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Comment by timothya | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I believe this is the relevant comment:

"Apologies to all impacted by this transient configuration. Firefox 43 users who do not have h.264 will get 360p VP8 until the configuration is updated early next year. The very large majority of Firefox users watching YouTube have h.264. For them, and for user who get VP9, <video> MSE performs better overall than Flash."

Yeah, but the next comment was:

> "Unfortunately this is not an acceptable state for us. We have many millions of users whose Youtube experience suddenly got significantly degraded, and we're not willing to leave them in that state over the holidays. Any chance you guys could simply roll back the change you guys made? If not, we're forced to ship a Firefox update that lies to you guys about the Firefox version, which really is not a good option for either of us :("

It can still be "multiple millions" and still be very low percentage numbers, when you are accessing risk you deal with percentages not absolutes.

Reading the comments, it's some 6%, not small for me, if the total number of users is many millions.

Firefox users without H.264 platform codecs were affected: 100% of Windows XP users (which are about 14% of all Firefox users worldwide!), 2% of all other Windows users (the "N" and "KN" editions in Europe and South Korea), and 3% of Linux users.

Is OpenH264 still not being used for video decoding?

OpenH264 can't be used for video decoding because it can't decode the H264 profiles used to encode video on the internet; it's strictly baseline profile only which is pretty useless. The only reason it exists is because Cisco has a bunch of H264-only videoconferencing hardware that they want to be able to work with WebRTC.

I got this shit, just like I get no ability to change any search settings or do an advanced Google search on Firefox mobile, and am now spoofing Chrome as useragent.

In my opinion, Firefox should do what Chrome did, and append the competing browser’s UA to their own useragent.

In the case of Firefox for Android, there is already a rapidly growing blacklist of sites that get their UA spoofed to Chrome.

You might want to add webp support to Firefox for Android then, and just spoof star.google.com/whatever TLD they support and star.youtube.com, too.

(Replace "star" with *, as HN doesn’t support any proper escaping or markdown. This kind of bullshit is what makes this page so horrible to use)

FWIW, you can enter things like that on HN by treating it as "code" -- skip a line and indent the next by two spaces

  *.youtube.com

For me, the extreme Youtube slowdown coincided with me being in a new location. For a while, I just thought that the internet must be extremely slow, and yet, the pages themselves loaded fast, fps games worked smoothly, and there weren't any other signs that videos should buffer extremely slowly. Now I know why.

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