It’s bizarre how blatent this is. Google has so much power over web standards that Mozilla have to work really hard to make firefox work, but YouTube don’t bother being subtle or clever and just write ‘if Firefox, get stuffed’ in plain text for everyone to see.
this isn’t much different than when microsoft added code specifically to break windows 3.1 when run under dr-dos instead of their own ms-dos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
And it cost them 280 million in the 90s ouch
Something tells me they survived.
Google has been doing this kind of thing for a while. If you try to use Google Meet in Firefox, you can’t use things like background blurring. Spoofing Chrome works in that situation as well.
And the stupid thing is that all I use Chrome for is Meets… And that’s it. Do they really think they win me over?
Not you or me. But most people, yeah.
That is, as always, the problem: it works for them. The average Joe isn’t going to implement a new filter into ublock…
How does one “spoof” chrome?
You can change your user agent string, the text your browser uses to tell the web site you’re looking at what browser it is, either via your F12 developer tools menu or via an extension.
The most convenient way is with a browser extension that changes your user agent. You can also change it in the developer options of most browsers.
It works for me now. Only took them 8 years
In my other comment I provide a link to the US DOJ anti-trust complaint center website.
This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.
This is literally why net neutrality needs to be regulated. Corporations will artificially make problems to induce additional earnings.
Super scummy, anti-customer behavior.
That’s not what net neutrality is about. NN is about carriers and ISPs treating all services and websites equally. Don’t feature creep NN. It weakens the arguments for why why we need NN.
Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act might stop any attempt to undermine browser performance.
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Doesn’t this break competition laws?
Couldn’t Google/YouTube be sued over this?Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.
Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.
They really weren’t that effective with Microsoft then either. The antitrust was far too late for Netscape and allowed Microsoft to hold a dominate market share with IE until they allowed the browser to deprecate and Google came in with a much better browser and took over the browser market (and are now doing the same bullshit).
As long as we keep giving these companies meaningless fines or wait until the damage is irreversible companies are going to always push the limit and look at any repercussions as just a cost of doing business.
So yeah, not much faith in anything changing.
That is why I am in favour of the financial death penalty. Fines should be 10x the damage done. If a company cannot pay it, they are required to become a non profit.
Fines should be 10x the damage done
What are your monetary damages for this?
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Yeah stuff like this really needs to be percentual and fined to the CEOs and the board, not the company as an entity.
Oh, Microsoft valued at 200 bil for shareholders? Well sorry C’s and boardies, you gotta scrunge up 2 bil each now, personally. Those are fines they’d at least notice.
(edit)
Come to think of it, the fined-personally-to-the-decisionmaker might really be the big thing here on its own. The company did this shit under you, CEO. It was your corporate policy and hiring practices that allowed this to happen, even if you did not press the button. You pay up. You take the blame, not the people under you just following orders.This just ignores the reason that corporations exist in the first place, to shield people from personal liability. There is a mechanism by which you can go after that called “piercing the corporate veil” but it is an extremely high bar to hit.
the reason that corporations exist in the first place, to shield people from personal liability
Which is the problem. As parent rightly pointed out, lack of personal liability is exactly why corporations pull this kind of bullshit. The solution is to lower the bar for holding individuals, particularly executives, personally responsible for the actions of the organizations they control.
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You should look into all of the anti-monopoly actions that Lina Khan has been pursuing as head of the FTC. Under her tenure the watchdogs have had more teeth than ever before. It takes time for this stuff to make a difference, but they are most decidedly doing the work (Cory Doctorow has some excellent write ups on this if you check his blog).
He lionizes her a bit much, but yes she has done far more than her predecessor.
Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.
And all they had to do was drag the trial out until a favorable administration took office.
Well they also dragged out the trial so long that time and costs rendered the plaintiff (Netscape) hopeless.
EU anthem intensifies
malicious slowdowns like this are why microsoft abandoned (non chrome) edge, too. Cause they couldnt keep up with fixing the constant fuckery google was doing, and users are idiots and blamed edge for all the problems.
Microsoft was kind of getting their comeuppance there. They did the exact same billshit when they dominated the market with IE.
You’re right.
Lets let google get away with murder because Microsoft did bad a decade+ ago.
I don’t think that’s what I said? At least it’s not how I meant it.
You can always count on lobbiests to enshitifiy the laws
Not in the U.S. Not as long as conservatives (incl. neo-liberals) have the power to protect them.
