I had a feeling this was the case. Youtube has been painful for the past month now.
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In addition to the fact that I remember this happening several years ago, I'm pretty sure this has been an issue for a while. When I decided to exclusively use Firefox about a year ago, YouTube as a whole would load slowly and it still does.
And I hate the fact that Google knows that they will benefit from this because, unfortunately, a majority of YouTube users are sheeple.
I started noticing how sometimes youtube just seemingly refused to load fully on my phone. I thought it was just my crap internet. But since I use Iceraven, a fork of firefox, it seems that may be why.
Once upon a time, Google wanted to kill the user-agent.
The YouTube viewing experience on FF is terrible. I have premium no ads and still manage to break the interface occasionally by clicking a new video or seeking the video playing.
Firefox is great for YouTube. Don't support google via premium - those guys aren't exactly short of a dime. Addblockers are flawless.
I can confirm this. I signed up for the free trial of YT Premium (which I immediately cancelled, but I'll take the three months) but YT seems to be detecting that I'm on Firefox and have Ublock installed, so I'm getting the occasional 5 second forced delay, even though I'm a premium user. (They may not count the trial as being a "true" premium user, I'd suspect.)
If this is true the crowd on here that often says Firefox is really owned by Google because Google pays Mozilla to have their search engine be the default search engine on Firefox really need to look at their claim and rethink their understanding of how Mozilla and Google interact.