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Comment on YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users

When you browse to a website, your browser passes info about itself to the server hosting that site. This info is intended to help the server provide the best rendering code for your browser. This is called your User Agent.

However, Google is using it here to identify Firefox users, and is apparently choosing to lump them all in a box called "adblock users" instead of trying to identify an ad blocker more accurately.

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Serinus@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If you do change your user agent, I would use an extension that does it only on YouTube domains.

We want independent metrics to show rising Firefox use, not falling.

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- casmael@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah cool I’ll have a look. Any extensions spring to mind?
  
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Norgur@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
That's because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU.

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otter@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
To add on

You can spoof this user agent to see if a website does something shady depending on which browser you’re using.

So if you keep all other variables the same, and just toggle the user agent value, YouTube behaves differently

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- Kodemystic@lemmy.kodemystic.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  How can we do that?
  
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  - otter@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I haven’t tried it in a while, but I think there are browser extensions for it. Might need to ask someone else for how to do it these days
    
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