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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 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

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