Stop Google From Artificially Slowing Down YouTube – Lifehacker

Credit: Sharaf Maksumov/Shutterstock It seems 2023 is the year Google has decided to make you use YouTube the way it wants you to use YouTube. First, the company began getting aggressive with viewers visiting YouTube with ad blockers. Users start by seeing a pop-up warning them not to use ad blockers on YouTube, but are able to close it and continue on. Soon after, the pop-up doesn’t close, at least not until YouTube detects the user disables their ad blocker.Not everyone is experiencing this anti-ad blocker strategy yet, but that doesn’t mean Google is sparing them, either. Now, the company appears to be slowing down YouTube speeds on non-Chrome browsers such as Firefox and Edge.How the YouTube slowdown worksFirefox who first noticed the “artificial slowdown,” reporting that loading a YouTube video takes a solid five seconds in Mozilla’s browser, while loading instantaneously in Google’s. You can see the effect in action in this Reddit post: A Firefox user clicks a Linus Tech Tips video to watch, then stares at a blank screen for five seconds until the video page finally loads into view.Even from this preview video, it’s evident that this isn’t your average slow network connection issue. Within this
Read More