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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.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c61

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Honestly, it sounds like the commenter was defending some crappy engineering decisions.

I'm not really comfortable that YT/Google were, via this guy, asking for special consideration (from an open source project) but only willing to discuss their request in private. It lacks transparency.

And this "feature" being not noticeable to the user, but kinda a requirement that it be there, and apparently associating stuff on someone's Google/YouTube side... but the Googler in question is unwilling for that feature to be identified.

From what he describes, it might be something like a quota service or an ad service that does consistency checks over the course of user sessions to fight spam/abuse/crawlers.

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