YouTube blames ad blockers for slow load times, and it has nothing to do with your browser
www.androidauthority.com
YouTube has clarified in a statement that users who use ad blockers will have a suboptimal experience regardless of their browser.

YouTube blames ad blockers for slow load times, and it has nothing to do with your browser | The delay is intentional, but targeting users who continue using ad blockers, and not tied to any browse…::YouTube has clarified in a statement that users who use ad blockers will have a suboptimal experience regardless of their browser.

  • ZephrC@lemm.eeEnglish
    1773·
    1 year ago

    Yeah, sure. That’s why it happens on Firefox even without an adblocker, and goes away when using a user agent switcher to claim you’re using Chrome instead of Firefox while using an adblocker. Because it’s toooooooootally about adblocking.

    • 1bluepixel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      222·
      1 year ago

      I tried this exact scenario and didn’t see any difference in load times. I’m using an ad blocker and it’s definitely sluggish, but switching to a Chrome user agent made no difference.

      • ZephrC@lemm.eeEnglish
        26·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, people seem to be having very different experiences with it. It might genuinely be them rolling out different versions to different people to bug test it or something like that. Even if that’s the case I still think its probably not unintentional that it hurts Firefox more. They do that too much for me to believe it’s an accident.

      • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        It’s hard to tell these days when there’s so much A/B testing and stuff going on. I haven’t run into this at all personally.

    • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      It’s actually been confirmed that the 5-second wait happens regardless of browser. Even with Chrome.

    • Goronmon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      How thoroughly was this tested? Because you can summarize a lot of these types of timing differences with one word.

      Caching.

      And from my experience people tend to overlook this when running casual tests like this.

      • MüThyme@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        This is 100% anecdotal of course, but I’ve noticed weirdly inconsistent behaviour. I have one tab I permanently keep open for YouTube and that one loads videos really fast. If I open a second tab by following a link from that main tab, then it partly loads the site and sits there for a weirdly long time before any content even appears.

        I’ve got a really fast connection too, and nothing else was having issues. This whole thing is bizarre.