Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
Even though it doesn’t apply for me (praise Freetube and Grayjay!) I’d rather waste 5 second looking at black than any ad ever
It’s funny they think 5 seconds of no content is worst of 10~30 seconds of ads.
I experience suboptimal viewing by having to watch ads. If I had to pick one or the other, I know which one I prefer.
It’s crazy that Google thinks people would rather watch 15 seconds of ads than 5 seconds of nothing.
Jesus Christ, why can’t they just leave it alone. At this point they are grasping at straws. More likely, people will stop using YouTube at all than turning off adblockers or switching browsers.
I use Firefox+uBO, and I would stop using it, but I’m not convinced that most users would. Too many people fear the slightest bit inconvenience or change.
This is part of a much larger plan. Google wants to establish a new standard that the rest of the internet will follow.
If Google is seen fighting an endless war against ad blockers, it will encourage other websites to do the same.
No longer will it be “Please disable your ad blocker, as advertising supports us and helps keep this content free”
It will start being “Ad blockers are not permitted.”
Google wants the Internet to start thinking of allowing ads as requirement for entry, and (via Manifest v3 and web environment integrity checking (which you better believe will be brought back in another form)), they will provide websites the tools to enforce this.
And I want to personally blame all the tech savvy people that have helped chrome achieve monopoly status over the last decade. If you’ve used chrome as main browser, it’s your fault.
Pointing fingers now after the fact is not productive. We need to educate people and lead them to alternatives like Firefox. Blaming people is not going to do that.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. In a lot of your more famous cyberpunk stories, like Snow Crash, the world itself is a violent dystopia, and the internet is depicted as evolving into something both intensely interesting, but also very chaotic and filled with hostile people looking to scam or exploit you. The contemporary internet is moving towards an extreme degree of corporate regulation and control. Its not chaotic - it’s intensely ordered. It’s not interesting - the content is boiled down to the lowest common denominator and recycled ad-nauseam. Companies like Google are now trying to take the current internet, which has tragically become like a gated community with billboards, into something even worse than that. I imagine the next step will be all out war on the only non-Chromium based browser of note left: Firefox. After Firefox is gone, Google will own the internet as we know it.
Considering those are people who only cost them bandwidth and provide nothing in return, that might actually be a net positive for their bottom line.
‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.
They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.
They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.
Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.
Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.
In other words (as I agree with you): they don’t generate direct profit for YouTube, but they generate value, or the long-term ability to generate profit.
And a long-term stable business should focus first and foremost on its value, because predatory profiting (i.e. profit obtained in a way that reduces the platform’s value) doesn’t last very long.
You’re relying on a lot of assumptions, which even if true, still doesn’t mean that the math works out in a way that means allowing ad-blocking users makes sense.
Netflix doesn’t need a “healthy community” for people to use the platform. Shows do perfectly fine letting all the talking happen on other social media.
AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all, which with how hard they push premium, definitely isn’t the case.
Yes, probably. But there are alternatives to circumvent their current restrictions and I think there will always be. If you add those methods, maybe the balance goes the other way around. For example, I’d go the Freetube way (invidious) instead. If they keep investing on preventing me to use Invidious, is it worth it for them? We will see.
If bandwidth was the problem, then they should allow Android systems to switch from video to audio-only when the screen is off or they could limit the resolution and fps to those using adblockers, without denying access to view. People using Firefox+uBlock already made a choice to not be their “clients”. At this point they should just count their blessings, which are still a lot, and let Firefox+uBlock users be or just close their pitty platform to their users as Facebook does. It’s here where their dilemma lives, are they gonna be another Facebook?
There are already several alternatives and this attitude of YouTube will only get them more users.
They don’t have a 100% monopoly, but they have enough control over the digital video space that they have real competitors.
In a real competitive landscape, YouTube would be scared to do many of the user-unfriendly things they’ve been doing because it would seriously hurt their market share. As it is, they might go from 97.64% of online user-generated video to 96%. That’s not really going to worry them.
Can we stop panicing every 5 seconds? Give adblockers 1-10 days and they will fix it. We have been through this a bunch of times.
Yeah, as long as it is a big enough problem on the internet, you will have at least one nerd trying to find a way to circumvent it.
Give them time.
Most of the articles writing about it seem to reference following reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
Following code is pointed out:
setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);
While this is a 5s timeout, the code itself does not check for the user agent. So wherever the code is the 5s timeout will occur. The code also does not seem to be injected server side. I spoofed my user agent and for good measure installed a fresh google chrome, both times the code was present. So this code cannot be used to make any browser slower without making the other browsers slow too.
There is a response to the reddit post, which most articles seem to take their intel from. IMO this response does a good job at exploring what the code could be used for and points out that it is more than likely not for slowing down Firefox users: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/ka08uqj/
I am amused by thinking that many journalists seem to take this story from a post on reddit, without even reading the direct responses - or just copy from another article.
The user agent is in the request header, so it’s known before any response is sent from YouTube.
I don’t know if that’s what they’re doing, because it’s not possible to know what their server code is doing, making it a far better place to hide sleazy code.
But the server outputs code for the browser to run. Doesn’t matter what the server does as long as the browser gets there same output.
Server side they could stall based on the agent but it’s not the case here. Whatever is happening seems to be client side.
The client code can be modified depending on the request headers before being returned by the server
Alternatively, it’s funny that people write comments arguing that it wasn’t targeted at Firefox users, on a post that already says that it wasn’t targeted at Firefox users :P
It doesn’t really matter whether it was “targeted” at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. “End” vs “means”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there’s a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox’s. Given that all it’s doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there’s some indicators even if there’s not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.
I said that i found different articles blindly copying. But i did not say 404 did so ;)
That’s out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?
For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:
if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {
setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);
} else {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}
It’s possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.
And I expect it’s likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven’t had the time to check it myself, but there’s probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.
The code is not obfuscated. The person i linked to even formatted it nicely. I do not have the time or energy to go through all of youtube’s JS. But the 5s everyone is talking about does target every browser the same. Serverside the code isn’t altered based on browser detection.
It can be formatted “nicely” with no issue. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to understand.
What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP()… it’s a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn’t necessarily match up with what you’d expect would be the flow.
In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren’t pedantic enough.
Like, for example, there’s this function:
function vc() {
var a = za.navigator;
return a && (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
}
Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that’s just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there’s also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too… and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.
And I’m not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem… it’s entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else… but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of “nicely formated” messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.
