, the map wouldn't update at all when attempting to search or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript code spinning the CPU nonstop. It's literally gotten to the point where I keep a Chrome window open and use it exclusively for Gmail, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Maps.
It's pretty obvious from the outside that supporting Firefox is not a product priority for Google. It also seems clear that it's in their best interest to have users choose Chrome over Firefox. My guess is that this likely emerges from a lot of very reasonable sounding local decisions, like "prioritize testing on browsers with the most market share," but it is convenient how those align with the anti-competitive incentives.
It's clear Google is only testing for chrome engine and safari: which comprise 97% of the browsers being used. Would you increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test for 3% of the market?
_I_ would in their shoes because I'm not just in it for the money and I care about the craft.
But clearly I am not them. :-) Mathematically it doesn't make sense for Google. It might make sense from an anti-trust perspective...
It's hard to argue anti-trust when all these browsers are based on Chromium - which is maintained in part by Google, Microsoft, Opera, Vivaldi, Intel, ARM, and Canonical plus several volunteers.
Since they throw me "Google recommends Chrome!" adverts in my face for various of their services, even when using a chrome-based browser it's not a case of only testing for Chrome/Safari. It's active work against others.
In most companies, when 3% represents an in-fact huge number because you have a very successful product, you absolutely do test for that 3%.
It’s tiny companies that may ignore 3% as too expensive to worry about.
At a company at the scale of Google or Facebook, yes. 3% x N billion people = a central European country or two.
As I said, the decisions are locally reasonable. However, if not supporting Firefox potentially exposed my company to scrutiny over anti-competitive behavior, then, yes, I would absolutely invest in testing procedures to mitigate that.
It's also worth emphasizing that it isn't difficult to support Firefox. I'm pretty sure that many of the sites that I visit do so largely by accident. I do a fair bit of web development, and Firefox/Chrome compatibility has never been an issue in the slightest for me. You almost have to go out of your way to choose Chrome-specific APIs in order to break compatibility. How does virtually every other website on the internet manage it—from my bank to scrappy startups with junior developers coming straight out of bootcamps—while Google with all of their engineering talent and $100+ billion cash on hand just can't seem to make it work?
This is exactly the same situation that web developers faced with Internet Explorer 5 and 6, and it sucked for end users!
Would you increase your testing by 50% to thoroughly test for 3% of the market?
I don't think you get to make these kind of cost cutting decisions when you're a vertically integrated mega-corp who also owns the browser with 65% of the market.
Isn't that a good deal? 50% more testing in a way that can surely be parallelized to some extent does not seem a very steep price at youtube scale.
These sounds like classic MS behaviour. It is kind of thing that ought to addressed in anti-trust case.
I've posted this here on HN numerous times over the years, and it's been a while since I last posted it:
Google is the new "Microsoft", they embrace, they extend, then extinguish. Look at their email offering, messaging offerings, they built on top of XMPP, then they pulled the plug eventually. Android is Linux based, but insanely proprietary, the app store is not open by any means, you're fully at their whims to get your apps on there. Chrome is basically the IE of old, implementing proprietary things or APIs that are not yet standard for Google products, and pushing out competing browsers.
I use Firefox across Windows, Mac, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu. I've not seen any specific issues with Google sites at all. I only really use Docs, Maps, and Youtube with any regularity but I've not really seen any of these issues.
Yea, I also haven't noticed any speed issues, but I do use noscript exclusively on Firefox.
Recently, play store images don't load (about 60% - 80% missing per app) in Firefox.
It is fascinating, how the simplest things on websites can be made arbitrarily involved, convoluted, over-complicated. And how those over-complications can then serve as a credible deniability.
Gmail has recently become extremely slow for me in Safari on a well specced M1 max
Same here on Firefox, for both my laptop running Windows 11 on Alder Lake, and my desktop running Ubuntu on Zen 2.
A few weeks ago I posted on here about the maps lag, and it literally felt like it was fixed after the comment got some attention.
There's 100% targeted de-optimization for firefox users and the burden of finding it is on the users it seems.
i believe for anything non-Chrome? Even Vivaldi has issues with some Google products.
bigquery console in ffx has like +120 latency potion
dupe?
I had the same Gmaps issue, I disabled LocalCDN for the site and panning etc worked again. Apparently the addon must be fixed to account for whatever they were doing.
Spotify web doesnt work good on Firefox.
Need to call out them.
I'm basically forced to use Chromium on Linux.
Using Google sites with a VPN on Firefox has been really annoying for the past couple of months as well.
While the EU has recently forced Microsoft to allow users to uninstall pre-installed crapware, Google is apparently unhindered in their ongoing (and succeeding) mission to take control of all layers of the consumer-facing internet.
For now.
Google is working on making a premium internet based on their services that permeate the whole web which they plan to serve only to "trusted devices" running Chrome - I do not think this is going to work out well for them.
