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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Hanlon's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
This is not only adequately explained by stupidity, but it makes the most logical sense to be explained by stupidity. They are actively fighting a war with AdBlockers. They are trying to block AdBlockers, and AdBlockers are working as quickly as possible to fight those changes. Then Google has to fire back as quickly as possible. This is resulting in rapid published changes to counteract AdBlockers and their retaliation. It makes all too much sense that their fight against AdBlockers did not work as intended. The people making these changes are Google software developers, and I really do not think any of them have an issue with Mozilla.
Unless you consider fighting adblockers a futile stupidity, you should first apply Occam's razor - explanation requiring least amount of assumptions is probably the correct one.
In this case spoofing user-agent string of Chrome is enough to fix all the performance issues on Firefox, meaning there is no fancy anti-adblock code or anything like that.
This is under the assumption that the user agent change is real. I have seen this spread time and time again, and every time I ask if there is any evidence. So I will ask you as well: do you have evidence for it, or have you experienced it first hand? I have yet to have someone prove that this is true, and I have not been able to create it myself (I tried, but never got a delay to begin with). So until there is evidence that this is true, and not just a rumor being spread, than Occam's razor cannot apply.
I saw this myself when this was news. Created empty firefox profile, installed only userscript changer plugin.
Default user agent - rotating loading circle before video starts playing. Windows/Chrome user agent - video starts immediately.
Tried with multiple videos, changing first user agent that opened the video to make sure it's not cached somewhere.
Didn't bother to install Chrome for reverse test though.
Now it's back to loading at the same speed regardless of user agent though.