It’s bizarre how blatent this is. Google has so much power over web standards that Mozilla have to work really hard to make firefox work, but YouTube don’t bother being subtle or clever and just write ‘if Firefox, get stuffed’ in plain text for everyone to see.
Google has been doing this kind of thing for a while. If you try to use Google Meet in Firefox, you can’t use things like background blurring. Spoofing Chrome works in that situation as well.
And the stupid thing is that all I use Chrome for is Meets… And that’s it. Do they really think they win me over?
Not you or me. But most people, yeah.
That is, as always, the problem: it works for them. The average Joe isn’t going to implement a new filter into ublock…
How does one “spoof” chrome?
You can change your user agent string, the text your browser uses to tell the web site you’re looking at what browser it is, either via your F12 developer tools menu or via an extension.
The most convenient way is with a browser extension that changes your user agent. You can also change it in the developer options of most browsers.
It works for me now. Only took them 8 years
In my other comment I provide a link to the US DOJ anti-trust complaint center website.
This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.
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That’s not what net neutrality is about. NN is about carriers and ISPs treating all services and websites equally. Don’t feature creep NN. It weakens the arguments for why why we need NN.
Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act might stop any attempt to undermine browser performance.
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Doesn’t this break competition laws?
Couldn’t Google/YouTube be sued over this?Not in the U.S. Not as long as conservatives (incl. neo-liberals) have the power to protect them.
Our conservative politicians are bought and paid for by large anti-competitive corporations.
Bought and paid for with a pittance.
Yes. And you can submit your complaint here
Well, can’t hurt to try.
Yeah, the fines just aren’t big enough for Google to care.
I wonder how long it’ll be before google gets sued for their anti-competitive behavior.
Oh I imagine the papers are being filed as we speak, because this is blatantly illegal.
Well you typically need standing in order to file a lawsuit, who would do it? Mozilla are probably the only ones. Why would this cause them to do it when past similar practices haven’t?
Europe will step in as usual
How would Mozilla finance a court case against google though?
Microsoft, Mozilla org, maybe apple
EFF or government
On what standing though? Mozilla potentially has standing, and if the government finds that google is a monopoly, then the government could have standing, but nobody else.
Isn’t Mozilla a non profit? I don’t they can sue for anything along the lines of hurting profits to the company.
Of course they can. If the word profit is confusing you replace it with returns or finances.
They do have a for-profit subsidiary that potentially could though
Google funds then I’m pretty sure…
What law are they breaking? Not trying to defend Google or anything, just curious what law is blatantly being broken here because I don’t know of one
It’s an anti competition law, they cannot penalize you for using a competitor service. This would be like getting fined by McDonald’s because I went to Taco Bell.
see FTC anticompetitive-practices
Been there, done that, and came on top.
They are already in one anti-trust trial for search engine shenanigans.
Cost of doing business
Google has been doing this kind of thing for years, to strangle their competition. For example, back when Windows Phone existed, Google went deliberately out of their way to cripple youTube, and maps. Apparently google will do anything they can to create lock-in and faux loyalty.
Google are completely evil. Here we’re talking about them using their popular products as weapons against competitors in unrelated areas. But also have a history of copying products made by others then using advertising strength to promote their version over the original. And if that somehow doesn’t work… they buy out the competitors. Both youTube and google maps are examples of this.
Everyone should remember that Google itself isn’t really as evil as the people who work for it, those “people” are the only thing keeping this shitty company going. They go to work every day to try and make this world a worse place, those people who enable evil need to start to be recognized for who they truly are, the ones who want total enshittification and love watching you suffer. At what point do we start to look at thr root of this problem?
Sometimes I get curious about chromium based browsers and consider giving them a shot for a while.
Then Google does shit like this and I keep mainlining Firefox out of spite. Half the reasons people experience “issues” with Firefox are just dumb garbage like this (see sites / web content being developed with Chrome-based in mind)
the website DRM thing is one of the most blackpilled and evil uses of technology i’ve ever seen
the people in charge of developing that should be put in a padded room and never allowed to see sunlight again. fucking god.
Woah, woah, woah, slow down: Why do they get to have padding in their room?