I hope not, but I suspect they will succeed. My observation is that the vast majority of people around me here in Europe see Google as completely trustworthy.
It's truly profound how split-second loading delays contribute to a negative impression about digital products. I guess we're all worn out from using our devices. Most of us just want "thing" ASAP, and we'll compulsively click 'agree' to anything that happens to stand in the way of it.
'Why don't you switch to Chrome, it works better/faster.' is not the sort of social pressure I can quickly respond to with my privacy concerns. And it's not like I'm not going to get an eye-roll or tin-foil-man comments from the mom-pop-type people in my life.
And it's not like I'm not going to get an eye-roll or tin-foil-man comments from the mom-pop-type people in my life.
That's why you don't start with the nerd explanation of the privacy issues, you just tell them Firefox is way better. You install FF + uBlock (since presumably they don't even have an adblocker on Chrome if they're anything like my parents), and tell them "Look ma, no ads!". Not even people who don't care about ads that much and just ignore them will go back to seeing them if they see the option of no ads existing. And if you handle all their bookmark imports and account logins for them so they don't have to, they won't even feel the difference from a UI/UX point of view (sans a few microscopic differences that nobody notices).
As for these artificial speedbumps, I think that statistic about every 100ms of page load decreases visitor time is true to an extent, but at least if I look at the way my parents use websites, even 5kb plaintext ones take like 3s to load since they have unfathomably slow internet and ancient devices, so it doesn't really factor in for them if they click on a video on youtube they wanna watch.
I hope not, but I suspect they will succeed. My observation is that the vast majority of people around me here in Europe see Google as completely trustworthy.
Just like MS was always seen in Europe as well, outside (parts of) the tech-workers bubble. Governments in every single country at every level never had any problem mandating proprietary softwares and formats to their citizens for many, many years.
I’m aware that it is quite popular, so I guess I must be weird, but YouTube being slow (and consuming lots of CPU due to that ambient mode stunt), when every other video site works fine in Firefox, and embedded YouTube videos on other sites work fine in Firefox, has just made me think YouTube is a pretty crappy site.
I’d never dream of changing browsers because some video site (mostly full of low-effort distracting silliness), didn’t work well in mine.
Is there maybe some road map or purpose statement on this? it’s not that i don’t believe that this is absolutely true (i’m sure it’s the wet dream of all SV companies…) but google’s offerings are so inconsistent that if that’s really their goal i just can’t see how they mean to get there. every answer to competition is a half baked answer in my experience and i truly just can’t see how google means to do this. google plus i thought was supposed to be this but that did not pan out well at all.
and i also don’t see how they can really do this at least in EU, at least not for long until the regulators catch wind.
Oh yes, it's called WEI as in Web Environment Integrity -https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/25/google_web_environmen... some of its code landed in production Chrome, leading to an outcry. V3 Manifest and WEI are all part of Google's push to make Chrome mandatory to be able to use their services.
It's not just Google's goal, either: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3671132/what-is-manage...
Ensuring you only use the OEM's recommended browser looks like the endgame of the internet.
No, WEI has already been abandoned and removed again.
I hope not, but they are certainly trying. I fear they have become an uncontrollable behemoth which have failed to identify alternative business models to their unsustainable ad business, and now they are trying to perform a major power grab to basically take over the web and force people to watch ads or pay.
I suspect that the SEO scam-industry will hit a wall on how far they can push their top-10 lists and advertising will no longer be worth it. Google search results are pretty bad now anyway, since you'll only ever find the sites that game the system.
Eventually users will realise this, and advertisers will see negative returns, and Google will lose money. But chances are they'll find another way to keep advertisers paying.
Why is their ad business unsustainable? seems like they just print money, and recent efforts are to simply increase printer speed... Because why wouldn't you...
Whatever their competition will be, sign me up now. I really like their products, the company itself and their philosophy not so much
What pisses me off about this is that people are such drones for The Google via GMail (mostly) that they don't question this since it works for them. Nevermind that Google is a user-hostile megacorp that will screw them as soon as it makes financial sense to do so.
Ever talk to someone random about Google's privacy bullshit and why Chrome is not a great browser? Nobody cares, and they think you're an idiot.
So, Google will carry on until it's too late.
Google, Samsung, Apple, and others have to abide by the same law, Microsoft isn't special.
I also don't understand what this law has to do with the topic.
I support the enforcement of anti-trust laws against Microsoft, but I am at the same time puzzled at how much Google is allowed to get away with. They are simultaneously maintaining the biggest browser platform while also being the biggest content and advertisement provider, AND they have a major influence on the development of web standards, AND they control the development of a major OS (Android) for accessing the web, where their browser comes pre-installed. And now they are actively exploiting their position and trying to sabotage the competition.
