The digital world is full of rivalries and the browser battlefield is no exception. Reports have emerged recently that suggest this is the case YouTube may be intentionally slowing down Firefox, causing the video platform to load slower than usual.
This is nothing new. Similar reports and accusations of this nature crop up from time to time as browser companies constantly compete to outdo each other to gain market share or increase their user base.
The latest incident appears to be happening at this very moment, as pointed out by several user reports YouTube intentionally loads slower in Firefox.
If your internet connection is fine, at first glance it might seem like the problem is related to Firefox’s performance and hardware optimization.
However, users found that the problem a 5 second delay when loading a YouTube video in the Firefox browser, disappears when YouTube is tricked into thinking it’s running in Google Chrome using a user agent changer.
YouTube has started artificially slowing video load times when you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically fixes this problem.
byu/vk6_ inyoutube
A user on Reddit, paintboth1234, suspects the problem lies in the code:
To further clarify, it is simply this code in your polymer script:
setTimeout(function() {
C();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);which does nothing other than make you wait 5 seconds (5E3 = 5000 ms = 5 seconds). You can easily search for it
Apparently the problem doesn’t occur when using uBlock Origin. So if you are annoyed by YouTube taking 5 seconds to load in Firefox, you can always turn to uBlock Origin.