this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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2654
Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away. (old.reddit.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not trying to defend Chrome here as I dislike their other behaviours, but just from what's presented in the video, an alternative explanation would be caching. That is, when the reloading is triggered by the switch of user-agent, the cache is reused and thus a shorter load time.

To exclude this effect, the user needs to either

  1. Spoof the user-agent and at the same time clear cache (you can disable cache when reloading through the developer's tool), or
  2. Clear cache, spoof the user-agent to Chrome. Load page, disable the spoofing, reload.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes. I'm not a frontend dev, so not familiar with JS code (let alone an obfuscated fragment), but according to this HN comment, it's used for a different ad block detection function.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That makes a lot of sense. It’s still exclusive to Firefox, though