this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."

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[–] casmael@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What do you mean by change user agent to chrome? Asking 4 a friend

[–] chaogomu@kbin.social 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

For a specific how to, there's a bunch of firefox addons that do it, but the mozilla recommended one is this

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/

It's super easy to use, just open it and it gives a bunch of options.

This is my current (fake) user agent;

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

A few more clicks;

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; HLK-AL00) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.102 Mobile Safari/537.36 EdgA/104.0.1293.70

And finally;

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3; Trident/6.0)

Now, that last one is making it look like I'm using internet explorer... Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.

I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)

[–] hyperhopper@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 year ago

Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with "fancy" features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 15 points 1 year ago

Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it's absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like "See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn't bother to support it anymore".

[–] takeda@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)

This is a good summary of this mess: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

I personally like seeing Mozilla loud and proud in all the user agents.

It's a mess, but also an echo of history.

[–] thanevim@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

When you browse to a website, your browser passes info about itself to the server hosting that site. This info is intended to help the server provide the best rendering code for your browser. This is called your User Agent.

However, Google is using it here to identify Firefox users, and is apparently choosing to lump them all in a box called "adblock users" instead of trying to identify an ad blocker more accurately.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you do change your user agent, I would use an extension that does it only on YouTube domains.

We want independent metrics to show rising Firefox use, not falling.

[–] casmael@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah cool I’ll have a look. Any extensions spring to mind?

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU, so they might have thought that they're super crafty and used markers such as user agent for their cool coercion delay code thingy

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To add on

You can spoof this user agent to see if a website does something shady depending on which browser you're using.

So if you keep all other variables the same, and just toggle the user agent value, YouTube behaves differently

[–] Kodemystic@lemmy.kodemystic.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] otter@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I haven't tried it in a while, but I think there are browser extensions for it. Might need to ask someone else for how to do it these days