So Alphabet:
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is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
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has the most used video platform online, with no close second (unless you count porn, but i’d still argue its not close)
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has the biggest share of devices relying on its platform worldwide (android)
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has the most used search engine worldwide.
Alphabet has to be split up. Alphabet alone is deciding what shape internet will take in the future.
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
Which was branched from Apple’s open Webkit base, but let’s all also forget about that.
They take the IP of others, spin it a bit and then block everyone. Burn them down.
Acting like Apple didn’t do the same thing with khtml to make WebKit.
The inevitable fate of any useful software that’s not GPL.
When will people learn???
Edit: Ironically, KHTML was originally LGPL. So modifications to KHTML were required to be open source by the license, but Chrome itself isn’t required to be open source (at least as far as I understand it, I am not an expert here). Nevertheless, if it were stronger GPL, then it probably wouldn’t have been impossible to write features like DRM in chrome. So I would have been a bit of an idiot to say that KHTML isn’t GPL (because LGPL is a weaker version of GPL), but in effect, the outcome is the same - all because of that big fat L at the beginning.
They didn’t do anything of the sort. We don’t need to endlessly recite the history of everything developed. If you want to call attention to it go right ahead but they didn’t give Apple a pass.
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They totally do though. You can ONLY use webkit on any iOS device. Chrome, Firefox, etc. they all are forced to use webkit on iOS. Neither Google or Apple are treating the web nicely, but at least you have a choice to use a different browser. Apple makes that effectively impossible.
Also you can’t really use Apple TV properly without an Apple device. Same with iCloud. Actually really any service they make only works properly with their full stack.
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I want Firefox (with its engine, not webkit) on my phone. With Apple that’s not possible
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All of those are meaningless peanuts versus
- Owns the biggest (borderline only) web ad service in the world
My long bet: The EU will force Google Search + Ads, to separate from Youtube within a decade.
God bless the EU. Actually protecting its consumers
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It’s fucking incredible watching Google change from a fairly well-liked company into essentially fucking Comcast. Fucking incredible.
Unchecked capitalism is a real motherfucker ain’t it?
Change from? I doubt they will stop being a fairly well hliked company in my lifetime
Well I’ve gone from being entirely indifferent to strongly disliking Google. I am actively and somewhat successfully in the process of de-googling. I encourage my friends to do the same, with some success. I think the writing is on the wall. Google seems to have no desire to maintain any sort of goodwill or positive feeling amongst the general public, whom it clearly views as a naturally occurring resource rather than a customer base. Nobody can predict the future but I don’t have a good feeling about the future of the company. Perhaps they will be able to diversify, but their recent actions show both that they deeply misunderstand their product and also that they lack good ideas about how to progress and evolve as an organisation. Fuck Google. All my homies hate Google.
Again? I remember they did this years ago when releasing Chrome.
Incidentally, I dropped Youtube’s web app like a rock when they started messing with adblockers and today they emailed me to say they’re cutting down features in my account because “I don’t have enough of a history”.
I swear, these decaying tech firms just don’t get the value of not appearing to be flailing in desperation.
hey’re cutting down features in my account because “I don’t have enough of a history”.
any idea what this actually means?
What features are they cutting down?
Is this a free account?
I had the same email, it’s creator-related features. So if you don’t produce content it shouldn’t affect anything
I received the same notification on my artist account. I can’t remember everything, but it was something like daily upload limits for videos and shorts and other creator related stuff. I don’t think there’s anything related to just basic usage features.
They take away the ability to include links in video descriptions. That’s still not related to watching videos, but it seems like a legit eff you to small content creators.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. That’s definitely a big issue. I think you can’t also pin comments.
they turn off video recommendations if your watch history isn’t on
This is a plus for me. I don’t want them to recommend me anything. I don’t trust them not to recommend me stuff that’s going to piss me off.
Their recommendations engine seems to stuck on “50 more of exactly the last thing you watched, plus a dash of right-wing conspiracy nonsense.”
Once I made the mistake of looking up how to change the oil on my Kawasaki Vulcan without being in incognito. Now half of my recommendations are how to perform maintenance on motorcycles that I’ll never own. And ads for Harley Davidson. A company whose business model is converting gasoline into noise.
I just use youtube-dl now and have it go to my NAS. It’s not easier then going to the website, per se. But now the video lives on my storage and it won’t go away after a corporation’s billionth DMCA claim that hour.
Genuinely wish I had done this a decade ago on my favorite articles. Link rot is getting worse and worse and YouTube is the absolute worst.
Turns out when you stop using it the recommendations become more and more unhinged and take on a slight pleading tone.
It’s weird and kinda satisfying to watch, honestly.
