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Comment by qmarchi | Hacker News Reader

To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers.

Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube

Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward.

The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment.

Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.

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> YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.

Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.

First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.

Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.

Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.

If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most probable and there is no wide spread conspiracy.

Youtube does experiments based on user-agents. I think this is well known and if not, a former Googler just let you know.

In any case, for those who are complaining, it's their website. Either pay or stop using it?

In addition, Google is still run disorganized-bag-of-cats management style and YouTube is so indpendent from the mothership they're almost their own company.

Conspiracy is unlikely purely because Neal Mohan is empowered to tell the Chrome team to pound sand and will do so if he thinks they'd make a call that would damage YouTube's numbers.

Not to mention, if performance with YouTube is slow, there's no clue for users that Firefox is the problem. There's no banner telling you "for faster YouTube performance use Chrome". And it's extremely unlikely that your average user is going to try to compare with Chrome, or even the thought occurs to them. They probably think their ISP just got worse or something.

If this were an actual mechanism to try to get users to switch, it would be an idiotic one.

Seems like @mdasen provided a simple explanation: Money.

Instead of just "stop using it" (pay isn't actually an option here, people who are paying are still getting the delay), let's force them to comply with reasonable antitrust regulation under threat of fines. Or preferably, break them up, youtube shouldn't be part of google and neither should chrome.

I mean if it is "is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors" in a way which causes Chrome UAs to get preferential treatment, isn't that specifically targeting non-Chrome browsers?

Making Chrome the dominant browser has been a huge focus of Google since Chrome's inception. You may not know this, but Google owns YouTube.

> this isn't targeting Firefox/Safari/etc.

> rather it is using the User Agent

This is literally the most common method of targeting browsers.

You're getting downvoted, but I was thinking the same thing. Could someone explain why that might not be the case?

If that's an A/B test where user agents are randomly added to either control or a test group, and you change your user agent, then you are reassigned, because you changed the user agent

To provide some clarity on this, it's not specifically coded into the system to prefer one particular browser over another, but rather, it's independent of all browsers and using the useragent as a string as part of a group.

Chrome could equally be as effected by this as any other browser.

> To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers

It's not targeting non-chrome browsers, it's just a before penalty that only applies to ... non-chrome browsers?

> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.

With Google's ongoing desire to break ad-blockers in Chrome, and make tracking a mandatory web specification via essentially monopoly browser status[1], Google has a _very_ strong financial incentive to punish non-chrome UAs - anything that pushes people to Chrome over browsers that they don't control is a win for them.

[1] let's be real: the only reason many sites work in browsers other than chrome is iOS safari, that's it

To provide some additional context and clarifying points that I see in the lower comments:

>> Regarding financial incentives:

Google is an insanely large organization, and the priorities and KPIs of one org (Chrome) largely don't impact another org (YouTube).

Additionally, YouTube is a regarded as a red-headed step-child within Google and is generally outside of the general interactions with other orgs.

That's based on years of working on that fine line.

>> Regarding Useragent Targeting:

The targeting scheme treats the useragent as a string, rather than a distinct value that the useragent is set to. Chrome is likely to hit this bug as much as any other browser vendor.

> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.

Until Chrome can no longer block ads... ?

> YouTube has no financial incentive...

Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.

They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.

They already made gmail slow on FF on purpose some time ago, no?

Didn't they do the same to Maps?

You are describing exactly what targeting non-chrome browsers is but somehow saying it's not?

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