Our conservative politicians are bought and paid for by large anti-competitive corporations.
Bought and paid for with a pittance.
They are bribed for so little that it would be almost easier to make a dystopian sounding PAC with money raised by small dollar donations to bribe them to do what the people want instead of them doing what rich donors want.
Only if that PAC could somehow guarantee a cushy job post politics.
Yes. And you can submit your complaint here
Well, can’t hurt to try.
Yeah, the fines just aren’t big enough for Google to care.
Wait for it to become equally shitty in all browsers, and then you can only watch in a special Youtube Windows app.
I wonder how long it’ll be before google gets sued for their anti-competitive behavior.
Oh I imagine the papers are being filed as we speak, because this is blatantly illegal.
Well you typically need standing in order to file a lawsuit, who would do it? Mozilla are probably the only ones. Why would this cause them to do it when past similar practices haven’t?
Europe will step in as usual
How would Mozilla finance a court case against google though?
Microsoft, Mozilla org, maybe apple
EFF or government
On what standing though? Mozilla potentially has standing, and if the government finds that google is a monopoly, then the government could have standing, but nobody else.
Isn’t Mozilla a non profit? I don’t they can sue for anything along the lines of hurting profits to the company.
They do have a for-profit subsidiary that potentially could though
Google funds then I’m pretty sure…
Of course they can. If the word profit is confusing you replace it with returns or finances.
What law are they breaking? Not trying to defend Google or anything, just curious what law is blatantly being broken here because I don’t know of one
It’s an anti competition law, they cannot penalize you for using a competitor service. This would be like getting fined by McDonald’s because I went to Taco Bell.
see FTC anticompetitive-practices
Been there, done that, and came on top.
They are already in one anti-trust trial for search engine shenanigans.
Cost of doing business
It could literally be a minute wait & I still wouldn’t use Chrome.
Google heard you and have increased the Firefox delay to 1m 30s. Would you please consider using Chrome now please?
Best I can do is boycott YouTube.
Ranting on Lemmy about a company while being addicted to (one of) their products seems to be much more effective, according to other comments in this thread. /s
Helpful comment!
The only helpful thing to do is stopping using YT, if you think they behave in an unrespectufl way. Complaining/ranting on Lemmy is going to be exactly as helpful as my previous comment. But, hey, who cares? I don’t even use it. Literally, not my problem.
What are we supposed to complain about then?
I didn’t say you shouldn’t complain. I said that doing it is useless. Stop using YT if you want to send a message or just deal with it
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edge would like a word
Sigma Edging
Sometimes I get curious about chromium based browsers and consider giving them a shot for a while.
Then Google does shit like this and I keep mainlining Firefox out of spite. Half the reasons people experience “issues” with Firefox are just dumb garbage like this (see sites / web content being developed with Chrome-based in mind)
the website DRM thing is one of the most blackpilled and evil uses of technology i’ve ever seen
the people in charge of developing that should be put in a padded room and never allowed to see sunlight again. fucking god.
Woah, woah, woah, slow down: Why do they get to have padding in their room?
I would assume so they cant easily hurt themself and have to live and suffer through it for as long as possible
But then they’ll be comfortable in there, because it’s soft and padded as opposed to cold and hard.
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I mean this in the least condescending way:
as far as I’m aware, even after looking it up, I think you are misusing the term blackpill.
Blackpill usually refers to a manosphere/Incel or Qanon type who has given up completely and lost all hope. In the the case of an Incel it’s that there’s no hope in ever escaping Inceldom. In the case of q anon it’s that none of the predictions about the “storm” will ever arise or come true.
I looked around and couldn’t find any other contexts that it’s used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pill?wprov=sfti1#
I am willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I looked all over search results etc.
Heck I use god damn duckduckgo out of spite nowadays
DDG, even though apparently a Bing front end, gives legit better results than google
It’s honestly good. It misses that “Algorithm profile” that Google has where it starts to “understand” what you mean but it’s still pretty good.
(Example. If I type in “genocide” in Google, it knows I often look for Undertale related things and pushes “Undertale genocide route” related content. For DDG I need to be clearer about what I mean)
It took a bit getting used to but I prefer it this way now.
DDG is legit great and even sometimes better than Google search now. I also am a SearXNG enjoyer
I think it’s still possible to ethically use Chromium browsers, so long as it’s one of them that’s been reviewing and removing anything ludicrous Google adds. I don’t even mind MS Edge on most of my computers for the most part. Firefox doesn’t load well on my tablet.
