Comment by WD-42
8 hours ago
Glad to hear it’s faster now!
YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!
8 hours ago
Glad to hear it’s faster now!
YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!
I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these problems.
Airplay from youtube is broken for me. I airplay and instead of english, I get german and no way to change the language. This is not an isolated incident.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1id4amh/youtube_ch... and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255931836
It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable
They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".
Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
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I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari), and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video plays.
I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.
Interesting. I use Firefox and it works flawlessly for me. I wonder if it's a computing power thing?
YT works pretty flawlessly for me with firefox on debian. What's the issue you're seeing?
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I'm using Firefox.
I use Firefox with uBlock and besides a couple of times where video start was delayed by a few seconds it has been working as well as before.
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Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?
It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.
Well... I have many new, emerging problems with YouTube as of lately.
For example I have to scroll down a lot to get to the comment section, the suggestions are all over the place, and so forth. Annoying.
Also due to uBlock Origin, some videos do not start and I have to refresh. It is not much of an issue for me but the fact that apparently I need a huge monitor to see the "old layout" is a problem for me.
Are you using Chrome or a Chromium browser? From experience and reports I’ve seen, that seems to make a huge difference.
Firefox
Only if you use Googles Chrome Browser. Other browsers have issues like Firefox[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41379517
I can no longer watch videos on YouTube with Firefox.
When Firefox dies, the last glimmer of hope will go out.
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Since some days I suddenly get freezes in the tab; these unfreeze after some time, say 20 seconds or so, but I notice a delay.
Something has really changed to the worse lately. I think it has to do with anti-ad programs as well as AI, like the UI also changed. It is important to point out that while you do not have any issues, other people do or may.
I've been seeing weird stuff where the video will play but the page is unresponsive: can't click to pause, can't click the time index bar to move to a different point in the video, etc. Then I close the tab, and the audio keeps playing! It will play for 10-15 seconds before cutting out. Bizarre. . .
I had that happen some week ago too! I had to clear site data + cookies for YouTube in Firefox before I got it to work again.
do you never encounter opening youtube video in a new tab only for video itself to load, while rest of the page doesn't?
I experience this, but only with YouTube Shorts. Video loads, but none of the elements around it.
That's never happened for me and I normally watch 5-10+ YouTube videos daily. Firefox.
That sounds pretty nice. Is there a way to do it on purpose?
I've never seen that. I use Firefox.
Are you running any extensions that modify content?
That happens to me about 50% of the time. I assume it's google engineers not testing on Firefox.
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Yes happens sometimes to me, Vivaldi.
This has happened to me frequently.
Also many times, the video won't play. If I reload the page, then it will play.
I have, and recently, i nothing is loading until i open a new video in another tab, then all of a sudden both pages start loading and playing :s
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Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.
I do too use Firefox on Linux, 4K videos seems to work fine for me, but I've never been able to download higher than 1080p with yt-dlp, seems it's just not available without DRM as far as I can tell, so now I'm curious how exactly you've been downloading that?
yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words, instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]`
The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
I'm n=1 using chromium but the only problem I have is the video losing focus when maximizing, meaning l/r/space don't work for video controls anymore, happened about when the liquid glass styled interface did
I use YouTube daily in safari and edge, this is complete hyperbole.
As a counter-anecdote, I use YouTube daily in Safari and it will not infrequently hang for tens of seconds when trying to load a video, occasionally play the sound without the video, reasonably frequently put the video over most of the page with no way to get to the controls, etc.
(This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers, etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which may have me on a naughty list.)
I have the same issue. I think it's because I'm adblocking because if I try in chrome with no adblocker it loads the ads instantly.
But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
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Youtube is pretty unusable, as they throttle videos, and links sometimes dont work. It has gone downhill fast in recent years.
I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube music).
Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.
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They limit the buffer to around 30secs or so like all other streaming services but otherwise 95%+ of the time it just plays smoothing with no buffering at all from start to end. YouTube is generally in the top 3 of the video streaming services I use. Even on 4G wireless (which I occassionally use) it works well enough which is impressive as other video steaming services struggle (with the sole exception of Netflix which is probably the only one better than YouTube).
No issues here for me with uBO, logged in or not, no premium
No idea what you are talking about. I don’t have premium and use in both logged in and logged out.
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That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. There are more browser engines out there than the ones you use, some in direct competition with Google themselves, maybe people using those engines are experiencing issues? Jumping to calling out "hyperbole!" sounds like hyperbole itself, since you don't actually have broad experience enough to say if that's true or not.
FWIW, when I use Chromium (logged out/in) on Linux, everything works fine. If I use Firefox (logged in), it works worse. If I change the user-agent to Chromium in Firefox, I get faster buffering than when I use the default user-agent. Make of that what you will.
> That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem.
No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.
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I run it in firefox. Today a video kept freezing when I scrolled down to load the comments. Sometimes I bizarrely have to scroll super far down to get past recommended videos to see the comments, which sometimes crashes the tab.
On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
I freely admit to holding google software to a higher standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from startups, however I also believe google has the talent, time, and money to where their software should basically be the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route you change" thing...
> YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days
Agreed. Shorts about half the time don't display comments, the back button breaks in mysterious ways. And I use Chrome on both Intel and M macOS machines, so the best in class there is, but my Windows Chrome doesn't fare much better. And Adblock ain't at fault, I pay for premium.
And that's just the technical side. The content side is even worse, comments sections are overrun by bots, not to mention the countless AI slop and content thieves, and for fucks sake I get that high class youtubers have a lot of effort to do to make videos, but why youtube doesn't step in and put clear regulations on sponsorship blocks is beyond me. Betterhelp, AG1, airup, NordVPN (and VPNs in general) should be outright banned.
And the ads, for those who aren't paying for premium, are also just fucked up. Fake game ads (Kingshot who stole sound effects from the original indie Thronefall ...) galore.
Google makes money here, they could go and actually hire a few people to vet ads and police the large youtubers with their sponsors.
I use an extension that turns shorts back into regular videos, and another one that undoes the auto-dubbing when watching videos in a (different) language that I understand.
With that, uBO and Sponsorblock, I never see any ads and have a great YT experience. (I don't have premium either)
I use YouTube in a browser (Brave) almost everyday. Works great for me.
Also on Brave and uBlock Origin. Mostly works great but every video now has a 3-4 second pause before starting. Pretty sure it's an anti-ad-blocker measure. Because I'm not watching their ads, I have no room to complain, just throwing out the data point that it's not a flawless experience anymore.
you don't get the "are you still watching" popups? sometimes it buffers hard for me. They also removed dislikes and constantly push shitty clickbai AI thumbnails. They're also adding shitty ai translation, so if you like learning languages you're SOL. They also changed thier rec algo to be more "right wing\tech bro" leaning