My point in highlighting it is that I think there is a lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws and/or a lack of laws that would prevent Google behaving in this way, since I think it is so much worse than what Microsoft has been doing with Windows not allowing users to uninstall crapware.
The law you're mentioning is the “Digital Markets Act”, and it's a new law that will apply to Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung and others, not having to do with any enforcement of “antitrust” laws upon Microsoft.
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Furthermore, are we talking about the same Microsoft that:
1. forced usage of Microsoft Edge, while also actively blocking circumvention mechanisms;
2. that keeps hijacking searches for Chrome, or Firefox;
3. that has telemetry in Edge that can't be disabled;
4. and that, upon first opening Edge, it asks you to agree to data sharing with the entire advertising industry?
---
You basically assert that Google is receiving preferential treatment from the EU, yet provided absolutely no evidence for it.
I didn't mean to imply that they got preferential treatment, and I also didn't mean to defend what Microsoft has been doing, I just think what Google is doing is even worse. I meant that if Google is allowed to dominate control of the web like they do now, then I think there is a lack of laws to prevent them from continuing that dominance. This may not be because EU lawmakers have been bought or anything, just that they are ignorant towards the issue of a single market player gaining control of all parts of the web.
yet provided absolutely no evidence for it.
Maybe the absence of evidence is the evidence in this case. (No lawsuits)
Chrome have been the IE6 situation all over again for a while now, except this time it's possibly too late to walk back. They are pretty much done taking over the standard.
To be fair, the IE6 problem wasn’t just massive usage, it was massive usage plus complete stagnation.
Chrome has high but not massive usage, and it hasn’t stagnated. It has a separate problem though: the lack of stagnation is actually a drive towards Google’s somewhat unhealthy vision for the web.
People keep forgetting that Google is an ad company first, everything else just supports that.
And what's better for distributing ads on the internet then controlling the software people use to view said ads - the browser.
If you are fluent with the terminal, you don't need to suffer from the YT Web UI. Install mpv and yt-dlp. Play videos like this:
mpv [--no-video] "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9zVjEZ7W8Q"
This is the way.
I really don't understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends. You get bombarded with ads, you're constantly tracked and experimented on, and your behavior is used to improve their algorithms in order to keep you on the site for as long as possible. It's a hostile user experience, just like most of the mainstream web.
Whenever possible, I suggest using Invidious, Piped, Newpipe, yt-dlp, and anything but the official frontends.
I try to compensate the creators I follow via other means if they have an alternative income source, but I refuse to be forced to participate in an exploitative business model that is responsible for the awful state of the modern web.
Because using the website is a better experience. None of those tools worked with Sponsorblock last time I tried, for one.
I don't want to yt-dlp every video, Piped and Invidious both have awful frontends in comparison, even the Newpipe dev admitted to using Vanced at some point, and yt-dlp needs some massaging to get the right video quality (and it can't download some videos at all).
If any of your solutions were better for the majority, the majority would be using them. Youtube's ad blocker war is making the platform worse for everyone, but having a couple of billions of developer power behind your platform still beats any open source video players built for fun.
>I really don't understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends.
I'm a technically proficient user that's written custom bash scripts for youtube-dl combined with ffmpeg to download videos locally and I still use the official Youtube desktop web browser UI every day for several reasons:
+ transcripts and close-captioning (use Ctrl+F search for text to find the section of video that starts talking about the topic I'm interested in)
+ many videos have index of chapters (deep links), table-of-contents
+ viewers' comments (especially valuable for crowdsourced feedback on DIY videos to point out extra tips, or flaws, etc)
+ external links mentioned (Amazon links to products is especially valuable for DIY tutorials)
+ convenient hot links to related videos (part 2, part 3, etc). Not every creator makes "playlists"
+ Youtube web UI has superfast video scrubbing of the timeline. A local video player like VLC scrubbing of the timeline is very slow compared to Youtube because the youtube backend pre-analyzes the entire video and generates a bunch of timeline thumbnails at multiple intervals. This makes the Youtube web UI timeline scrubbing very fluid with responsive visual feedback.
I like downloading with yt-dlp but I also lose a lot of functionality when I watch videos in VLC instead of the Youtube desktop webbrowser UI. The above points are not relevant to the terrible Youtube app on mobile and tablets.
+ many videos have index of chapters (deep links)
In mpv, you can use PgUp and PgDown to select chapters.
+ external links mentioned
Video description is in audio/video file if yt-dlp gets a --embed-metadata. mpv prints that if present.
The web frontend just works. The other frontends tend to have issues, which even if they're not deal-breakers are annoying. I won't put ideology over using what works best. And clicking a link, then clicking play, beats copying the URL then pasting it into a command line.