I have never had a reason to switch from Firefox. I used Chrome once out of curiosity, but I didn’t like it.
Google has been doing this kind of thing for years, to strangle their competition. For example, back when Windows Phone existed, Google went deliberately out of their way to cripple youTube, and maps. Apparently google will do anything they can to create lock-in and faux loyalty.
Google are completely evil. Here we’re talking about them using their popular products as weapons against competitors in unrelated areas. But also have a history of copying products made by others then using advertising strength to promote their version over the original. And if that somehow doesn’t work… they buy out the competitors. Both youTube and google maps are examples of this.
Everyone should remember that Google itself isn’t really as evil as the people who work for it, those “people” are the only thing keeping this shitty company going. They go to work every day to try and make this world a worse place, those people who enable evil need to start to be recognized for who they truly are, the ones who want total enshittification and love watching you suffer. At what point do we start to look at thr root of this problem?
“Do no evil1”
1 unless we can make money from it.
Actually, their slogan was “Don’t be evil.” But they revised it recently by adding a comma after the first word.
Any organisation that needs to remind themselves not to be evil is already intrinsically evil.
Very overtly and loudly claiming a quality which should be self-evident in oneself, one’s company or one’s nation invariably means it’s not really there.
I think they changed it didn’t they?
I think it’s “do the right thing” now
For the shareholders
Ahh, much more leeway
I mean… “evil” is arbitrary, right?
Not arbitrary enough that they thought they could keep saying it. They ditched that about a decade ago.
“It’s evil not to make as much money as possible”, Google founders. C-suite and board, probably.
Not anymore: they ditched it for “do the right thing (for my wallet)” a couple years back
Wow, and it’s literally just “If you’re using Firefox, wait five seconds.”
Elon moment
Did someone actually investigate and find the exact place in scripts where this logic takes place?
EDIT: Yes. https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-reportedly-slowing-down-videos-firefox-3387206/
This sounds like something that would be in the back end so likely not. But if spoofing user agents fixes the problem then I’d say it’s evidence enough to warrant a deeper look.
Is that easy to do?
Yes. User Agent is a http header that is part of every request you send to a server. As such, it is 100% client side and it can be whatever you want, it’s just a text string. For layman users, I’d recommend using an addon for it, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
Of course, you can also change the user agent string in the browser config manually. The official Mozilla support page describes the process in detail: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox
When they decide to do tricks in the backend differently between browsers, there will be ways to overcome that.
it’s pretty inconclusive if there’s no context for how that code is called. I’m kinda confused why the article wouldn’t have provided any additional detail other than a single line of code. why bother digging at all?
it’s part of their anti-adblock code. without going into too much details, they can instantly find out whether ad-block is trying to do anything on chrome, but on firefox they need a 5 sec delay
Which is honestly to Firefox’s credit. Making it harder to find out stuff about your browser is a good thing, unless it has to do with feature support.
But the fact that they don’t give a shit and are willing to ruin the user experience for it, that’s despicable.
Have you read past that screenshot of the code, though? It says the problem was not limited to Firefox, it seems Edge users reported problems as well. Anecdotally, I did experience that delay problem on Thorium this weekend as well. I have seen a variation of this problem almost a month ago, where sometimes the video would take a long time (like, over a minute, sometimes) to load, or often just not load at all. So I just chalked it up to Youtube having done something stupid on their end.
that half sentence in the aa article though
“That move makes sense in many ways, as the platform needs to make money to survive…”
should we also start a gofundme for youtube, i am suddenly worried for them /s
I’ve noticed that too, I just switch to Freetube when it happens.
Simply disgusting, but it’s business as usual for Google.Is free tube just pulling YouTube’s data or it a separate site? Can you watch livestreams if it’s the former? Basically all I use YouTube for is watching a couple streamers and watching Japanese udon restaurant channels while I eat my bologna sandwich for lunch
It does play livestreams, yes.
I’ve gonna look into that then thank you
I just use Freetube either way. I can’t stand autoplaying videos or suggestions, popups, etc.
Not noticing this change from the EU… Guess they’re too afraid of pulling that shit here?
Google LOVES A/B testing so it might be just that. I haven’t noticed anything either.
They’ve been caught before, but there’s no regulation for this in some regions
Bet it’s done in such a way that they can claim “We’re just optimizing for Chrome, not slowing down any competitors. It’s not our fault our competitors don’t using our web engine for their browsers.”
