To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers.
Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube
Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward.
The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment.
Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
> YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Google has big financial incentives to punish non-Chrome user agents.
First, we've seen that Google pays a large amount of money to be the default search engine in competing browsers. A big reason for funding Chrome development is so that Google doesn't have to pay someone for the majority of its search traffic. If Google is paying out 30-40% of search ad revenue from non-Chrome browsers, that's many billions of dollars if they can get more people to use Chrome. If non-Chrome browsers are a bad experience on one of the most popular sites on the internet, that pushes people to use Chrome.
Second, Google is altering Chrome so that ad blockers won't be as effective. If they can push people to use Chrome, they'll get more ad revenue since ad blockers won't be as effective.
Google has been pushing Chrome because people using Chrome makes them billions of dollars. Maybe YouTube itself doesn't have a financial incentive, but Google definitely does.
If Chrome vanished tomorrow, Google would then face steep fees when their deals with Mozilla and Apple were up for renewal since they'd be dependent on traffic from Firefox and Safari. Instead, Google can keep paying Mozilla less and less money over time as more people use Chrome instead of Firefox.
In addition, Google is still run disorganized-bag-of-cats management style and YouTube is so indpendent from the mothership they're almost their own company.
Conspiracy is unlikely purely because Neal Mohan is empowered to tell the Chrome team to pound sand and will do so if he thinks they'd make a call that would damage YouTube's numbers.
Instead of just "stop using it" (pay isn't actually an option here, people who are paying are still getting the delay), let's force them to comply with reasonable antitrust regulation under threat of fines. Or preferably, break them up, youtube shouldn't be part of google and neither should chrome.
Not to mention, if performance with YouTube is slow, there's no clue for users that Firefox is the problem. There's no banner telling you "for faster YouTube performance use Chrome". And it's extremely unlikely that your average user is going to try to compare with Chrome, or even the thought occurs to them. They probably think their ISP just got worse or something.
If this were an actual mechanism to try to get users to switch, it would be an idiotic one.
I mean if it is "is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors" in a way which causes Chrome UAs to get preferential treatment, isn't that specifically targeting non-Chrome browsers?
Making Chrome the dominant browser has been a huge focus of Google since Chrome's inception. You may not know this, but Google owns YouTube.
To provide some clarity on this, it's not specifically coded into the system to prefer one particular browser over another, but rather, it's independent of all browsers and using the useragent as a string as part of a group.
Chrome could equally be as effected by this as any other browser.
If that's an A/B test where user agents are randomly added to either control or a test group, and you change your user agent, then you are reassigned, because you changed the user agent
> To provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers
It's not targeting non-chrome browsers, it's just a before penalty that only applies to ... non-chrome browsers?
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
With Google's ongoing desire to break ad-blockers in Chrome, and make tracking a mandatory web specification via essentially monopoly browser status[1], Google has a _very_ strong financial incentive to punish non-chrome UAs - anything that pushes people to Chrome over browsers that they don't control is a win for them.
[1] let's be real: the only reason many sites work in browsers other than chrome is iOS safari, that's it
To provide some additional context and clarifying points that I see in the lower comments:
>> Regarding financial incentives:
Google is an insanely large organization, and the priorities and KPIs of one org (Chrome) largely don't impact another org (YouTube).
Additionally, YouTube is a regarded as a red-headed step-child within Google and is generally outside of the general interactions with other orgs.
That's based on years of working on that fine line.
>> Regarding Useragent Targeting:
The targeting scheme treats the useragent as a string, rather than a distinct value that the useragent is set to. Chrome is likely to hit this bug as much as any other browser vendor.
> Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.
They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.
If you keep breaking the site guidelines like this, we're going to have to ban you. We've already warned you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34557733) and you've unfortunately continued to do it repeatedly, not just in this comment but in other recent ones:
shrug. I was unnecessarily rude in two of the 5 comments, if you were just replying to those i'd understand, but i don't really understand the others (including the previous warning and the one you are replying to now), especially the one you're replying to now. I can try to be more civil but considering there are only two valid complaints out of my entire comment history, if you really want to ban me there's nothing i can do for you.
You should be banning the google employee pretending they have "no financial incentive" to shut down their competition. It's obviously inflammatory and absurd. Every company has financial incentive to impede their competition. He works at google, he knows this and is lying or propagandizing or who knows.
Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube
Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward.
The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment.
Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.