Of course this only works because by default (since I have an ad blocker anyways) I don't get bombarded with ads on the web frontend, and so far I've seen the adblocker nag screen once (a failure which uBlock Origin seems to have swiftly corrected).
Because I don't want to fuck about working against the platform, opting myself into something that'll break at any moment.
I would much rather put up with Youtube than be frustrated when my 'alternate frontend' one day breaks and i need to figure out a workaround.
I really don't understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends.
- Because I don't see ads with YouTube Premium
- Because I add things to my playlists
- Because I more often than not find interesting things to watch there
- Because I like using it on my phone or TV
There's a lot of reasons why someone would prefer the official apps over some third party app that might break every few months.
I think you’re missing the point. How can I browse Youtube in mpv?
What do you mean by "browsing" Youtube? Clicking new links for the purpose of entertainment?
My post was only about playing videos.
Well, how do you get to the videos? How do you discover their links to pipe to mpv/yt-dl?
One option is RSS (YouTube still supports it) subscribing to channels. Do you know of others?
I don't, i use Youtube for listening to music or livestreams that i already know the title of.
Use Invidious, Piped or any other frontend that doesn't track and manipulate you.
Adding https://youtube-lite.js.org/#/ to the list.
In addition to Piped, and Invidious, mentioned by sibling comments, which allow you to subscribe, search, and provide recommendations, you can use a complete CLI workflow with something like ytfzf[0], or, you can use the search commands on yt-dlp[1], which are also accessibly through mpv using the ytdl:// prefix.
Getting familiar with such tools not only replaces the terrible UXes you have to be subjected to, but also gives you the power and freedom to be creative with how you use Youtube and other online streaming sites.
I wrote various tiny scripts to replace all my needs for Youtube search, using any highlighted text, with a shortcut, Youtube Music, with a synced plain text file of song titles and a shuffle-on-read script, and more curiously, a script to help me slowly go through all thousands of my partner's favorite songs, and then, using shortcuts, add them to my own favorites, decide on them later, add them to the "what the heck do you listen to" friendly banter list, or the "my ears bleeding" list, etc. Much better UX then anything the slow web UIs can offer, and with minimum hacking.
One feature it lacks is seek bar previews. There are thumbnail scripts but they don't use the available youtube thumbnails.
I implemented downloading of youtube thumbnails for one of these scripts.
Or use any of the many alternative YouTube frontends: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#youtube
Another "Youtube is doing shit" thread and yet not a single mention of Peertube.
So for all people uploading videos, please have a look at Peertube. It is to Youtube what Mastodon is to Twitter. (and more: it is compatible with Mastodon, one can subscribe to your Peertube channel through his/her mastodon account).
I’m not arguing to leave Youtube completely but to offer an alternative to your audience. Please join peertube.
I'd love to see real competition to YouTube. I'm afraid this seems not, the UX isn't great, homepage is useless, you need to click on Browse content then enter some keywords on a blank page, search results limited to 2 items and then you need to click on "Display more videos". I might be to used to youtube homepage, for me it's perfect I get videos right away and suggestions are good. I'm pretty sure this project, Mastodon and others are in good will, but they lack great ux/ui, it seems to me that ux isn't even researched, how can it be a viable competitor?
Please send this to the Peertube developer. Consider also that until recently it's likely that having videos load fast on peer2peer and adding features like streaming likely had a higher priority than interface polishing.
But you might be asking for something impossible : the focus is on the different servers, and having a "suggested videos" page is seen as an anti-feature because it involves making an "algorithm", at which point you are editorializing, become (legally !) responsible for what you select, and are close to become a platform yourself, something that you started out by fighting in the first place !
Like Mastodon, Peertube should not aim to "Do everything people think will be good to get audience". It should create a philosophy.
I’m quite sure that lot and lot of people are tired by all those algorithmic suggestions. People are sad to see creators doing videos to get likes/subscribers/views instead of really creating.
This is a new model. And the winners of the old models will either adapt or not be winners any more. And that’s good if the premise is that the old model is broken in the first place.
I'd love to see real competition to YouTube. I'm afraid this seems not, the UX isn't great.
What do you call YouTube's UI then? Any Peertube instance I used has better UI than YouTube. Most websites have. Because YouTube UI is atrocious and one of the most user hostile UIs I have used.
search results limited to 2 items
Not sure what you are talking about. Is this an exaggeration? It is not clear via text-only to me.
I don't need it to be a competitor; I don't even want it to be a competitor. I just need it to exist and get some quality, modest use like the rest of the fedeverse.
YouTube's market hold is unfortunately circular; no uploader on the platform will risk splitting their audience to a platform nobody goes to, and because of that, new platforms are unable to grow.
That aside: I also doubt most peertube instances can withstand the bandwidth costs of seriously hosting a few moderately succesful YouTube channels.
