Comment by frankjr
2 years ago
I have a hard time believing that's actually what's happening. If they wanted to slow down other browsers, why would they choose this easily discoverable way? They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect. It seems more likely this is just a debug snippet that has made it into production by accident.
If I was working at Google and I was tasked with doing that, I'd half ass it too
I mean it could be that the programmer wanted it to be discovered to draw attention to Google managers' shenanigans but that seems kind of far fetched.
ah yes, the fact that they are sabotaging other browsers in a very obvious way is actually proof that they didn't meant to sabotage other browsers!
> They could have easily slowed down serving of JS files (and other assets) based on the user agent to a similar effect.
And that is /not/ easily discoverable??
I would argue it's a bit harder to find if the youtube backend serves files slower for certain browsers. One could even radomize it and sometimes still serve it fast or something. Since you cannot look at the backend code it would be hard to proof anything.