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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by voxel@infosec.exchange to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

#YouTube is making the watching experience worse on #Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

I didn't believe it the first time I heard abt it, since it sounded more like a conspiracy theory than a actual thing, but it's true. Google does add 5s timeout specifically to Firefox and Edge users when they try to watch a video on YT. If you want to know more about it, Mental Outlaw make a very good video abt it (Link: https://youtu.be/v4gXhmzQztE ). I think Google did this, to get people moving to Chrome since the majority will think this is a browser issue, nobody would expect YouTube to purposely doing this. In the attached Screenshot you can see that YouTube checks the user agent of browsers to see if it's Edge, Firefox or not. You can bypass this by changing your User agent to chrome.

Edit: Due a lot of people saying a lot of different things abt it, I want to say that I'm not 100% sure abt how exactly this works, there is a inbuild delay by Google, but who is actually affected, there are a lot of different opinions abt it. I wasn't able to verify this myself in LibreWolf, but this could be the case due my intensive hardening I did and this is just a result of what I found in the code and what Mental Outlaw and others shared across social media, if you got different or additional infos abt this feel free to comment and I suggest everyone ti also check the comment section.

#privacy #youtube #google #dataprotection #firefox #msedge #browser @privacy

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[-] Asudox@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

I understand Firefox, but why Edge? Isn't it chromium based?

[-] netchami@sh.itjust.works 26 points 11 months ago

Google is a shitty big tech corporation and wants everyone to use their garbage browser that collects and sells all of your data. Thankfully we have great solutions like Invidious and Piped that allow you to watch YouTube content without ever having to visit the ad-infested YouTube website. You can use these in combination with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links, it's awesome. No ads, no delay, no tracking. Just some free and open source software.

[-] voxel@infosec.exchange 8 points 11 months ago

@Asudox Firefox and Edge are two of the biggest competitors to Chrome, Edge is like a degoogled version of Chromium but with a bunch of Microsoft Trash instead, they don't even have Google Safebrowsing or Google as default search engine like Firefox does.

[-] Asudox@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Oh, thanks I get it now.

this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
218 points (89.8% liked)

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