Content makers already do multi uploads on various platforms
no uploader on the platform will risk splitting their audience to a platform nobody goes to
cough nebula cough
I think Rumble [1] is the most valid competitor at the moment.
I am not getting this behaviour in Firefox 120. Tried it, logged out as well.
setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
The code looks like a silly concurrency bug fix, i.e., a lazy way to force ordering.
I can't believe billion dollar companies 'solve' bugs the same way as i do
The people working there are also just people like you.
They just practice leetcode a lot, doesn't mean they know how to deal with those issues in the UI.
A 5 SECOND timeout for a concurrency issue? I doubt it.
It's timeout that's part of loading ads. That code isn't blocking anything. The headline here is wrong.
Such fix won't sleep for 5000 ms though. In my reading it looks like a part of the adblocker detection code. (EDIT: Relocated the actual analysis to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346602 for more visibility.)
Or potentially a concurrency bug trigger? "One in 1000 times X takes a bit too long and causes problem Y; I'll make X take minimum 5 seconds so I can trigger Y reliably." Then fixes Y but forgets to remove the delay.
I have a hard time believing that's actually what's happening. If they wanted to slow down other browsers, why would they choose this easily discoverable way? They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect. It seems more likely this is just a debug snippet that has made it into production by accident.
If I was working at Google and I was tasked with doing that, I'd half ass it too
I mean it could be that the programmer wanted it to be discovered to draw attention to Google managers' shenanigans but that seems kind of far fetched.
They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect.
And that is /not/ easily discoverable??
I would argue it's a bit harder to find if the youtube backend serves files slower for certain browsers. One could even radomize it and sometimes still serve it fast or something. Since you cannot look at the backend code it would be hard to proof anything.
ah yes, the fact that they are sabotaging other browsers in a very obvious way is actually proof that they didn't meant to sabotage other browsers!
I've recently done a pc upgrade and am now enjoying 64 gigs of ram. Decided to watch a live stream on youtube this weekend.
Firefox: 22 GB of ram usage for the youtube tab after ~15 minutes. Tab became unresponsive.
Edge: Out of memory error after ~5 minutes.
Chrome: working fine, the youtube tab sitting peacefully ay 400-600 MB.
I don't know what your problem is exactly but this is not normal behavior on Firefox at least. Check your extensions to begin with, or for a quick test, try watching a video in a prvivate tab.
Just, ublock origin, a password manager, and the kagi extension for my search engine. ublock origin was installed on all browsers. I'm not even trying to watch it without ublock, as that would be an unreasonable thing to do in general.
I know this is not normal behaviour, and it's likely unintetional, but I'll be damn sure google won't bother to fix it. I'm most surprised by Edge as it's running chromium and it should share some similarity to chrome.
Not sure what is specific in your setup but I have watched numerous live stream on firefox and tab never became unresponsive. Haven't checked the ram but my laptop had half of yours and the live were running for an hour or so.
I had the same issue, it turned out to be some random addon I installed years ago. Check if the problem also occurs with everything but uBlock Origin disabled.
I don't understand this. If people don't want to or need to buy anything and they don't want to see ads, because this is pure simply a distraction and won't sway them into buying anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads?
Furthermore, I wish regulators have gone at YouTube like a ton of bricks. The ads they show are mostly from various kind of scam artists. My friend is a bit naive, but fortunately she asked me for an opinion whether she should invest her savings into the programme offered by one of "gurus" advertising on YT. She even gone on a few of their webinars and became as you would say, brainwashed. The kind of way you see in a cult. Fortunately there was still some worry running around her and she asked me to check before transferring £20k. You can't imagine how much effort it took to tell here these guys are fraudsters. Now she is onto another scheme and now she tells me that I just don't want her to invest the money, because I think everyone is a fraudster and these are the good guys! Then she showed me testimonials from apparent "clients" how they got rich. One person looked familiar and I actually found them on Cameo. She tried to say maybe this is just that person's side gig etc. and she does not talk to me.
I really really hope someone or some organisation get to the bottom of this kind of harmful and dangerous content.
YouTube is a scammers paradise and YouTube wants more people to fall for these things.
The point of forcing ads onto users who don't want to see them and won't buy anything from them, is that the advertisers will still pay Google. In the long run, their CTR will suffer, but it will be consistent across advertisers. If they're paying per click then nobody loses except the user, who Google is betting actually will click on some ads (meaning they're basically engaging in psychological warfare, or at least rewarding the advertisers who do). And if they're paying per impression, then advertisers will see conversions go down in the long run, but Google might think the increased volume will make up for it.
I don't understand this. If people don't want to or need to buy anything and they don't want to see ads, because this is pure simply a distraction and won't sway them into buying anything, then what is the point of forcing them to watch ads?
Age-old question. It's not that simple. Those ads have an effect on you whether you "want to or need to buy anything" or not.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and...
