Relatively old post.<p>In such cases, I tend to go with "never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence".<p>Most things that people assume are malicious often are usually prioritization issue. FF market is small, engineering resources are scarce (you may think they are vast, it's google after all, but you need to think of the "impact" engineer has to drive for promotion, which FF barely clears if anything).
Spoiler: they aren’t.<p>Most Googlers use Chrome at work so it’s going to be better supported incidentally. The reason behaviors change when switching UA is because features vary across browsers and the UA ends up acting as a flag that turns features on or off. Not because someone is putting in a sleep() when they see Firefox. That would make for a very awkward code review.<p>When I was a Googler I exclusively used Firefox. Things were never so bad that I had to switch over to Chrome even with internal tools, though I suffered many hiccups due to this choice.
Similar discussion around the time this reddit post was posted (by OP as well): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40736397">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40736397</a><p>As far as I remember this has since been addressed. I personally have no issues on Firefox on Linux.
I've heard this multiple times over the years. I offer an alternative explanation:<p>I always have uBO enabled with a bunch of extra rulesets for curtailing tracking and "annoyances". If I turn that off, I get weird behaviours in YouTube (and other sites). Re-enable it and I get back a smooth, reliable site.<p>Facebook, eBay, newspaper websites, Amazon, et al all demonstrate similar behaviour: slownews and broken behaviour without uBO, performant and reliable with.<p>Maybe it is coder bias unintentional or otherwise.<p>Or maybe it's the ever-bloating workload of user-tracking and ads causing problems.
For me, it's really simple. I have YT Premium subscription. If they break Firefox or yt-dlp to the point of unusable, I will cancel my subscription.
I am so glad for this post. I thought all my recent YouTube issues were maybe related to a hardware problem, and or Linux kernel update.<p>It’s a hard problem to solve, that is to incentivize YouTube to care about Firefox even if Google had no relation to YouTube simply because FFs market share is so small.<p>That being said I think it is a shame that somehow the web became what it is. Would it not be nice if YouTube was a API and the player/site could be implemented by anybody, so you could choose from many players provided by different people ?
Not really saying it is intentional by Google, but I'm a Firefox user and noticed this started happening again recently. YouTube for me is super slow, buggy, not registering clicks, locking the UI.<p>It did happen in the past and was fixed after around 1 month (which was good because it decreased my time spent on YouTube).<p>Right now YouTube is almost unusable for me on Firefox with uBlock Origin on M1 Max and has been for the last couple of days for whatever reason. Even disabling uBlock Origin doesn't help.<p>Something is definitely going on between the two.
Archive link for whoa pardners
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20241205000131/https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1cjbsmj/youtube_on_firefox_seems_to_be_getting_much_worse/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20241205000131/https://old.reddi...</a>