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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure those sites break in Edge and Brave as well...

They break them on purpose so people will switch to Chrome. And the worst part is, there's no evidence (yet?) that there's malice behind it. Maybe we'll get a whistleblower at some point, but that'll only happen when their income no longer covers buying off their conscience.

Do they only break for users in the United States? I've been using Firefox exclusively since about 2.0, and I've never had any of the Google projects break for me. Not once. Yet this seems to be a pretty common problem around here.

I'm from Europe and on one occasion Youtube was broken on Firefox but not on Chrome. It was fixed in the day or two.

In my experience, YouTube in-video links (those that e.g. show thumbnails of videos and are pointed at by vloggers with their fingers) have been broken in Firefox for years. Not that I complain, I've always been annoyed by those. I think it took me 2 years to realize that after seeing vloggers point at invisible things. I had to double-check in Chrome. (I just assumed that they forgot to add the links when editing.)

Those links don't appear on my Android-based Youtube clients that come with my cable box and Sony TV. The vlogger's hand points to nothing. It's amazing how second-class Youtube on Android TV is, maybe someone at Google hates testing it. I still manage to use it for about 75% of my Youtube usage. My wife and I are definitely going through a Youtube phase, which will probably end when the ads reach a tipping point.

What exactly is broken in Firefox on YouTube or Gmail? I'm not a heavy Firefox user, but when I try it every once in a while, I've never noticed anything broken on any of the Google's sites, even Maps and Docs worked just fine - but then, maybe I wasn't trying out some advanced features.

My wife and I have had a fanless PC hooked up to our TV since 2011.

Firefox is the only browser we use and we watch Youtube every day. If it broke, I'd know about it or hear about it.

It never breaks.

> What exactly is broken in Firefox on YouTube or Gmail?

Performance. That makes the sabotage so insidious!

https://tech.co/news/google-slowed-youtube-firefox-edge-2019...

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/disable-polymer-youtube

Incompetent vs malice...

If they are close to the edge cases of the spec, just not testing on Firefox will break it. By negligence, rather than malice.

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