Fuck Google.
Searching a tracking number from Chrome using Google? Finds a package.
Same search on Google from Firefox leads to nothing.
Hell net neutrality laws might even have relevance if they keep this up.
Edit 2: Well, at least I know I’m right. Downvote away.
Sorry, I’m all for net neutrality, but behavior based on browser usage, while dickish, has nothing to do with it.
Edit: it seems like I’m being schooled. Got any sources to back up your downvotes?
Edit 3: nope. I’m not being schooled. The downvoters should either get better informed or stop downvoting with their emotions.
yes it does, net neutrality not only has to do with the ISP but also the services. different useragent string should NOT lead to a worse quality of service.
Got any source on that? I’m legitimately asking to learn more about that.
“feelings” bro
Right, but your service provider has nothing to do with that difference. The fact that the entity you’re contacting on the other end of the connection is providing a degraded experience isn’t an internet service delivery problem.
Your internet service, which is what net neutrality is concerned with, is distinct from services on the internet. In the same way that your phone service has nothing to do with the quality of service you get from HP’s telephone support line.
The web is based on open standards; that’s what made it universally accessible. How does limiting access based on how you access the web benefit anyone?
It doesn’t, but that isn’t their point. They’re simply pointing out that existing net neutrality laws in the US usually only apply to ISPs and telcos, not internet businesses.
Nobody is defending the practice, they’re just differentiating it from what we’ve previously referred to as “net neutrality,” which is 100% entirely about how ISPs process internet traffic, and not about the services being used within that traffic.
Unless I missed the memo, and “net neutrality” means something different now.
Since Google is both the service provider for the client browser and also provides last-mile internet services; they would fit the definition of a supposed neutral ISP but also neutral for applications and services further up the OSI stack.
Net neutrality is not just a service provider concept but has been viewed this way in the cases service providers have tried to game the system. It also encompasses the concept of an open internet; the neutrality of data is data and presentation, or lack of to the client is defined by open standards, not the desires of any one party.
Imagine a business making some smoothies with water provided by the utility company. The business decides to sell less appetizing smoothies to certain organizations. Are you saying that that’s a “water utility neutrality” issue?
Where did I say it did? The fact that it’s not a net neutrality issue doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Net neutrality is just a specific thing that isn’t this.
It doesn’t, that’s FTC / anticompetitive law territory
Hmmm, not sure why people are downvoting…
Maybe these days people are using the term “net neutrality” in a broader sense to just mean equitable access, rather than the specific meaning that’s been used in the past to refer to ISP behavior and giving preference based on how much is paid?
Well, you might want to look at the Wikipedia article on Net Neutrality to see whether or not you are being schooled on it.
In that case I’m right. Thanks. I thought my memory was pulling a fast one on me.
It also does that with other unrecognised user agents.
Personally I don’t understand why someone would still use Google when duckduckgo has more features and is just as good for searching and in the very rare case it isn’t you can easily switch back temporarily by just adding the prefix “!g” to your query.
I tried duckduckgo for a while and kept coming back to Google for “real” searches at work. It’s not as good for searching in my experience. Yet.
Duckduckgo has become a little better than it used to be… but google has also become a whole lot worse.
Yeah, I haven’t quite found a replacement that is better than google, but the way the trajectories are, it’s only a matter of time.
If you’re looking for research papers, duckduckgo (and yandex) is your friend - google is perfectly unusable for that these days.
The vast majority of times I go back to Google to do a search I find it also returns useless results. I’m not convinced it’s any better than duckduckgo. I think it used to be, but not anymore.
I had the same experience. I used switch between DDG and Google when DDG gave results I didn’t want. During the pandemic, I remember DDG giving lots of false positives and odd, non-standard web page hits. Like, if I was searching for current COVID advice, it would give me hits from the health department in Bumfuck, Nebraska instead of, say, CDC (and I don’t live in Bumfuck, Nebraska). It has really improved since then and now I can use DDG pretty much exclusively. Not having to scroll past a page of Google ads to find my search results is quite glorious.
The 6 residents of bumfuck Nebraska would like a word with you after their Trump circlejerk.
And I would be honored to speak with them!
I think it depends on wether google is eating the cookies or not
What’s your field?