Seems odd to do something so brazen while also publishing information that (could) prove intent.
Google also modifies how business information can be accessed from Firefox Mobile. You can't read reviews easily from Firefox Mobile. At least not my install.
That's because it's not actually what's happening. I'm all for bashing bigcorps and especially ad empires but reddit folks confused correlation with causation here.
The code in question is part of a function that injects a video ad (that plays before the start) and the code itself is just a fallback in case it fails to load over 5 seconds so that video page doesn't break completely.
Why was this affected by user agent change? My best guess is that on some combinations they somehow decide not to show any ads at all (for now) and therefore this function is not called and some other code path is taken. This is consistent with my own experience with the recent anti-adblock bullshit they implemented. The banner was not being shown after user agent change implying it's one of the considered variables.
You can verify all this if you click 'format code' in browser debugger.
That makes sense and explains why it seemed so odd.
I don't use YouTube so the comment was more of a way to bring up the other behavior in business reviews. It seemed relevant.
Edit: reviews are also broken(for me) on Firefox desktop with no extensions enabled and with ublock enabled.
Using firefox I get "instant" youtube. The video starts playing before most of the rest of the UI has loaded even, definitely under 1 second.
Any idea what specifically causes it to happen, rather than just "firefox"?
An up-to-date adblocker blocker blocker, most likely. Paying for Premium may also do it.
I've gotten that really slow UI loading almost always lately and I've always assumed that it's because I'm running uBlock Origin.
Although I just tried opening two videos and both opened basically instantly.
Anti-Trust anyone?
Wait until the EU gets their hands on this..
I hope they keep this code in YT.
It will be a party for the EU to punish Google with an anti-monopoly lawsuit.
Best case: google gets forced to split up chrome, youtube and search as they obviously abuse their power.
Would be a bad day for the Internet. There's no way Youtube is financially viable without being cross-subsidised by Google's search income and running on Google's peering agreements with ISPs. Ads would be nowhere near enough to cover the bandwidth cost, which is why sooner or later any attempt to copycat it failed or went down to utter niche content.
setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
The actual code. They went and actually hardcoded a 5 second delay.
or it's a background process that waits until other assets have had time to load
This just... isn't happening for me? My only extensions are UBo, Return Youtube Dislike and Sponsorblock, so I presume a UBo filter is either fixing it or the change isn't rolled out to all users yet.
The UBo team commented on the Reddit thread that they were looking into it. So it may have already been fixed.
I noticed Youtube started doing this in the last couple days, and I use FF. What a silly thing to do, about as juvenile as a company can be.
It's been happening on Chrome as well for the past few days so I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
I'm getting such a pause also in Chrome since a few days, I was assuming that it's fallout from the adblocking wars though (I use uBlock Origin and don't get the nag screen anymore since around the time that pause appeared)
Yup, same here — I see the same delay in Chrome now and then.
I guessed it was due to the cat-and-mouse adblocking prevention between YouTube and adblockers (I'm also using uBlock Origin).
I have been getting this same slow-down for a month or two, but using Brave - which is the same user-agent as Chrome.
I would imagine changing the user-agent at all will (temporarily) fix it, rather than to a Chrome user-agent specifically.
Probably targets ad blocking users rather than non-Chrome users.
Huh, I nearly exclusively use Brave for YouTube because it does a good job blocking ads and I haven’t noticed any slowdown.
I did see the ad nag once when I accidentally went to YouTube in safari
Can we have some fucking facts already? We have seen other reports of this same issue but people were using Chrome. This seems like an over-reaction. And the Reddit herd is known for being unstoppable over false-assumptions.
HN is no better. We love to jump to premature conclusions. Just look at this thread. It doesn't even link to anything (right now the submission link is https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/) and yet people are automatically bringing out the pitchforks.
I’ve also noticed mysterious buffering in the iOS app for YouTube for at least a few months. Even on a Google Fiber connection many videos will take a number of seconds to start, and sometimes buffer in the middle. I also have YT Premium, so anti ad blocking shouldn’t come into the picture. Videos load right away in Safari though.
Delete the iOS app and install the Vinegar Safari extension. It will replace the hostile video player with a native HTML5 <video> element. I never see any ads, I can select the stream quality, and Picture-in-Picture works as my OS intended it to.
Why are people upvoting a submission without a proper link? Really shows that people are always just commenting on the headline and not the content.
It has been changed now but it was the wrong link (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/login/) for 3 hours with 900 upvotes.
Not only that: Google's recaptcha will also ask you for dozens of captchas on firefox android (which is probably the best) way to watch youtube/use google site without ads on mobile)
f** google
On android NewPipe is a good alternative to watch youtube
Because this wasn't visible enough: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9...
setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);Google's play in order to force Mozilla to adopt new Manifest V3 and cripple adblocking.
