Hacker News Reader

I've also been seeing this in Firefox for the past couple weeks or so.

The video quality will default to "Auto-1080p" or similar but it will be visibly much worse than 1080p quality. Switching to 1080p manually seems to be the only way to get good quality.

This has been the case for as far back as I can remember.

I've had the same experience on Safari—in addition to the issue with Find no longer working in Google Docs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27351855).

I strongly suspect that at least part of the reason for these is to discourage people from using Google's properties with browsers other than Chrome (whether it was the reason for creating them, or just noted as a benefit for refusing to fix them once they were identified).

I suspect this is the real cause. They did it with search, makes sense they would do it with other areas as well.