I’m in a DevOps/Cloud Engineer role and DDG works better for me than Google. No ads and somehow fewer of the gpt generated fake help articles.
Same vein, devops/data engineering. Maybe I’ll give it another shot, I’d like to get off Google.
Big same. I’ll even bang out to Startpage to try to avoid directly using Google (!sp vs. !g), but that’s not as good either.
I bow to my search overlord Google. Until I try Grasp, Kagi, and SearXNG, and hopefully one of those will satisfy (in particular SearXNG).
Until then DDG remains my default, and I’ll !g half the time :(
Did you use Kagi? How was it?
Been using Kagi for a few months. Now that the unlimited tier is $10 it’s a no brainer, for me.
One of the three on my to-try list, still.
I tried it a few months ago and bought it before the trial was over. Took some time to build trust but it’s still on par with google if not better.
(My account probably looks like a shill for them but I swear I’m just a happy user)
I also really like Kagi, and their bundle for Ultimate users of the various text AI tools is also very helpful for work.
I really want to ditch Google, but DuckDuckGo aint there my brother.
It may work for some simpler/lazy searches, but for real stuff, nah.
The “good” thing is that Google search is going the way of Amazon, so with Google shooting themselves in the foot and DDG catching up a bit, maybe soon they’ll level
Works perfectly fine for trouble shooting complicated IT problems.
Isn’t ducksuckgo just paying for google search with a privacy wrapper/obfuscation layer on top?
Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google
I think they also use Yahoo and their own scrapers too.
Not that it matters of course.
ddg always drops one of at least two troublesome terms. Which is infuriating.
Might have to do with my settings, in which case it is a bug.
Bangs are gold (which is why ddg is my default) but i still sometimes miss exclusions.
I get results with DDG
It’s stupid we need an extension to fix this on mobile devices but there’s an extension to fix this on mobile devices
Someone, light the EU signal!
Lawsuit intensifies in the distance
Fuck Google. Ruining the internet for profit.
They dont want to just run it.
they want to control and dictate it.
Google needs a massive regulatory hammer to come down on it and smash it into dozens, if not hundreds, of tiny individual companies
nationalize these fucks
The internet is incredibly important to the modern society. Letting private companies only motivated by filling the pockets of the
old fartsshareholders run it is a bad idea. It’s time we consider Internet infrastructure like any other type of infrastructure.I agree with you. But have you seen how California has handed over the power grid to private companies?
I find it wild we don’t nationalize the banks we bail out with trillions of our tax dollars. Each and every one of us should be getting dividends on their profits, we should own half of the banks by now
Can you say Anticompetition practices?
1 lawsuit, 2 lawsuit, 3 lawsuit ah ah ah
Slam dunks, yes. But does any of the people who would bring a case against then have enough money to fight an army of more lawyers? Probably not.
Idk I’ll just find some millionaire/billionaire who’s hungry for public approval in the space and bug them about it probably
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The thing is, I really don’t think, Google would care about Firefox. Firefox is sitting at negligible percentages of usage share. The only real competitor to Chrome is Safari and that’s because of iOS.
I guess, they might impact Safari on macOS with this, but someone would have to try this out to actually see, and ultimately, this could still just be a dumb mistake.Having said that, Google holds a near-monopoly in both video content and web browsers. They have a special duty to not disadvantage competitors and even if this was an honest mistake, I do think, it deserves a slap on the wrist.
Google has a history of this sort of “whoops, we got caught, uhhh… That was just a bug!” behavior.
They do have a history of such things happening, yes, which is why my comment exists in the first place. Normally, I would assume this to just be the result of regular shitty management practices paired with regular shitty profit motives.
The history makes it look like they might genuinely have a higher motive here, and I’m saying I still don’t think so, because it would be far too petty and I don’t see them benefitting that much from it.
I want to believe you and I hope you’re right, but I have such little faith in corporations ever doing the right thing anymore.
The more bullshit like this I read about YouTube the more I despite them. I already use GrayJay on mobile and I’m using ublock Origin + ublock Matrix on Librewolf to control cookie usage on desktop. So far I’ve been able escape the video player block by clearing cache.
I’m just waiting for the day they “force” me onto another frontend.
doesnt ublock origin already block youtube’s anti adblock?
