i never experienced that delay in the first place...

Cruelty, is Thy name.

Oh wow, I just opened lemmy because a YouTube video was taking extra time to open in Firefox lol.

I haven't noticed this in the browser, but I've definitely noticed it using the YouTube app on Roku. No Firefox or ad blocker there.

I'll just blame it on my ISP being shit

This delay has happened on Brave browser too, it's not FF specific. But it's pathetic either way.

I mean, if they really wanted to show you ads, they could just switch the returned stream when the video player calls for certain chunk, then when that ad is done playing, switch back to the original stream. The user experience would be basically like watching TV.

I don't know if it makes a difference, but I'm in Canada and I've noticed none of this. No video load delays, no anti ad-blocker pop ups, none of it. I'm not going to stop using Firefox or Ublock Origin though.

I've never seen this fake load thing and I always use Firefox

It's punishing me and I'm using their app. Their video loading has been spotty as shit lately. And I know it's not my bandwidth, I've got 5Gbps available and 12ms latency to YouTube's closest data center.

I'm not even blocking the ads when I use it.

I will never again use Chrome again (well maybe except YouTube if stops working in non-chromium-based browsers), we need to get Web back into our hands! It is sad that it took me too many years to realize that, I hope others will follow.

Strange then how my Vivaldi browser doesn't have the load time, then. Almost like it's a punishment for non-chromium users.