this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
415 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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."

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (3 children)

For a specific how to, there's a bunch of firefox addons that do it, but the mozilla recommended one is this

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/

It's super easy to use, just open it and it gives a bunch of options.

This is my current (fake) user agent;

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

A few more clicks;

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; HLK-AL00) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.102 Mobile Safari/537.36 EdgA/104.0.1293.70

And finally;

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3; Trident/6.0)

Now, that last one is making it look like I'm using internet explorer... Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.

I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with "fancy" features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it's absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like "See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn't bother to support it anymore".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)

This is a good summary of this mess: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I personally like seeing Mozilla loud and proud in all the user agents.

It's a mess, but also an echo of history.