YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 for 2 weeks

Browsers identify themselves with a user-agent string, and the user agent strings are a giant disaster of technical debt resulting from a long history of browsers working around buggy websites and websites working around buggy browsers. Browser video is <i>also</i> a giant disaster of technical debt, and YouTube uses the user-agent string to determine which ways of serving video will work and which ones won&#x27;t. Presence of bugs here is no surprise, and any such bugs will naturally impact some browsers but not others.<p>So, a bug in YouTube&#x27;s compatibility-autodetection caused it to fall back to a slower, bitrate-limited fallback method that it didn&#x27;t need to, for some versions of Firefox. They took two weeks to deploy the fix. Considering those two weeks included Christmas and the bug didn&#x27;t affect security or render the site unavailable, this seems like a pretty good response time.

Ah user agents. One of my favorite quotes:<p>&quot;And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla&#x2F;5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit&#x2F;525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome&#x2F;0.2.149.27 Safari&#x2F;525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webaim.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;user-agent-string-history&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webaim.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;user-agent-string-history&#x2F;</a>

This is actually pretty great. Youtube has some issue with Firefox 43 and serves it lower quality video to deal with it (probably as a hack to enable video for some users for whom it didn&#x27;t work at all under 43, but there&#x27;s no explanation from Youtube engineers in the thread). The Firefox team complains to Youtube, but Youtube responds with that they won&#x27;t budge until January at least.<p>Firefox sees it as a threat to their reputation (obviously for them having a few users for whom it doesn&#x27;t work is better than having loads of users with a degraded experience) and they start spoofing their UA to another version. The Youtube engineer is indifferent (or can&#x27;t really do anything about it).<p>Then when it&#x27;s done a Google employee from a different team comes in the thread to complain about the situation because the fact that the UA is spoofed for <i>only</i> youtube.com and not other (Google) domains breaks his product.

The existence of a “feature” that relies on UA strings being consistent across domains, with the potential to “brick YouTube entirely in a user-visible way for all Firefox 43 users in Europe”[1], is quite worrying to be honest.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c61" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c61</a>

I was actually hit by that bug, which I erroneously attributed to firefox. I stopped using firefox as a result.<p>I will probably start using it again because I read this article. I can&#x27;t help but wonder how many ex-users who wont because they don&#x27;t follow the news.

I&#x27;m curious about this non-user-visible europe-only feature, which depended on user-agents aligning between youtube.com and google.com, that got broken, especially since the details couldn&#x27;t be discussed in public.<p>Antispam? Ad-tracking? Why would it be Europe-only?

Reading the comments on that bug, it looks like it was only a small subset of Firefox users who experienced this bug. Not really a big story.

Some (not Mac) users on the newest version of Firefox got lower quality Youtube video over the holidays, and the issue would would not be fixed until next year? Oh yah, next year was next week. Thank goodness, it was still fixed within the year.<p>Do we live in a world where this in unacceptable?

Here is a list of bugs with Google services and Firefox.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.otsukare.info&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;google-webcompatibility-bugs-list" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.otsukare.info&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;google-webcompatibility-...</a>

We should just remove the reporting of User-Agent in browsers. All they do is encourage user tracking a building half-baked heuristics.

I wonder why it was that important (for Firefox to do something about it).

On a similar note, Facebook does this as well for video. Take these two browsers: Chrome (with Flash bundled) and Opera (the new shitty one, based on Chromium, with chrome-like user agent and without Flash). Facebook serves Flash video to the browser without flash and HTML video to the browser with Flash.<p>Why? Fucking user agent.

I think that browser user-agent-strings are far more trouble than they are worth.<p>I think at this point, if there are browser bugs in something as important as video, the release team or someone should pick it up before release as a show-stopper.<p>If the issue is on the server end, then the people running the server should be fixing their mess.<p>Do we know which it was? A Firefox issue that caused Youtube to detect the user-agent and server lower quality video, or was it an issue on Youtube&#x27;s end?

The only reason this should be on the front page #1 of HN is if there is tangible evidence that intent was malicious.

Interesting ... Because of some incidents Google is evil ... Meanwhile Firefox is not allowed on iOS.

I&#x27;ve also noticed the bug, it didn&#x27;t happen with Chrome. What do you all think was my first thought?