I would assume so they cant easily hurt themself and have to live and suffer through it for as long as possible
But then they’ll be comfortable in there, because it’s soft and padded as opposed to cold and hard.
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I mean this in the least condescending way:
as far as I’m aware, even after looking it up, I think you are misusing the term blackpill.
Blackpill usually refers to a manosphere/Incel or Qanon type who has given up completely and lost all hope. In the the case of an Incel it’s that there’s no hope in ever escaping Inceldom. In the case of q anon it’s that none of the predictions about the “storm” will ever arise or come true.
I looked around and couldn’t find any other contexts that it’s used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pill?wprov=sfti1#
I am willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I looked all over search results etc.
Heck I use god damn duckduckgo out of spite nowadays
I think it’s still possible to ethically use Chromium browsers, so long as it’s one of them that’s been reviewing and removing anything ludicrous Google adds. I don’t even mind MS Edge on most of my computers for the most part. Firefox doesn’t load well on my tablet.
I have never had a reason to switch from Firefox. I used Chrome once out of curiosity, but I didn’t like it.
“Do no evil1”
1 unless we can make money from it.
I mean… “evil” is arbitrary, right?
“It’s evil not to make as much money as possible”, Google founders. C-suite and board, probably.
Any organisation that needs to remind themselves not to be evil is already intrinsically evil.
Very overtly and loudly claiming a quality which should be self-evident in oneself, one’s company or one’s nation invariably means it’s not really there.
Did someone actually investigate and find the exact place in scripts where this logic takes place?
EDIT: Yes. https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-reportedly-slowing-down-videos-firefox-3387206/
This sounds like something that would be in the back end so likely not. But if spoofing user agents fixes the problem then I’d say it’s evidence enough to warrant a deeper look.
When they decide to do tricks in the backend differently between browsers, there will be ways to overcome that.
Not noticing this change from the EU… Guess they’re too afraid of pulling that shit here?
Google LOVES A/B testing so it might be just that. I haven’t noticed anything either.
True, could just be lucky. I still haven’t noticed any ad blocking changes either, but then again I’m using Firefox with μBlock Origin…
Bet it’s done in such a way that they can claim “We’re just optimizing for Chrome, not slowing down any competitors. It’s not our fault our competitors don’t using our web engine for their browsers.”
I mentioned similar shading behavior on another post, when using Firefox with Chrome or native user agents on the plain old Google search page.
It’s apparently not even subtle enough to make that claim, it checks the useragent and sleeps for 5 seconds if it’s not Chrome.
Not that I don’t believe you, but do you have a source for that?
If changing your user agent to Chrome on Firefox fixes it that justification won’t fly
imagine sitting down to code this and thinking you’re doing the right thing
you should be able to whisteblow clearly evil technology and have some sort of economic safety net
I mean they need money to live
Google developers can easily find a job elsewhere. If they stay at Google the chose to.
Isn’t it one of Google’s ‘creeds’ to “Don’t be evil”?
I heard they quietly dropped that as their motto several years ago.
Ah, I was wondering why YouTube was taking so long to load recently. I thought it was just because their code was shit, and it turns out I was right, but not in the way I thought.
Yeah, the simplest the answer is usually correct. Is this a conspiracy involving hundreds of Google employees intentionally building features to slow the app down on Firefox or is it incompetence because they don’t test their product on multiple browsers?
Oh, so it’s shit in the way I originally thought, then.
And also shit in the second way I thought, since adblock is a symptom of how terrible they’ve made the experience on their platform and if they want less people to use it they should make that experience more reasonable.
Given the shit big companies have got up to in the past and continue to get up to, as exposed in past and ongoing antitrust cases, that conspiracy theory you mention really isn’t all that unrealistic. Yeah, it’s not what happened in this case and it isn’t the simplest solution, but it’s absolutely a believable thing for YouTube to do, though I think they would have hidden it better if they had.
I really hope they try this in the EU. The EU regulatory agencies have been on a roll lately.
They are doing it here to.
Yeah, user agent switch to chrome made YouTube vid instantly load. Real shitty google!
I smell a spicy lawsuit