I mentioned similar shading behavior on another post, when using Firefox with Chrome or native user agents on the plain old Google search page.
It’s apparently not even subtle enough to make that claim, it checks the useragent and sleeps for 5 seconds if it’s not Chrome.
I was wondering why YouTube started taking a while to load pages in the last couple weeks. Fucking Google, pulling this shit.
Not that I don’t believe you, but do you have a source for that?
If changing your user agent to Chrome on Firefox fixes it that justification won’t fly
Gmail is almost painfully slow on my PC (I use Adblock on Firefox). Does anyone else experience this?
And, yes, I know Gmail is very bad, you’re preaching to the choir. I am in the midst of switching over.
Fear not friend, you are not alone. I too am slowly switching over, and these things take time. We are truly victims of a great bait and switch, with our digital lives held hostage. We never asked for this.
What are you switching to ?
Folks have suggested Proton Mail. It seems pretty good to me!
This is an aside, but I also want to give Proton points for their calendar app. I used to use Gsuite and Google calendar and no matter what I did it always opened in agenda mode. The Proton calendar has all the features of Google calendar (as far as I can tell) but their app has an option for default display mode. That brought me incredible joy.
proton mail is indeed very good
MXRoute and a domain name you own. Then you can switch provider anytime and actually own your @ email address.
I may just do this… and for the mail itself, is Thunderbird still a good choice ? it’s been a while since I’ve used àa desktop client. What about mobile by the way ? thanks for your insights
Thunderbird is great. MXRoute usually does a black Friday sale and its only $10 a year when I signed up 2 years ago.
For android mail client, I use FairEmail off Fdroid. I love it so much. It blocks tracking images and has a ton of other awesome features. I have it set up to get my 2 gmail accounts also and they are color coded to red so I can decide if its important and if so I go and change it to my non-google email or unsub. Going google free
Appreciate this a lot. I found a good deal at Hostinger so I went with that and am now choosing my domain name. Am stuck on that page lol. It has to sound good and be memorable
Seize the means of technology
Google Streetview is also ubgodly laggy. I have to refresh constantly to bring it to normal speed, and that lasts a few mins.
I can recommend mail.com. 14 USD for a full year. but you can also use it for free. I just payed for it last month.
No slowdowns here. Using Gmail since it’s inception. Fi customer with a backup service. We have YouTube premium maybe I’m getting away with something. No ads and no buffering.
imagine sitting down to code this and thinking you’re doing the right thing
you should be able to whisteblow clearly evil technology and have some sort of economic safety net
Counter point: the code monkeys just do what they are being paid for. The fact it’s so easy to circumvent is a testimony on how the people implementing this shit disagree with the corporation.
Hi, code monkey here - I don’t work for a large company like Google, am paid less than a Google code monkey, and the products I work on are used by orders of magnitude less people. But even still, if my lead came to me and said “hey, I need the frontend to detect when a user is using ‘XYZ Browser’ and then introduce an artificial 5 second latency whenever they try to load a page”, I’d look at him with incredulity and tell him “no, I’m not doing that. That’s stupid and you should feel bad for suggesting it.”
Code monkeys aren’t paid to simply follow instructions given to them by someone else like some sort of robot - were paid to create applications and programs that people can use, and are usually given enough creative room to do that in a way we see as the best way.
I… am paid less than a Google code monkey… I’d… tell him"That’s stupid and you should feel bad for suggesting it.”
I feel like these things are connected.
Maybe it was unclear. If I get fired for insubordination or whatever, I would be in much more pain than a Google code monkey, because I’m paid much less.
Are you thinking about it another way, where because I’m paid less, I wouldn’t care if I got fired, which makes me more emboldened to push back on my higher ups?
Sadly, salary and loyalty to the corporation are often proportional is what they meant.
Right, gotcha. In my experience, software developers are a bit more principled (maybe fickle is a better word lol) than that. Sure there are some dedicated “company man” types, but for the most part software devs are more loyal to the work/end product than the company
Of course my experience doesn’t speak for anyone else’s, take all this with a grain of salt, etc, etc
I mean they need money to live
Google developers can easily find a job elsewhere. If they stay at Google the chose to.
Isn’t it one of Google’s ‘creeds’ to “Don’t be evil”?
I heard they quietly dropped that as their motto several years ago.
