Yeah, sure. That's why it happens on Firefox even without an adblocker, and goes away when using a user agent switcher to claim you're using Chrome instead of Firefox while using an adblocker. Because it's toooooooootally about adblocking.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
330 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
59608 readers
4742 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I tried this exact scenario and didn't see any difference in load times. I'm using an ad blocker and it's definitely sluggish, but switching to a Chrome user agent made no difference.
Yeah, people seem to be having very different experiences with it. It might genuinely be them rolling out different versions to different people to bug test it or something like that. Even if that's the case I still think its probably not unintentional that it hurts Firefox more. They do that too much for me to believe it's an accident.
It's hard to tell these days when there's so much A/B testing and stuff going on. I haven't run into this at all personally.
It's actually been confirmed that the 5-second wait happens regardless of browser. Even with Chrome.
How thoroughly was this tested? Because you can summarize a lot of these types of timing differences with one word.
Caching.
And from my experience people tend to overlook this when running casual tests like this.
This is 100% anecdotal of course, but I've noticed weirdly inconsistent behaviour. I have one tab I permanently keep open for YouTube and that one loads videos really fast. If I open a second tab by following a link from that main tab, then it partly loads the site and sits there for a weirdly long time before any content even appears.
I've got a really fast connection too, and nothing else was having issues. This whole thing is bizarre.
So if I use Firefox I have a choice between a 5sec delay or a 5sec delay and ads. That seems like an easy choice.
I will stop using youtube before I stop using adblockers.
My opinion too. A lot of people say "Oh I couldn't live without it, I'm constantly watching vids on there" so you ask for recommendations, look them up, and it's 99% brain-rotting video porridge
What, you mean to tell me you don't wanna watch MUTAHAR LAUGH COMPILATION AT FNAF FREDDIE FAZBEAR POOPING ON PURPLE GUY 3AM (GONE SEXUAL)?
Have you tried Odysee or Peertube yet?
deleted
The other day my wife asked me "what's that pipe website you use to be able to watch YouTube videos" then I realized it was because she got blocked by YouTube haha
Android: newpipe, libretube, clipious, skytube, revanced
Funny how soon it will seem as if chrome is the most used browser while it's actually Firefox with a user agent change
I can already imagine the bullshit wired articles about how users are Switching from Firefox to Chrome, remember how they tried to claim people were uninstalling ad blockers, when in reality they were switching to uBlock Origin, that was pretty funny.
ask the mainstream users if they using firefox lol
I've got Firefox and Ublock, and don't see any delays, warnings, etc. It may have to do with the fact that I'm not signed in with an account.
This also appears to be in an A/B test or something similar. It isn't happening for everyone (yet).
Remember that just like with everything YouTube doesn't apply changes to all users across the whole site simultaneously. They always do gradual rollout with randomized user impact. So as to not upset or raise too many alarms at the same time. It's been their MO for about 10 years now.
As has been the MO of many large sites for a while now. It's called blue-green deployment.
Yeah and while I'm sure it is useful for minimizing outrage at controversial changes, it's mainly to prevent rolling out major bugs to too many people
If that's blue green deployment, then what is red yellow deployment?
Yeah it looks like they've switched away from the 5-second penalty for having ad blockers to counting down the number of videos you'll be shown, then after 3-2-1 it's 'adblockers violate youtube's toc'
To be clear that is not new, that was a thing already before. Like from around July some people were already getting that.
Sundar can diaf
I'm using DNS level ad blocking, anyone else not experiencing anything weird?