For me it’s "oh? You really like this creator? Be careful not to binge their backlog all at once! I think you’ve had enough. Let me hide the rest of their content for you so you’re not tempted
Hey, how about this news show where the guys stand instead of sitting, and wear normal clothes? They still awkwardly read off a teleprompter and have a very shallow understanding of the topics, but come on, you should watch them again. I know their shrill, forced, voices make you cringe and exit the video as fast as you can, but let me put that up next on auto play for you again
All I have left to say about Google and Youtube in particular is that Youtubes ads have become so problematic, both in amount and quality (like seriously, people get banned for using innocuous words in videos targeted at adult audiences, yet completely fucked up ads are squarely targeted at children) and at this point, it’s time for YouTube to die.
A new platform needs to come along.
Which will be hard since Google has such a stranglehold on the datacenter and backbone level that they have an absolute advantage when it comes to bandwidth and storage costs. Which is the main cost for video platforms like YouTube.
The only thing stopping a viable replacement for YouTube is the servers, google essentially has an infinite amount of server space, you would have to match them on that, decentralization would help bare the load, but there will become a time when even those servers will need to dramatically expand their server count.
I think with everything that’s going on, self hosting will become kind of like a smartphone, everyone has a server. Then the creators host files, and you transcode them on your hardware
Not gonna happen
It it legal? I remember when China’s tech giants started infighting and the party ended up dividing them and phorbiding them to do so.
They where creating tech exclusive for their devices and internally block all other out.
I just figured if we aren’t doing it here there should be a reason. (Apple appart)
Edit:guys what I’m saying matters the orthographic mistakes can be easily attribute to my lack of interest in writing the proper queen’s English when any shit will do
I’m sorry to be the spelling guy but it’s “forbid” not “phorbid”
Do you have poor spelling fobia?
I’m sorry to be the spelling guy but it’s “phobia” not “fobia”
Woosh goes the joke over your head. ✈️
I think they got it and didn’t give a phuck.
I’m sorry to be the spelling guy but it’s “Whoosh” knot “Woosh”
Na, I understood the joke just fine. If you were here when I replied my joke to the joke, you would know that the post I replied to had negative votes until I made my joke. Then everyone else realized that they were making a joke and started giving them upvotes. Have a good day.
Keep phighting the good phight ✊
iwouldfightforyou.jpg
Hahaha ce la vi
If it’s happening it’s not doing so for everyone. I use Firefox and I have never seen this delay.
I haven’t experienced it either, but Google also typically rolls out changes in waves. They rarely just push to prod and call it a day. They push changes in waves, so they can pull the update or make adjustments if the early waves have issues.
They do it so we gaslight the people that have it and then it’s too late to do anything when everyone has it lol
Same.
The anti-adblock warnings only lasted a few days for me too, not seen them for a couple of weeks now.
I’d seen it in my Firefox/Win10 + uBlockO setup. I just used yt-dlp and then a uBlock “quick fixes” update sorted it.
Really? I switched from Edge to Firefox recently and YouTube slowed to the point it takes minutes to load the home page and several refreshes. Actually, most Google pages, but YouTube is the one I really use these days.
The videos themselves load fine, and of course every other website loads fine at the same time, but YouTube is nearly unusable if you can’t even get to the video in the first place.
I suspect this is less of a slowdown and more of a “we’re trying to detect adblockers and in Chrome we can do most of this check on the application level which is fast, while on Firefox we have to do it the extra slow way and we CBA to optimize any of it because the delay is to our advantage.”
Nope, in the article it shows a hard coded 5 second delay.
It’s a standard timeout function without any context. Most likely thing is that it tries to load an ad and if that doesn’t work in these 5 seconds, then the anti adblock popup is displayed. If you don’t use an adblock, the site loads instantly cause the ad is detected. If you use ublock, you see neither the ad nor the popup, so everything that’s left is a 5 seconds timeout.
While it definitely is shady coding, it’s an anti adblock “feature” caused by incompetent design and not an anti Firefox thing.
Not quite in practice. I can’t say what they are doing, but I can say, there are 3 main web addresses that must be enabled in a whitelist firewall to view YT. If these are white listed, videos will load and play but half the time the connection is terrible. However, I never see a warning message about an ad blocker. They know the difference somehow. I don’t need to run an ad blocker because I run the ultimate undesired web connection blocker. They simply manipulate my connection and it impacts things on my network even when I am no longer connected to the internet at the router by removing the wired connection. (hard booting my server/router/devices solves the problem)
It might be an anti Adblock feature caused by incompetent design, and it might be an anti Firefox thing. Or it might be something else altogether or some mixed version of the above. You don’t know, neither does anyone else.
Exactly, no one knows, but here we are on the 7th article saying Google is slowing down Firefox on purpose. That’s the least likely option by far. That would get them into multiple anti consumer and anti monopoly lawsuits while probably breaching their contract with FF at the same time. Alphabets board of advisors isn’t run by Elon musk, they know pretty much what they can get away with and wouldn’t be stupid enough to try something this big while they are already beeing monitored by the EU.
