It’s bizarre how blatent this is. Google has so much power over web standards that Mozilla have to work really hard to make firefox work, but YouTube don’t bother being subtle or clever and just write ‘if Firefox, get stuffed’ in plain text for everyone to see.
In my other comment I provide a link to the US DOJ anti-trust complaint center website.
Google has been doing this kind of thing for a while. If you try to use Google Meet in Firefox, you can’t use things like background blurring. Spoofing Chrome works in that situation as well.
How does one “spoof” chrome?
You can change your user agent string, the text your browser uses to tell the web site you’re looking at what browser it is, either via your F12 developer tools menu or via an extension.
The most convenient way is with a browser extension that changes your user agent. You can also change it in the developer options of most browsers.
And the stupid thing is that all I use Chrome for is Meets… And that’s it. Do they really think they win me over?
Not you or me. But most people, yeah.
That is, as always, the problem: it works for them. The average Joe isn’t going to implement a new filter into ublock…
The fuck?? Isn’t this anti competitive behaviour?
In a previous generation, governments would go after this blatant anti competitive behaviour.
I’m sure the EU will still.
It’s just a shame that there’s really only one government organization globally that will still stand up to corporations.
To be fair China will send you to a reeducation camp or disappear you if you try to act like a western billionaire.
China will make you disappear for many things including speaking up against the genocide of religious minorities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They do the same shit for Google search results. Search weather or stock tickers with a Chrome user agent* and you get a rich, interactive chart of the weather forecast or stock history. Search with another mobile user agent and you get a static snapshot of the weather or stock price at an instant in time.
There’s even an extension for Firefox for Android which changes the user agent for Google searches to Chrome, to get the rich content.
* just a user agent, not an actual browser, which proves that it isn’t about browser capability, but rather abusing their monopolistic market position in search to further their web browser’s market share. Sound familiar, Microsoft from the 90’s?
Doesn’t this break competition laws?
Couldn’t Google/YouTube be sued over this?Let’s hope Europe stars investigating Google as a gatekeeper. That seemed to work miracles on Apple.
BTW, this:
This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.
Not that I think Google is a great company, but why is this on its own proof of anything based on this single persons video evidence? In my single person test I don’t see that 5 second delay when using Firefox and browsing around Youtube. Seems far more likely to be an issue with this persons browser setup than something Google did to me.
And this is precisely why they use an A/B architecture to implement these sorts of changes. “It’s not happening on mine, must be in your setup.” delays/prevents people from recognizing the bad behavior, and instead of them being called out on it or forced to behave properly, the users they abuse just give up and switch back to Chrome because it “works better”, then the A/B lists are shuffled again and the process repeats.
Or, they could use an A/B architecture because it makes good design sense when you are dealing with a change that will impact millions/billions of people. But the conspiracy theory’s sure are a lot more fun to wallow in I will admit.
Or, they could use an A/B architecture because it makes good design sense when you are dealing with a change that will impact millions/billions of people.
Both could be true though.
Ah, I was wondering why YouTube was taking so long to load recently. I thought it was just because their code was shit, and it turns out I was right, but not in the way I thought.
Yeah, the simplest the answer is usually correct. Is this a conspiracy involving hundreds of Google employees intentionally building features to slow the app down on Firefox or is it incompetence because they don’t test their product on multiple browsers?
