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.”
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.”
It doesn’t really matter whether it was “targeted” at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the logic takes the user agent into account and discriminates against Firefox users. Those are different things.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing was written by some AI and they just run massive tests with different forms of ad blocking and different browsers to train the AI on how to detect ad-blockers, and this just resulted in Firefox users being given a higher chance of block, so the algorithm set a handicap to Firefox users, as a lower level of protection they added for cases where there’s no 100% confidence an adblock is used.