Nope, I still got it after a while
Then your uBlock Origin filters aren’t working properly. See this thread for instructions on how to purge and update your filters to block YouTube’s ads and YouTube’s adblocker blocker.
I mean after clearing the cache it disappears. But I’ve seen the “your video player will be blocked” 3 or 4 times during the past few months maybe.
Those 3 or 4 times may have been after Google had updated their anti-adblocking stuff and before uBlock Origin had updated their anti-anti-adblocking stuff.
Also, do you have any other adblockers installed? Does your browser have its own adblocker? Either of those can cause interference with stuff like this.
Nope, I use Librewolf with uBlock Origin, uMatrix and BitWarden. Nothing else.
But yes, I haven’t seen it in quite some time now.
If you get it, purge and update your cache. It still works.
It sort of does for me. I used ublock to block the popup and the overlay that prevents you from using the site. Sometimes a video will stop playing for a moment, but it resumes as soon as I hit play.
im using librewolf too. i keep seeing the adblocker active warning instead of a video, in the video-box on youtube Plays just fine in private window though…
Even after clearing the cache from the ublock filter settings?
User Agent String: A browser’s way of lying about what it is, in order to not trigger some server’s arcane content filtering system.
User Agents should be optional. The whole idea of the Internet was that the server should respond the same way to the same request regardless of the client’s qualities.
There are qualities that are useful for having different responses, like supported language, whether the browser accepts gzipped content, etc.
Fuck that shit.
- You can do language codes in the URL to serve different versions of content
- If your browser can do TLS then it should be able to handle gzip content or alternatively if the internet didn’t allow cookies and scripting in your browser then it would have been safe to use TLSs built in compression
Check out the Gemini protocol if you want to see that a lot of HTTP spec stuff is completely unnecessary
So if I type in “google.com” what language should the front page be in?
First language in Accept-Language header that server also support
Yeah, User Agent is also a header, which the other guy is saying shouldn’t exist.
Some widely spoken language I imagine, Chinese, Spanish, English I don’t care. Since .com is intended for commercial use, the language of the companies biggest market makes sense here as well.
You’re also forgetting that the likes of google.ru, google.nl and google.every_other_country_code exist.
Also there are plently of websites the have language selection in the site that overrides that header, look at Wikipedia.
There are plently of sites in non english languages that cater to non English speakers only, not every site has or needs 10 different translations.
At this point we also have translation engines in the browser so for pages in languages you don’t know, that you absolutely need to access, you can use it to understand the page to a decent level and/or be able to navigate to a version in your language if available.
Who said anything about English?
I just used it as an example since it’s pretty much the lingua franca of the internet and it’s what we are currently using. The same argument applies to any other language.
The issue is that some of those techniques are only useful after the client has rendered the content rather than before.
But they are useful and completely valid ways of dealing with the problem.
It is not the end of the world if I have to click am extra once or twice to change the language. Hell most websites have much harder processes just to reject cookies.
Personally I would rather err on the side of slightly extra work the odd time I’m not on a website not in my native language than have an extra bit of information that can be used to track me.
Again take a look at the Gemini protocol, its a perfectly fine browsing experience without all the cruft.
Valid, but not standard and more inconvenient.
Additionally, you act like query strings can’t be used to track you when they certainly can.
Most of the advantages of Gemini are implemented in the client and not the protocol itself.
That’s in separate headers
Bot
From what I can understand from the thread, they aren’t deliberatly crippling FF.
Oh, they also do that. Just not based on architecture. https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23970721/google-youtube-ad-blocker-five-second-delay-firefox-chrome
The way I read it is Chrome gets a pass on the architecture crippling, the others don’t.
Someone correct me if I got the wrong idea.
So Google is saying out loud they are trying to be Microsoft and abuse its near monopoy to push their other products.
Got it.
It looks like also this was against adblocker so, again, not specifically Firefox. Quote from the article itself:
The issue was initially reported as targeting Firefox users, but users online have said they’re seeing the delay in Chrome and Edge, too. Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use. Mozilla’s senior brand manager Damiano DeMonte wrote in an email to The Verge that “there’s no evidence that this is a Firefox-specific issue.
Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use
That means nothing, this check could be done on the server side and noone would know
I mean… We can we can invent a thousand conspiracies if we want to…
Except that the delay and ad blocker check is literally in the JavaScript code, you can see it.
