this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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Haven't seen Youtube tabs crash like this in like 6 years, now it's happening several times a day. The Youtube UI is also painfully laggy- when you hover over a video it takes like 3-5 seconds for the player to show up and equally as long when I try to pause the video or change settings. When I open the Youtube front page it just shows a blank dark background for a long while before anything loads. Sometimes Youtube tabs get stuck loading, showing only the video with no UI, no way to pause, no comments or recommended videos and the only way to fix it is to open the page in a new tab. It also sometimes seems like a fucked Youtube tab drags the whole browser down, making any websites load endlessly until I close my Youtube tabs.

It's been like this for a few weeks? months? now, but it's steadily getting worse. I assume it might be Youtube fucking with either uBlock users, or Firefox users, or both

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago

could be YouTube AB testing some bullshit because I've not personally noticed this in the UK

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 days ago

I assume it might be Youtube fucking with either uBlock users, or Firefox users, or both

definitely this. youtube wants you back on the web browser owned by their corpo and ads shoved into your eyes like broken glass. or if not your monthly $

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

i'm using firefox and ublock origin and i have no problems with youtube or crashes ever

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The power of A/B testing. Fuck over a small portion of your users and observe the results and the users are just guinea pigs.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's genius. No matter how upsetting or disgusting a change is, they can roll it out to just the right partition of users designed to prevent a critical mass of people getting upset enough to congregate and do anything about it collectively.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Their genius is not from A/B testing, the genius is normalizing the proliferation of non-free programs that only the software's landlord apparent can control.

We are just tenants who meekly ask for a license contract to use their programs. Only with a libre (software shared collectively) program do you actually become a user and not used.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago

I use Freetube nowadays if privacy is a plus for you.

https://freetubeapp.io/

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago

Yes it is because uBlock Origin I've found. It tries to load ads, goes wowee when it can't, and will just sit there until the ad timer is up before actually loading.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

Yeah, YouTube seems deliberately broken for Firefox and/or uBlock and/or the combination (I would never go to YouTube without uBlock so I can't do isolation testing). Nowadays if I want to watch something on YouTube, I just grab the link and download it with yt-dlp to watch it locally in VLC. I can delete the video after.

This has the added benefit of not making my old computer's fans chug, and it prevents YouTube from doing that annoying thing of throwing up a giant thumbnail for another video in the center of the video BEFORE it has finished which blocks vision of the video.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

Yup it's absolute ass for me lately. I have a pretty powerful laptop but just youtube has been crawling. And I have premium so the ad blocker I'm running shouldn't even matter >_<. Oh well, guess it's time to cancel premium and embrace alternate ways of getting slop.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

yep. buffering and performance once loaded has been fine, but uBlock has been failing to block ads when the page first loads, so i just get an empty player with an unloaded 15 second seek bar until i refresh. i think they're fucking with video-embedded ads or some shit idk

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Yeah, past few weeks on YouTube have sucked on Firefox

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Same, but it comes and goes for me and it doesn't crash, it just doesn't load. I have to refresh the page to actually load the video and even then I can only see the first minute. I have a yt account mostly for making comments, giving likes and making public playlists but it's kinda over. I'd prefer to have something like Audiotube or some other free software client

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

even then I can only see the first minute

This has started to happen to me recently but only as long as I have scripts from the jnn-pa.gogleapis.com domain blocked. If I allow that one videos load beyond the first minute. This also seems to only happen randomly. Might be related to new uploads, but not sure about that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Hmm I'll check it out, thanks. Must be a new domain because it's only happened since last week. Another weird thing that's happened is InnerTune is unable to fetch music even when logged on. Ffs just when I thought it couldn't worse

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I've had problems with Google docs and sheets being laggy on first the last two-ish weeks, but haven't turned off ublock to test. Haven't tried YouTube recently, freetube replaced that

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

This started for me(Firefox + UBlock Origin) months ago right around the time Youtube started attacking Ublock so I assumed that was the reason for the lag. Had my whole computer crash because of it. Using alternative front-ends consistently since then.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

I believe google uses the same frontend framework for everything which will legit leak memory and crash if you use ublock origin. I noticed is in the google cloud console lmao. I think there was some other thing where it implements an api that wasn't implemented on firefox, shadow dom v0 or something and for Firefox it uses a bunch of bloated shims instead but idk how accurate that is anymore. But yeah when i remove ublock my google cloud tabs stop leaking memory and crashing and perform a little better.

I should probably put together some evidence for my statements... Nah

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

This was on a pi, but YouTube was constantly crashing my browser. Clearing the cookies (just for YouTube) fixed it. It's happened a couple times. Clearing YouTube cookies fixed it each time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

This only happens to me if I have more than like 4 youtube tabs open at the same time. If I keep it to 1 or 2 it seems to work a lot better. Also try it in private browsing - maybe you have a poorly coded extension installed that's messing things up.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

YouTube is an extremely slow website, if you compare it with invidious which removes all the profit-generating anti-features it's a night and day difference.

They're also integrating AI slop into the video player, so I basically only use invidious and Freetube.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

yeah. haven't had crashes like this but get pages slow to load and 2010-style buffering sometimes. i think my FF is just bloated with extensions and shit though, I might need to try a full reset. using librewolf with just ublock made things a bit smoother. the website does suck though

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

~~was having this problem recently, but closing some of my tabs helped it. I had like fifty youtube tabs open and I went and watched a bunch of them so I could clear them out and my remaining youtube tabs stopped chugging so bad and now it's much less painful~~

spoke too soon, just tried to open a tab and it was laggy as fuck, like 8 seconds to get response and after closing the tab the audio continued for about as long

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Yeah, I get tabs that are just showing a white screen with a loading wheel in the middle

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I assumed it was some memory leak maybe from one of my extensions. Restarting Firefox makes it snappy until it bogs down again. Scrolling, pausing/unpausing, hovering on the timeline, all of it slows down.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I've thought about this. It hasn't crashed for me yet, but I feel like Youtube didn't need to be refreshed 5 times for the UI to show properly in the past. Don't know how it is on Chrome.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

i use mac os FF + ublock and haven't bumped into this yet. occasionally there's a hiccup between ublock updates but I'm sure it happens on a system by system basis. I echo the freetube sentiment i just checked it out and it looks cool

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

For the last few weeks when I'd try to watch any YT videos, it would actually not only kill FF but also fuck up my desktop. I'm not sure if it's a Linux specific thing but my whole computer would slow to a crawl, my graphics would wig out, and my system monitor applet's CPU section would freeze up. It hasn't happened for a few days though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I've found that opening each and every video in a new tab seems to be a partial workaround