The articles clearly say that the cause is unclear and that it’s an ongoing controversy. If you had read the one for this thread you’d see that. They were very transparent about that.
You are the one here saying it’s definitely one way and not another.
it’s an anti adblock “feature” caused by incompetent design and not an anti Firefox thing.
If thats the case then they still are not able to do it even with the delay cuz they havent blocked me yet
I’m honestly not willing to give them that much benefit of the doubt at this stage. But I also acknowledge we don’t have concrete evidence of deliberate sabotage.
Someone should investigate deeply. My combo of a whitelist firewall on an OpenWRT variant and Graphene often has a bandwidth issue that is clearly software related only after watching something from YT. I can stop the apps manually and close everything related to browsing and the connection issue still exists. I can disconnect the internet from my router and the problem still persists. However, if I shutdown all 3 devices for a few minutes and bring them up fresh, the network connection is flawless. Something is running in memory, and I believe it is related to YT, but I lack the skills to break it down further. I like to run an AI server and it is simply useless if anything on the network has connected to YT since booting.
I’ve also noticed when family is watching YT premium (not something I use) and I am downloading a LLM from HF, the internet bandwidth of our network more than doubles on my wired connection. In between the streaming packets from YT the speed on the download jumps massively. If family is watching YT, I can actually download a LLM faster. That just seems odd to me that those are connected.
Maybe your ISP has some sort of agreement with yt?
Does that seem legitimate to you? There are many more implications below the surface with this. Yes, YT has little black boxes that cache content locally with ISPs that also means they are likely filtering all data. I don’t like that part, but I can live with it.
The idea that something is running on my device that seems to be hidden, but where I can stop the behavior by flushing the memory; that is extremely alarming. If I understand it correctly they have direct memory access for streaming video through h.264. Whatever they are doing is causing me to drop connections and impacting my WiFi signal stability even when offline doing tasks unrelated to YT. As soon as I reboot the problem is gone. I distrust them so much now that I do a hard reboot any time I watch YT. (It improves battery life as well.) This is criminal behavior if my speculative analysis is correct and they are running stuff like this in the background. I’m running a combo where I control every aspect of my network. This should not be happening in my circumstance.
TBF I’ve seen a rare behavior in FF that makes some websites load slowly for no good reason (not an adblock thing). Anticompetitive either way but Google could be exploiting this bug.
I think you give them too much credit. From what I’ve seen, it’s just a setTimeout call for 5 seconds if you’re on Firefox, which is similar to what all those shady cookie popups from TrustArc do if you click “Reject all”.
This happens all the time to me on Android. Sites, especially Google searches, sometimes take 30 seconds to 2 minutes to load. It’s frustrating when I’m in a rush.
The worst part is that a Youtube Premium Subscription costs more than Netflix or other streaming providers here in Australia… And you’re basically paying for ad removal of a metric ton of low quality content (and their music service, which isn’t as good as others I found)
That being said, this might not be true (I’ve seen lots of BS online regarding browsers in the past)
And it doesn’t remove promotions by the content creators, so you’re still seeing lots of ads. Still, since my kids spend so much time on YouTube I think it’s worth reducing the amount of brain washing, but I’m definitely not happy about the pricing. It’s ridiculous when you compare it to other streaming services who also have to produce or license their content.
How about seeing YouTube adverts to then watch a video that’s entirely an advertisement for the company that’s sponsoring the YouTuber.
when the email came through for the price hike, I told my wife we should drop the family plan and use more advanced adblocking and invidous etc - apparently my demo didn’t pass the wife and children test… so guess who’s continuing to pay for YT Premium?
Can you ditch the wife and kids?
J/K
That’s actually my suggestion. Clearly the wife is nuts
I post videos a few times a year to share events with family. I just posted a few yesterday. I can’t in good faith continue to post to YT and encourage my family to use it as the platform declares war on their users.
But what else is there that allows me to post videos for free and my family can just watch them without having to install a new app, register for yet another service or configure some obscure plug in?
There’s other services, but they’re populated largely by the sort of people Youtube has kicked off entirely, which some people don’t like.
You could post the video to Dropbox or something? They might have to download the full video before playback, but i wouldn’t be surprised if some file sharing services are smart enough to stream video.
Odysee fits the bill but be warned there are some conspiracy theorists nuts and nerds on there.
Been like this for a long time now. Both YT and YT Music are unusable on desktop due to the lag.
Eh, works fine for me. I don’t watch a ton of YouTube, but I haven’t noticed any real issues, and I use an ad blocker.
Decided to test it out myself on Firefox and Edge. Didn’t get the delay, but did get ads both times because I don’t have adblockers set up over there. The second was unskippable. Ugh.
I tested it in Firefox InPrivate, Edge, Brave, and Chrome and all are identical for me. I think they just fucked up YouTube. 😂
Could also just be a rolling release.
