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.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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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.
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...
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.
It works for me now. Only took them 8 years
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.
Let's hope Europe stars investigating Google as a gatekeeper. That seemed to work miracles on Apple.
BTW, this:
This is some ultimate scumbaggery.
This should be illegal, Firefox being their competition (tangentially)
It honestly probably is
EU might hit them for it. I have no faith that the US government is going to do anything.
The thing that gets me is they think no one will ever find this stuff. There are hundreds of thousands of people (maybe more) who are actively looking ways to block ads and get around this behavior. There's no way it'll ever go unnoticed.
They could literally have used some variance in implementation, server side bandwidth limitations, etc, but THIS is just blatantly obvious
I wonder if it's a case of malicious compliance.
So this is part of a larger adblock checker, if the ad doesn't load within 5 seconds, it fails and triggers the adblocker warning. Since the ad should load in 3, they've set it for 5. If you have ubo, you won't see the warning that it then wants to pop up, it just seems (and is) a 5 second delay. Changing the UA probably removes this from Firefox because then the clientside scripts will attempt to use builtin Chrome functions that wouldn't need this hacky script to detect the adblock. Since they don't exist, it just carries on.
I was wondering how badly out of context the above quote must be considering the UA isn't checked in the function. Above poster is trying to construe it as a pure and simple permanent delay for Firefox.
That being said, the solution is still bullshit.
This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.
Doesn't this break competition laws?
Couldn't Google/YouTube be sued over this?
I wonder how long it'll be before google gets sued for their anti-competitive behavior.
Sometimes I get curious about chromium based browsers and consider giving them a shot for a while.
Then Google does shit like this and I keep mainlining Firefox out of spite. Half the reasons people experience “issues” with Firefox are just dumb garbage like this (see sites / web content being developed with Chrome-based in mind)
Heck I use god damn duckduckgo out of spite nowadays
DDG is legit great and even sometimes better than Google search now. I also am a SearXNG enjoyer
DDG, even though apparently a Bing front end, gives legit better results than google
It's honestly good. It misses that "Algorithm profile" that Google has where it starts to "understand" what you mean but it's still pretty good.
(Example. If I type in "genocide" in Google, it knows I often look for Undertale related things and pushes "Undertale genocide route" related content. For DDG I need to be clearer about what I mean)
It took a bit getting used to but I prefer it this way now.
the website DRM thing is one of the most blackpilled and evil uses of technology i've ever seen
the people in charge of developing that should be put in a padded room and never allowed to see sunlight again. fucking god.
Woah, woah, woah, slow down: Why do they get to have padding in their room?