Indeed, but google can just transmit different javascript to different users/browsers/regions etc (that’s why browsers have useragents, so websites can improve browser compatibility according to the circumstances). It can be decided on a whim and noone would know except some coders at google
Except everyone would know. Multiple people across the globe testing different browsers have looked at the same JavaScript code that is being sent to the browser. The check is there, client-side, google isn’t sending a different JavaScript payload for different browsers. Like you said, they could, but that’s not how it currently functions
Which turned out to also have nothing to do with FF but is targeting adblockers.
They finally made YouTube unusable for me even with ublock. Refreshing the filters didn’t work and told me I could only watch 3 videos.
Google was always going to win the war but I didn’t expect it to be like this.
I’m now using piped for all YouTube videos.
I randomly stopped getting the anti-adblocking. On my gaming PC I never got them, on my laptop they went away after I disabled my adblocking for one video and then re-enabled it. Now I don’t get them at all. Did they give up on me?
I’d love they gave up on me too…
They no longer appear for me. The biggest change for me was just using uBlock Origin. Previously I also had Ghostery. If you run multiple extensions for privacy, try dropping them and only using uBlock.
Never got them for some reason, with just ghostery (and maybe privacybadger)
You are remembering to purge all caches before refreshing I hope?
Using an alternative front end isn’t losing
Once they get rid of front ends and you go back they’ll have won
I wish Piped worked for me, I was trying to watch a Linux tutorial in full HD to see the commands better and Piped just refused to buffer the video.
There are other alternatives too, like invidious. The yewtu.be instance works decently well for me but limits to 720p I think. There is a list of all running instances somewhere on the github iirc. There’s other instances that allow full HD, just have a search and you should be able to find one.
Just redirect any watch page to https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=%ID% and you will get a list of instances. Can be setup with Redirector in a minute
Well, I just got Redirector last night to check it out and it took me some time to figure out how to get it to work right where I have https://youtube.com/watch?v=* redirecting to https://yewtu.be/watch?v=$1 in case there is something funky going on there that causes me to need to have that redirect active.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
My YouTube redirect rule is a bit more complex, but works for all shorts, youtu.be and regular youtube links and it supports time stamps and videos that are part of a playlist.
Set the rule to regular expression, use this one
(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:www\.)?(?:youtube\.com\/(?:watch\?v=|shorts\/)|youtu\.be\/)([^&?\/]+[&?]?.*)remove the two “amp;” at the end (Lemmy formatting is bad, it replaces an ampersand with
&even if you tell it not to…) and redirect to https://%yourinstanceofchoice%/watch?v=$1Enjoy!
Okay, what I was trying to do with Redirector is have it so I can search and browse videos on YouTube, but when I click on something that I want to watch, it forwards me to the same video on YewTu.be instead.
That’s exactly what this is doing. It captures all youtube.com/watch, youtube.com/shorts and youtu.be/ pages and redirects then to the same page on invidious. Just replace %yourinstanceofchoice% with yewtu.be.
If you don’t open videos you want to watch in a new tab, you also have to go to Advanced Options in your rule and tick “HistoryState” else it will bypass the redirect.
This should work for you:
What works for me is opening a new Private windows on Firefox, with ublock installed, and then login into YouTube. I do have to login every time I hope a private windows by so far I’ve been able to watch unlimited videos with an ad blocker installed
Why are you using YouTube at all if you don’t like it so much? Go use something else.
YouTube thinks aarch64 Firefox is… a HiSense TV!!!
Ah yes, televisions are exactly where the user wants lower resolution
That’s gonna be a lawsuit…
So Mozilla is going to take Google’s money and use that to sue Google?
It’s going to be a bug report.
Well… That seems uselessly risky and complex when you can just ask them to not do that. The issue tracker said the Youtube folks have been informed. Let’s just see if they fix that rather quickly. (but they are certainly not the only one with that kind of stuff. I’m not a big fan UA discrimination. I mean, this kind of stuff is what webcompat is all about.) (except for some purpose where you truly care about the architecture, like selecting a download link for an installer) (on the other side, I’m totally fine with feature-flags based discrimination, but that need to be done client-side).
yea like if they want money just grow some balls and ask for a monthly pay for youtube they got our generation like cable had our parents
i would be willing to pay so much much money for REAL premium youtube
i thank the community for all the amazing broadcasts
Out of curiosity, what would you consider “real” premium YouTube to be? Are you thinking something where the creators get a higher share of the revenue in return for better production values?
