Is Google intentionally hobbling youtube on firefox?

M76

M76

[H]F Junkie
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Jun 12, 2012
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Conspiracy theory or not, I think there is something going on with youtube recently. It's getting worse and worse on firefox. I'm getting all kinds of problems. Pages not loading completely, or videos keep playing in the background after leaving the page (I can still hear the audio until I completely reload). And also the video window turning blank after a few minutes of playback with HTML5 player. The Flash player used to be excellent but recently its performance became so bad that I had to switch to HTML5, but even the video quality is worse now.

Just what the hell is going on? Is google trying to make me switch to chrome by making their page crap on other browsers? Or it's all unintentional and there are a bunch of idiots working at google adding random code to their pages screwing everything up?
 
It's funny you mention this. Because I was going to start a thread similar to yours about Internet Explorer.

I'm having issues with my IE will lock up on websites that use a lot of Google Scripting. (Such as Google Analytics and Google Ad's, etc). But all these websites work just fine in Chrome.

It was getting so bad, that 50% of my websites are no longer loading in IE.. I am typing this on Chrome right now.
 
Same here. Firefox lately has been slow on just about everything. Not even Youtube. I'll watch a twitch stream and it will eventually just hang and I'll have to restart it.
 
I've not noticed any issues at all.

The vast majority of Firefox problems are due to extensions. Start by disabling them and see if the problems go away.
 
M76 said:
Conspiracy theory or not, I think there is something going on with youtube recently. It's getting worse and worse on firefox. I'm getting all kinds of problems. Pages not loading completely, or videos keep playing in the background after leaving the page (I can still hear the audio until I completely reload). And also the video window turning blank after a few minutes of playback with HTML5 player. The Flash player used to be excellent but recently its performance became so bad that I had to switch to HTML5, but even the video quality is worse now.

Just what the hell is going on? Is google trying to make me switch to chrome by making their page crap on other browsers? Or it's all unintentional and there are a bunch of idiots working at google adding random code to their pages screwing everything up?
Click to expand...

It would be absolute madness for them to do that. Every tech company under the sun has large internal meetings at least once a month to talk about how reliable their websites are and how they still need to improve the last 0.000001% because traffic drives revenue.

I'd blame your ISP.
 
Well all I know that youtube is getting worse and worse in usability. Not to mention other google operated sites. They might have good intentions but if something works they just shouldn't fiddle with it.

Google maps? Utter crap the new version is. Less usable, and about 1000% slower.

Forcing me to join goo+ to be able to comment on youtube?

Forcing me to create a personal profile on goo+ to be able to view age restricted videos on youtube?

Those are just examples that jump into my mind quickly, there were definitely more headache for me with google and their bright ideas recently.

And my ISP can't be responsible for the video window turning blank in youtube, or the video going on to play after I navigate away from the page. Those are both bugs in the player software. Also my ISP can't be responsible for the video quality being inferior in the HTML5 player compared to the Flash player. That is the result of the HTML5 player using the crappy webm stream, which is larger and still looks worse than the mp4 stream that the flash player used to use.
 
I noticed this and other issues with new Firefox releases. I went back to v31.0 and everything is golden. Addons might have something to do with some of it.
 
Probably has to do with VP8/VP9 decoding which YouTube uses by default if the browser supports it. Unfortunately, a lot of devices don't have accelerated VP8/VP9 decoding so it maxes out your CPU utilization, kills your battery but still plays crappy. Fortunately there's a work-around and that's to install h264ify add-on for both Firefox and Chrome that forces the browser to use accelerated h264 which is more common. On Chrome YouTube 60 fps plays like crap without it along with dealing with broken Intel VP8/VP9 acceleration in their IGP drivers.
 
M76 said:
Conspiracy theory or not, I think there is something going on with youtube recently. It's getting worse and worse on firefox. I'm getting all kinds of problems. Pages not loading completely, or videos keep playing in the background after leaving the page (I can still hear the audio until I completely reload). And also the video window turning blank after a few minutes of playback with HTML5 player. The Flash player used to be excellent but recently its performance became so bad that I had to switch to HTML5, but even the video quality is worse now?
Click to expand...
Bugzilla is full of recent similar reports of problems with HTML5 video and Flash. It doesn't appear to be limited to Youtube, so either downgrade to a version with fewer problems or change browser.
 
Scoobydo said:
It's funny you mention this. Because I was going to start a thread similar to yours about Internet Explorer.

I'm having issues with my IE will lock up on websites that use a lot of Google Scripting. (Such as Google Analytics and Google Ad's, etc). But all these websites work just fine in Chrome.

It was getting so bad, that 50% of my websites are no longer loading in IE.. I am typing this on Chrome right now.
Click to expand...

I normally don't respond to myself but I thought I might add more info to my post.

I reinstalled my computer, and left it bare bones. The only thing I installed was SonicWall NetExtender because my work requires it to remote in (its a VPN client.) Low and behold, problems started again even with a fresh install. I disabled the SonicWall NetExtender services on my computer and guess what. Everything works again.

Bah. Stupid VPN software. It has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with Dell, Inc. The makers of the software..
 
I feel like Firefox is slowly going the way of Netscape, whose ashes it was born from.
 
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