Hilarious
Youtube is a very toxic environment. Even "informative" content is often toxic, but in a very subtle manner.
At google They may be not respecting the web but they are doing firefox users a favor. If you really need to see a video, five seconds won't make a difference. If you don't need it, five seconds may remind you that you don't really need it.
Try to see the positives
It’s been like this for years on Firefox for me, even before they cracked down on adblockers and such. I’ve also noticed it messes with the history functionality and often breaks the back button. Getting sick of googles nonsense.
Chrome has been the new Internet Explorer for a bunch of years already.
And even people who lived the horror days of "We need to support IE6 because the client wants so" and "ActiveX is a good choice for web pages" are complacent.
Please, for the love of all that's good in the world, use ANYTHING but a Chromium-based browser if at all possible.
Software that's not getting any attention will be ok as it won't get python upgrades.
Software that is getting attention has a nice long warning period and fixes may not even cause any trouble at all if the code is ok and there are unit tests.
New software won't have a whole class of timezone problems because people will use the better API to remove the warnings.
I cannot see what the big problem is - much more troublesome things happen in Go all the time. Python isn't a huge for-profit company like Google or even MS which has to dedicate efforts to ensuring that games from 1992 still run in 2023.
I have experienced similar delays when clicking links from google search.
It's a bug they can't fix and "if you wait 5 seconds it works". Also , in 5 seconds, ad blockers are guaranteed to have kicked in
People on reddit have posted videos of this happening in chrome, I think it's possible this is actually just a bug and not an evil scheme.
YouTube company should be split into two. One for client, one for infrastructure. And they should ban them from your exclusive deals with each other.
I use Firefox and I have never had issues with Google sites. I don't know if they are picking and choosing users but I just checked and my load times for youtube are ~2 seconds for both Chrome and FF. no difference in load times.
How come this video isn't just showing caching at work?
Oh, I noticed this yesterday and assumed it was ad blocker hostility. Which I guess it may well be -- are Firefox users more likely to use ad blockers? Possibly. Certainly on Android. That doesn't strictly matter though, presumably the Youtube people try to avoid stepping on the Chrome people's toes.
Given Google is apparently going ahead with killing extensions on Chrome it's not hard to imagine some scheme where a guy is just lookin' at'cha merchandise and happens to be carryin' a baseball bat is all -- you can't really blame him for some spillage, right? (make using Firefox painful to try and push people to Chrome). Before crippling Chrome? Sounds ridiculous, but one can't help but wonder...
Thinking about some more, the point could actually be to make users question if its because they have an ad blocker not even actively blocking anything, but simply installed. Some number of users may uninstall their ad blocking extension to see if it makes the lag go away.
If that’s true, it is pure evil.
I use Firefox on macOS Ventura, and here the video pages load instantly.
I do have YouTube Premium (paid for in India to reduce the cost), but also in an incognito window where I'm not logged in, the video pages load immediately.
Maybe it's because I use the extensions uBlock Origin and/or Disable Autoplay For YouTube?
And that is why these giant companies should be split apart.
* Meanwhile, reddit asks me to sign up or log in to see the thread. *
Oh wait. Who thought it's a good idea to post this with a link to a login page instead of the actual discussion thread?
I don't use firefox but have noticed a strange delay occurring during the past day or two. Wondering if it's coincidence. I use ublock origin, so maybe youtube's detecting its presence somehow and forcing a delay? (ublock is up to date so I don't get the message from youtube telling me to stop using adblockers - perhaps this is their next attempt to annoy people into paying/allowing ads?).
Time for EU to slap them in the face again
Just yesterday people on here were talking about how using Adblock instead of paying for Youtube was unfair to Google and basically stealing. Is this the type of behavior you want to reward?
Glad I dropped chrome for Firefox at the beginning of 2022. It took some time to get used to it but eventually it's now my main browser. Tired of Google being such a piece of shit. Hopefully 2024 will be the year of Linux on mobile.
They’re gonna start rickrolling anyone not using Chrome next.
Unexpected side effect - Rick is now number 1 in all the streaming charts.
Using firefox 118 on Mac here and seeing no issues. Videos load instantly or near instantly.
The most interesting part from the discussion was noting it's implemented in the most basic, easily avoidable way (just spoof chrome) implying engineers unhappy with these tasks.
@dang or op, wrong link. Should be: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
Seems relevant to the discussion here.
How Google is building a browser monopoly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig
Sadly there is still no alternative to Youtube. Same with Reddit.
Code generally does not enter the YouTube code base without a lot of review namely (1) performance tests and (2) code reviews from multiple teams. Lines like this almost certainly get flagged/increased scrutiny. It would be very hard to imagine multiple people didn’t know about this and assign the blame to a single person.
This seems like a pretty clear-cut antitrust case. The EU Commission better go after it.
