Google are deliberately breaking YouTube when it detects you're running Firefox
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In such cases, I tend to go with "never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence".
Most things that people assume are malicious often are usually prioritization issue. FF market is small, engineering resources are scarce (you may think they are vast, it's google after all, but you need to think of the "impact" engineer has to drive for promotion, which FF barely clears if anything).
But this time, I'll assume a mistake because the potential anti trust fallout isn't worth it.
Breaking youtube might also be a resourcing issue still - like making sure they control the release process without having to allocate resources to make sure what they do work for windows phone too.
Note: I no longer work at google.
https://mspoweruser.com/google-claims-edge-slowing-empty-div...
These claims aren't isolated. I think it's a bad look for Google to repeatedly make mistakes when they are currently under multiple investigations for monopolistic behavior.
I think this is a fantasy we have about big companies, esp big tech companies, often until we work at one.
"But they have so much money, surely it wasn't just one guy working on this major thing" and "If they wanted to do it right, it would have been done right" and such.
Trillion dollar company with probably <100K eng, spread over hundreds of products/features/etc, who also have to go through performance reviews and have to show impact.
So yes, my choice words are very intentional in this case.
leadership to prioritize their browser -> leadership to prioritize the most popular browsers. Yes.
This should be considered malice rather than incompetence. I believe that's what others are getting at.
(On the other hand, perfectly reasonable to assert "If the rules say the market leader doesn't have to care about the welfare of others in the market, maybe those rules need to change").
"sort by revenue", or "sort by users" is not as deliberate in my opinion. But sure.
Monopolists shouldn't have the benefit of doubt. If it acts in a way that seems like dominant market position abuse, the default position should be assume that's the case, and act accordingly.
Fair enough, Apple videos playing nice with Android cast devices is also trouble.
At Google's scale, the easiest way to harm Firefox's market share is to simply not test changes on Firefox. Let Mozilla keep their browser implementation-compliant with Google's interpretation of the spec, not the other way around.
Corporations are not people.
I doubt anyone has something like "if firefox sleep (100)"
Did you know that the DOJ (in the US) recently ruled Chrome to be separate from Google, due to monopolistic practices?
>never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence
Really? If only they uttered this phrase during the trial the could have got away with it, dang!
I am no Google fan, and I left it for a bunch of reasons. There may probably places where they do have monopolistic practices - and I won't comment on them - but my engineering sense is the explanation is much simpler here.
>please do not use anything they build
I actually try not to.
That's not even related to what I said. I mentioned the issue here is less likely to be due to monopolistic causes.
Also see this reply from an eng that did work around firefox regressions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389526
It corroborates with what i said.
"Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system."
We should aim to have incentives that produce the behavior we want, which is that YouTube should function the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome.
I'm "incompetent" at doing the laundry. Strangely it's ok because strangely I never get asked to do the laundry. What a totally coincidental benefit that I am not knowingly perpetuating at all.
Most Googlers use Chrome at work so it’s going to be better supported incidentally. The reason behaviors change when switching UA is because features vary across browsers and the UA ends up acting as a flag that turns features on or off. Not because someone is putting in a sleep() when they see Firefox. That would make for a very awkward code review.
When I was a Googler I exclusively used Firefox. Things were never so bad that I had to switch over to Chrome even with internal tools, though I suffered many hiccups due to this choice.
I was ultimately never able to find the root cause, and the issue went away with the next minor update of Firefox itself.
The thing is: for a junior engineer (who are often the ones who get assigned that kind of task because it's not high-priority to the product's feature list, which is the primary driver of success), that's a hell-project. Ultimately, it's a negative mark on performance review: "I spent a month chasing a problem with a browser used by 2% of our userbase and the end result is the problem fixed itself" is a terrible waste of company resources. And since Googlers get to choose what they think will be most impactful, it should be no surprise they avoid that choice every chance they get.
Google's whole self-management approach tends to optimize towards the center at the cost of the fringe.
That goes beyond ignoring the long tail of issues: it chokes out innovation.
As far as I remember this has since been addressed. I personally have no issues on Firefox on Linux.
I always have uBO enabled with a bunch of extra rulesets for curtailing tracking and "annoyances". If I turn that off, I get weird behaviours in YouTube (and other sites). Re-enable it and I get back a smooth, reliable site.
Facebook, eBay, newspaper websites, Amazon, et al all demonstrate similar behaviour: slownews and broken behaviour without uBO, performant and reliable with.
Maybe it is coder bias unintentional or otherwise.
Or maybe it's the ever-bloating workload of user-tracking and ads causing problems.
IME the only thing Premium is good for is getting rid of most ads and enabling background playback in YouTube's official app.
In any case, I am using YTP as a leverage. It's well-known Google doesn't like Firefox and yt-dlp, so I am using those with YTP to make the point that maybe they should think twice about it.
It’s a hard problem to solve, that is to incentivize YouTube to care about Firefox even if Google had no relation to YouTube simply because FFs market share is so small.
That being said I think it is a shame that somehow the web became what it is. Would it not be nice if YouTube was a API and the player/site could be implemented by anybody, so you could choose from many players provided by different people ?
It did happen in the past and was fixed after around 1 month (which was good because it decreased my time spent on YouTube).
Right now YouTube is almost unusable for me on Firefox with uBlock Origin on M1 Max and has been for the last couple of days for whatever reason. Even disabling uBlock Origin doesn't help.
Something is definitely going on between the two.