Not OP, but I just want videos. I don’t need or want their music service. That’s the premium I’m waiting for.
I wanted to get premium and while i was considering it they had 2 price increases.
No thank you, bye.
I am of the mindset: i want value out of my money, subscriptions that let you own nothing immediately falls out of my requirements so i need it to be a price i’m willing to pay. Which is a low price.
I cancelled spotify the moment they added €1 to the cost, all it gave me was a play button and a bunch of bullshit i don’t care for like a year in review. Dude, i was there…listening to that music, i already know what i played so i don’t need you to tell me.
But that’s just me and i’m the odd one out it seems.
I compare spotify like this; i bought a cd from the discount bin for €5 and got to play that for a whole life and i’d be happy if it was all i had. Spotify opens up do much music to you which is really cool BUT i used to buy a single album a year and copy that to a new cd/mp3 player to add it to the previous boughr cd’s. So my cost went from €5/€20 a year to €11 a month while i own nothing. In my head that’s automatically a waste of €112 euro’s that are spent with no real returning value.
The biggest value most subscription services offer is: they’ll stop literally pestering you with ads.
Switched to Freetube/Invidious. Like the sun, I’m never looking directly at Youtube.com ever again.
It might just be a coincidence but I’ve had a lot of trouble using Invidious or Piped lately too. Videos load and titles load, but video thumbnails don’t load for me.
I’ve had issues with Invidious and Piped literally every time I’ve tried to use them. Can’t understand how people even use the public servers.
However I have disabled Piped proxy in LibreTube and been using that for a long while but for the last week or so it hasn’t been working at all.
GrayJay is still working though.
There was a problem with DASH. Now it’s fixed, it should work with the proxy enabled.
As I said, it’s never worked with the proxy enabled. And it’s still not working with it disabled, right now.
I have also had piles of trouble. I don’t get how so many people apparently have none
It’s the same with all the other frontends (LibReddit, Nitter, etc.). They never work and everyone is just like “try a different instance!”. How many dozen different instances should I try before I give up?
Shout out to Stealth (Reddit) and Squawker (Twitter), those both work the vast majority of the time without any “instances” to depend on or switch through.
Google is blocking popular instances these days, so yeah, you basically need to find an unpopular instance, which usually means it’s new and may not live for long, or it will quickly become popular, because it works, which will cause Google to block it.
I tried it and my main complaint was it was like 720p, so lower quality (noticeable to me just looking at it). But it “just worked” for me. But I’m also not interested in YouTube enough to play this game - if they block me, I stop going there. It seems like they give up blocking me every so often (or something updates IDK).
there’s a browser extension called libredirect that has a keyboard shortcut to switch between instances. you can also use freetube/newpipe/mpv.
I know what apps you can use. The apps are not the problem. The proxies are.
Do you have a link for Stealth? Libreddit was working for me up until two days ago.
It’s on FDroid
Good to know about Stealth. Thanks!
Yeah I might try the others a couple more times before giving up but it’s not gone well for me thusfar. Libreddit and invidious worked for me for like 4 days last time, both crapped out about the same time. It’s annoying to have to repeatedly troubleshoot what used to be something you could basically count on working
Yeah, Google started blocking popular instances of Invidious and Piped in May this year: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3822
Every so often, it may start working again when those instances get a different IP address, but it usually doesn’t last more than a few days…
Steelmanning: perhaps no ARM Linux system was capable of playing 4K reliably until Asahi Linux came along?
Someone on the Hacker News cross-post mentioned it, but it seems like they assumed any ARM Linux device that wasn’t detected as running Android was some low-power device like a Raspberry Pi, and didn’t anticipate more powerful devices running bog-standard Linux until Apple Silicon and thus Asahi came along.
It’s probably the case that this was good intent given the lack of desktop ARM computing hardware, but they really should let the client decide the video quality.
True, but I would guess that the clients didn’t handle that well and this was just a stupid quick fix.
Apple Silicon has entered the chat
Hmm, anti competitive practices.
If only there was some kind of legislation that protected an open and fair internet…
No
