this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it is slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
I'm pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can't be assed to try to find it right now.
Here you go:
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
They used to also use the unreleased version 0 of shadow DOM for building the Polymer UI, which - being a Chrome-only prototype - understandably didn't work on Firefox, and therefore instead used a really slow Javascript polyfill to render its UI.
I haven't checked on it lately, but I imagine they must've changed at least that by now.
It's not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It's a scumbag company.
How the fuck they haven't been slapped with an anticompetitive is beyon - oohh right. End stage capitalism
One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.
That’s super interesting! I’m not versed enough though, do you have like a tutorial you recommend or should I just Google it?
There's a bunch of extensions that allow you to switch user-agent easily, I personally use this one, it includes a list of known strings to choose between as well.
And to check that it’s working, there are websites you can go to which will tell you what browser they have detected you are using.
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own ~~privacy invasion sniffing tool~~ browser twice as hard as for Firefox and such
Google does that a lot with their own web properties. I remember Google Meet didn't support background replacement on Firefox, but switching Firefox's user agent to Chrome suddenly fixed it.
Google Sheets is a mess on FF too. Cell selection is broken af.
Do you use YouTube so much that a small performance difference on a single Site has an influence on your browser choice?
You haven't experienced slow until you try to take Firefox through Google Cloud Console or Search Tools. 15 seconds in Chrome, somehow turns into 3 minutes in Firefox, funny how it does that.
Same happens with Safari. The page loads in a weird funky way, video sorta first and then comments and suggestions many seconds later.
On Chrome on the exact same computer it’s instant.
They’re doing it on purpose.
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
Google definitely did extend video loading times on FF a while ago, not sure if they still do it.
Ironically I use a chrome type browser for YouTube and mail checking only. This is also the only browser in which I am logged in with my Google account.
My main Firefox is for everything else including search.
I tried both and the videos played at the same speed for me
Because they do. A while back, it was discovered they were injecting delays if they detected Firefox as your user agent.
Firefox is good for webpages not web apps
That's a really weird take. Like… what even is the difference supposed to be?
This sounds more like “everything should be as it was back when ! When there were still Webpages, and we were frolicking about the internet! Until ~~the fire nation attacked~~ Web apps took over!”
What an oddly aggressive take on someone’s opinion
Basically I am saying Firefox is not as performant as chromium when loading JavaScript.
Don't agree, nothing noticeable for me anyhow. Chrome has the ultimate drawback: being under the control of a monopolistic evil corporation
In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.
We're usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you're using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.
A web app is just a fancy name for a dynamic web page. Change my mind.