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YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[–] 106 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

You absolutely can tell what's happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when ontimeupdate promise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.

https://pastebin.com/TqjzbqQE

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    They don't need to put incriminating "if Firefox" statements in their code -- the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Easy enough to test though. Load the page with a UA changer and see if it still shows up when Firefox pretends to be Chrome

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    The video in the linked article does just that. The page takes 5 seconds to load the video, the user changes the UA, they refresh the page and suddenly the video loads instantly. I would have liked to see them change the UA back to Firefox to prove it's not some weird caching issue though

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