 You know, when the EU and other regulatory agencies started their campaign of bullying big tech into submission, I never would have thought that Google was gonna be the company to fight back against these regulations the hardest. So it's recently come to my attention that YouTube has been testing this new feature on the platform where if you visit youtube.com and you just so happen to be using the Firefox browser, you may experience an additional five second delay before your video actually starts playing. Now, I wanna point out before we go any further into this that this is an experimental feature that only a few users have reported seeing for themselves so far, so you might not be able to reproduce it yourself in the Firefox browser. However, I do have a video of this phenomenon that we're gonna take a look at that was recorded by vk6 underscore who first posted the video to the R slash YouTube subreddit, which the mods immediately removed for some reason. Yeah, this totally is not suspicious activity at all. And we're also going to take a look at the actual piece of JavaScript code that's hidden in the massive code base of YouTube's Polymer script, which is actually responsible for this delay in our favorite foxy browser. And I'm also going to teach you some ways to mitigate this delay. So as you can see in vk's video here, they're using the Firefox browser with a number of add-ons that YouTube probably doesn't like mainly this one here, you block origin. Now, it's kind of weird because if we start playing this video, you can see that the test video here actually does play for about one second before it seems like his browser freezes or might make the user think that there's a network issue. But you can clearly see that the video actually did buffer, right? Like when he loaded up this page and kind of paused the loading of the page or whatever, the video was buffering in the background. So it is definitely not a network issue. And you can also tell that the delay doesn't actually kick in until after the JavaScript responsible or loading the video has actually executed. So obviously we get this pause for five seconds and then it plays again. And to make matters worse, I noticed when I was watching this video before I started recording that the buffering in the video gets reset. Like it's basically refreshing the page and appears to be refreshing the video and all of that. And this is an absolutely disgusting thing to do to people that have slow internet connections who might have to let videos buffer for a little while before they're actually able to watch them in HD in the first place. So then we go on to where VK spoofs his user agent just for YouTube.com and he's changing it to Windows Chromium. I don't think Windows necessarily matters. But anyway, he's changing it to Chrome, right? Chromium, Google Chrome, whatever. And boom, you see that the YouTube video loads and he gets two seconds in and everything like that. No problems at all. Now let's take a look at the actual JavaScript code that's responsible for this delay because that's the smoking gun for evidence as far as anything's concerned. So of course YouTube minifies their JavaScript code but after running it through a de-obfuscator, we can start to get a better look at what's going on here. So in this function labeled SMB, we have some code that appears to handle the loading of the video, which I think kinda checks out with VK's video that we just watched where you saw how the YouTube video actually did load. It even played for one second, but then another function gets triggered that reloads the page and makes you wait five seconds. And that is down here in this set timeout function where it's running for five E3. So typically delays and things like that, like timeouts are measured in milliseconds. So this is really five times 10 to the third power milliseconds or 5,000 milliseconds or five seconds. And obviously there's more code throughout that makes this function only run on Firefox or probably just run on any non-Google Chrome browser but I digress. So now that we've looked at the evidence for this, let's discuss why Google is actually doing this or at least why I think Google is doing this. So most people probably know at this point that Google owns YouTube. And of course Google is also responsible for Google Chrome. But what some people don't realize is Google Chrome is powered by the Chromium browser engine. In fact, most of the popular browsers these days like Microsoft Edge and Brave, they're also powered by that same web engine. It's kinda like how you've got different brands of trucks like Chevy's and Ram's, but under the hood they could both have the same Cummins engine. Because of this, it can be said that Google probably has quite a bit more control over how most of the world browsers the web than anybody else, right? Because they control the web engine, which to some extent means that they control these browsers. And one of the big changes that's coming to this web engine and to other browsers is gonna be the removal of Manifest V2, which is supposed to kill the functionality of most ad blockers. And of course, blocking ad blockers on YouTube has become one of Google's primary objectives as we've seen. But they really can't do anything about Manifest V2 and things like that on non-chromium browsers like Firefox, because they're using a totally different web engine. They're a lot more independent of Google. And so, the cat and mouse game of YouTube blocking add-ons like Ublock Origin and then the Ublock devs finding a way around that block could go on forever within Firefox, Safari and other non-chromium browsers. And all the while, Firefox and other non-chromium browsers could start gaining more market share as people start using them instead of Google Chrome because they're not allowed to have their favorite ad blocker. So what does Google do? They go, yeah, just make Firefox load our famous media site a little bit slower because Google knows that most people aren't gonna look into the JavaScript. They know most people don't watch my videos or read these tech articles. They're just gonna think that Firefox is arbitrarily slower for some reason and they'll happily jump back into the Chromium Gulag to save five seconds every time they go to YouTube. But to be honest with you guys, I really think that this move is a huge mistake on Google's end. I mean, I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure that this is a gross violation of the EU's Digital Markets Act, or Digital Marketplace Act. It's probably even in violation of some of the laws here in Burgerland and considering that the two most valuable companies by market cap in the world, which is Apple and Microsoft, both bent their knee to the EU's DMA and they made their products less shit so that they would comply. Like they walked away, Microsoft, they're walking away from ad revenue. Apple, they're walking away from potentially some revenue through the App Store because developers, at least for their clients in Europe, they're not gonna be forced to ship those apps through the App Store. They're gonna be able, their clients are gonna be able to side load it if they want. So that tells me that despite these being the two most profitable companies to ever exist, despite their $2 trillion plus market caps, Apple and Microsoft do not want to take on the EU in a legal battle or be banned from the European market. So we're gonna see how this plays out. I mean, Google clearly wants to keep being evil, but at this point, they're pretty much begging to get themselves regulated, like heavily regulated or possibly even broken up into some smaller companies. But in the meantime, instead of sitting around with your thumb up your butt, waiting for the government to fix your problem while YouTube delays to load, you could be using a user agent spoofer like VK6 did. This is actually the same one that he was using, user agent switcher. I actually don't even think that this particular one is available on Chrome just on Firefox. But yeah, this is probably the easiest method to circumvent the delay. And you can also create a custom filter for UBlock Origin with this string right here that should also be able to bypass the delay without you having to go and install another additional add-on. So I hope that this video was helpful to you. 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