Technology

They've always been at war with ad blockers. It's just most major multinationals have matured or diversified to a point where they are functional monopolies, and no longer gain any value in competition or service improvement.

At this stage of the merger and consolidation phase of global capitalism, with captured governments that won't dare break them up or fine them more than a meek virtue signal, the most cost effective way to satiate the infinite growth of capitalism is to increase the exploitation and value extraction of their existing user base as much as possible (aka enshittification).

their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits.

Concluding implicitly: "... and therefore a threat to all your computers' security" :-)

It’s more obvious than that even; their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits.

Sounds like the single best reason to use one.

Dear God, won't anyone think of the shareholders?

Mind you that Firefox will adjust it to be able to fully support ad blocker.

But they aren't controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma' bell and pa' bell days.

Google controls over 90% of the search business in the US and that's the way the vast majority of people begin their browsing. It's why US v Google is currently in the courts

Adsense is literally 90% of the market. Let alone android...

Uh... Gmail, Ad sense, search?

They've got like a dozen duopolies going on, they have far more control and ability to leverage it than Bell ever did

I was getting the delay early yesterday and then it went away. I guess they must have done something in uBO.

Just turned it off. No difference.

They just haven't rolled it out to you yet.

Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with "fancy" features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.

Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it's absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like "See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn't bother to support it anymore".

I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)

This is a good summary of this mess: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

If you do change your user agent, I would use an extension that does it only on YouTube domains.

We want independent metrics to show rising Firefox use, not falling.

That's because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU, so they might have thought that they're super crafty and used markers such as user agent for their cool coercion delay code thingy

To add on

You can spoof this user agent to see if a website does something shady depending on which browser you're using.

So if you keep all other variables the same, and just toggle the user agent value, YouTube behaves differently

There's people reporting exactly that if they're using certain ad-blocking tools.

I did see Chrome users mention a delay (on lemmy) but I haven't personally checked it out

My understanding is the method they can use on chrome is near instant, but the alternative they use on Firefox is slower, hence the delay. Is this BS? Yeah probably, but it does at least logically follow.