I really hope the next Next Generation EU package will be entirely funded by the fines we will inflict on Google for its blatant abuse of market dominance
As a JavaScript Dev, around 2010-2012 it was not uncommon to see `setTimeout(..., n)` hacks, often with n=0 but sometimes even n=1000, n=5000 into a codebase. This could workaround some bugs, and given the overall low-quality state of the JS ecosystem back then, often a last-resort.
And yes, am guilty too of committing this to prod back then. I think I haven't had a case where this was deployed in the last decade, but in the ugly SPA days pre angular v1 (and even during angular v1), where you code was this big glued-together conglomerate of various 3rd party UI libraries, this was common. Its ugly as hell, and you really had to be there at that time to understand this. But often it was just a cheap alternative, while debugging and fixing the truly underlying cause would be several man-days or even weeks.
My point being: It might have slipped their QA cracks and was at some point intended to workaround a bug of some obscure Firefox behavior. For a company at youtube's scale this is however pretty embarrassing.
I thought it was my adblocker (uBlock) causing the issue.
The mentioned issue that can be seen on the video has been happening to me for a day or two while using Chrome.
Assume this is supposed to be the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
The second I saw reddit as the source I knew this was going to be incorrect.
Can someone check gmail as well? It loads so slowly under firefox.
Seems like this is an unintentional benefit to firefox users. A small amount of friction is the difference between "I'm mindlessly watching" vs "I actually care about watching this video."
This is why you don't let a single corporation control more than half the internet, and more than 75% of the browser market
Is this what has been making Firefox crash when I load videos lately?
They did this for years in the past, I really despise google
I haven‘t tested this thoroughly, but I have a feeling that YouTube also forces worse codecs on Firefox. Codecs that can only decoder on the CPU, making Firefox seem sluggish and wasteful. This is a reason why I switched to Safari on macOS.
I noticed this one and it did come to mind that it was, ahem, targeted
overlords: I'll give up youtube entirely rather than watch ads/contribute towards your revenue
I said it already several times, but it's worth repeating.
Stop using the youtube.com frontend entirely. It's enshittified beyond redemption. If they could replace it with a big ads billboard with no added value while leaving their profits intact, they'll do it.
If you really have to watch some content that it's only on YouTube, use Piped, Invidious, or one of the many tools based on youtube-dl or any of its forks.
Google deserves piracy now because a big loss of revenue resulting from their hostile practices is the only thing that can stop this enshittification process. Google will stop only when users say that it's gone too far. Scraping them, pirating them and financially damaging them is a moral duty at this point.
Quick note:
yt-dlp + VLC speed this right up again!
On a completely related note, the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority has recently been flexing its muscles on digital markets. You may wish to know of this URL, specifically for reporting anti-competitive practices: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...
I would need to see a Firefox UA warm cache reload in the same video before I put any stock in this. This aligns to perfectly with the “But Google evil” narrative for me to believe it uncritically. Alas, I don’t trust the internet anymore.
Hm, it does not correspond to my observations. I'm using Firefox and the videos load and start just as they usually do.
A/B testing? :)
I wrote an email to Electronic Frontier Foundation and European Digital Rights collective asking them to file a complaint against Google because of this unjustified slowdown. I advise other readers to consider doing the same.
I use Firefox on Windows and I cannot reproduce this. Videos load instantly.
I've had this slow down show up for me as well. I wonder if there's a non malicious explanation, although I'll admit I'm unable to think of a charitable interpretation.
Sometimes YouTube also disables features on my home page. For example, at the top of the home page there's usually a filter bar with various categories. I haven't figured out under what conditions this gets triggered, but there's times where the filter bar just disappears.
I also noticed this during the weekend. I initially assumed that the new uBO filters are too blame -- guess that's exactly what Google is going for with these hostile measures, and it kinda works.
Use brave. The best youtube premium experience without paying for premium.
happens to me on chrome too with ublock.
Wait, so this is about the delay loading, but not why FF mobile has really poor frameretes at the start of most (non-ad) videos?
I haven't noticed an issue yet.
My issue at the moment is while ublock can still block ads, every video automatically pauses like 5 seconds in and I need to hit play again.
Oh wow. I’ve been feeling this but had ascribed it to the new ad blocker war thing.
Surely this is straight to court for anti-competitive behaviour?
lol, I think this ended up being one of several factors that made me switch to firefox (now vivaldi).
The "extra chance to consider your life choices and do you really want to watch this video" was a feature not a bug.
Plus now tiktok and telegram are orders of magnitude more popular than YT. Im seeing more and more creators arrive on YT as their "second choice" platform.
Pretty sure Apple does something similar with iTunes on Windows. It's amazing how slow the UI is in general and how poorly the Movie watching experience is with it being incredibly slow to seek or take any inputs while playing a video.
From reddit discussion (https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9...):