I use YouTube daily in safari and edge, this is complete hyperbole.
(This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers, etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which may have me on a naughty list.)
But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
Yeah - I watch most of my YouTubes on the Apple TV and the ads are a pestilence. Sometimes it'll be 50s pre-roll[1] with multiple 30-50s breaks for a 10m videos.
Luckily there exist[0] many fine technologies that let you view them without ads via something like Infuse with a DLNA server if you're that way inclined.
[0] Currently. YT-DLP is fighting the good fight but I don't know how much longer they'll be able to keep in front. But then I'll just stop watching YouTube, really, because it's a horror show without adblock/circumventions.
[1] The video doesn't appear in your history until the pre-roll has finished which means if you can't be arsed sitting through a 50s pre-roll just that second and - at least on the Apple TV - you've not clicked on the video from your homepage / subscriptions, good luck trying to find it again unless you remember the name + channel etc. (which it also won't properly show you until after the pre-roll!)[2]
[2] I hate YouTube corporate.
Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.
What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )
there's a lot of iphone/ipad users out there.
> Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already
I don't use it but ui probably. ads maybe. plenty of people have money and don't want the inconvenience of trying to get around it.
Also, when playing music you won't be hit with ads.
Your setup can move with you wherever you are, home, travel, in the vehicle. This can be helpful for engaging the audible sensors of small aliens sans screen.
Youtube without ads on every device, anywhere, is quite a different experience.
The company voluntarily decided to serve the content at no charge to consumers, at the company's own expense, to the internet at large, with no reasonable expectation of any obligations from the people they're freely offering the content to.
They're welcome to stop freely offering it the moment they decide they don't want to be the world's most popular video sharing and viewing platform anymore.
Until then, neither I nor anyone else has any obligation to pay them, run any part of their front-end code (includig the ad-serving parts), or view any of their ads.
FWIW, when I use Chromium (logged out/in) on Linux, everything works fine. If I use Firefox (logged in), it works worse. If I change the user-agent to Chromium in Firefox, I get faster buffering than when I use the default user-agent. Make of that what you will.
No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.
No, Firefox always been a second-rate guest at Google properties, and I'm not expecting it to change soon either. Why would they make it better when status quo means more Chrome users (in their mind)?
I would expect YouTube managers to pressure the Chrome managers, because YouTube brings in billions of dollars every month. Likewise I would expect the trend to move in favor of YouTube, because the browser loses money at an increasing amount and YouTube generates money at an increasing amount. 70% of YouTube happens on Mobile, and in the US more people are now watching on TVs than phones. Source: Nielsen, the old-school company that has huge influence over ads.
The site pops a literal warning saying "having problems? turn off your ad blocker" so I'm not sure where the mysteries lie here.
They're testing on thousands of devices. And they're probably even testing against ad-blockers on your bro-browser. But they're certainly not motivated to optimize that experience, so you get what you get.
Notably, YouTube these days prioritize AV1 codec even if you don’t have gpu acceleration for it, making lots of systems fall back to CPU decoding and making it completely unusable. Install the h264ify extension to force h264 during content negotiation and get your gpu decoding back.
Even if you can make a matrix of all those combinations, it’s even more complex than that to test in practice. Take my laptop for example, it starts off good and manages the cpu decoding for a while, a few minutes into a video it overheats and throttles, causing stutter.
What YouTube should do on the other hand, and I’m sure they already do, is to collect metrics from all playbacks. That should show black on white how many users struggle with each codec.
I don’t think I’m in any minority here given how many million installations the h264ify extension has. Google simply care more about their bandwidth cost than the user experience.
On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
I freely admit to holding google software to a higher standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from startups, however I also believe google has the talent, time, and money to where their software should basically be the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route you change" thing...