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YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users
(www.androidauthority.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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They don't need to put incriminating "if Firefox" statements in their code -- the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.
Easy enough to test though. Load the page with a UA changer and see if it still shows up when Firefox pretends to be Chrome
The video in the linked article does just that. The page takes 5 seconds to load the video, the user changes the UA, they refresh the page and suddenly the video loads instantly. I would have liked to see them change the UA back to Firefox to prove it's not some weird caching issue though
Yeah, and also Edge or an older version of Chrome etc just to be sure.
I guess his question is "is that happening?"
I don't know, nor am I speculating. The person I was replying to said they didn't see a browser check in the code, which isn't enough to dismiss it.