<story><title>YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 for 2 weeks</title><url>https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c25</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimrandomh</author><text>Browsers identify themselves with a user-agent string, and the user agent strings are a giant disaster of technical debt resulting from a long history of browsers working around buggy websites and websites working around buggy browsers. Browser video is &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; a giant disaster of technical debt, and YouTube uses the user-agent string to determine which ways of serving video will work and which ones won&amp;#x27;t. Presence of bugs here is no surprise, and any such bugs will naturally impact some browsers but not others.&lt;p&gt;So, a bug in YouTube&amp;#x27;s compatibility-autodetection caused it to fall back to a slower, bitrate-limited fallback method that it didn&amp;#x27;t need to, for some versions of Firefox. They took two weeks to deploy the fix. Considering those two weeks included Christmas and the bug didn&amp;#x27;t affect security or render the site unavailable, this seems like a pretty good response time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josteink</author><text>&amp;gt; So, a bug in YouTube&amp;#x27;s compatibility-autodetection caused it to fall back to a slower, bitrate-limited fallback method that it didn&amp;#x27;t need to, for some versions of Firefox. They took two weeks to deploy the fix. Considering those two weeks included Christmas and the bug didn&amp;#x27;t affect security or render the site unavailable, this seems like a pretty good response time.&lt;p&gt;Do you think it would take 2 weeks or less than a hour if the browser affected was Google Chrome?&lt;p&gt;Google has systematically made Firefox an inferior option when using Youtube, pushing people to install Chrome instead because &amp;quot;Firefox doesn&amp;#x27;t work&amp;quot;. At some point you almost start thinking they&amp;#x27;re doing it intentionally and maliciously to push their own (closed, DRMed) browser.</text></comment>
<story><title>YouTube change served lower-quality video to Firefox 43 for 2 weeks</title><url>https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970#c25</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimrandomh</author><text>Browsers identify themselves with a user-agent string, and the user agent strings are a giant disaster of technical debt resulting from a long history of browsers working around buggy websites and websites working around buggy browsers. Browser video is &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; a giant disaster of technical debt, and YouTube uses the user-agent string to determine which ways of serving video will work and which ones won&amp;#x27;t. Presence of bugs here is no surprise, and any such bugs will naturally impact some browsers but not others.&lt;p&gt;So, a bug in YouTube&amp;#x27;s compatibility-autodetection caused it to fall back to a slower, bitrate-limited fallback method that it didn&amp;#x27;t need to, for some versions of Firefox. They took two weeks to deploy the fix. Considering those two weeks included Christmas and the bug didn&amp;#x27;t affect security or render the site unavailable, this seems like a pretty good response time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akerro</author><text>&amp;gt;a bug in YouTube&amp;#x27;s compatibility-autodetection caused it to fall back to a slower&lt;p&gt;I double it&amp;#x27;s a bug, it&amp;#x27;s not the first time it happened, when YT introduced full HTML5 mode, there was a bug that for firefox, and only for firefox youtube was serving video with incompatible codec, the same as for Chrome, but Ff didn&amp;#x27;t have that codec implemented yet, so video didn&amp;#x27;t work. Opera was served video same as before, I noticed on reddit and other forums people were complaining on Firefox, that it stopped working on youtube. People started posting &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m moving to chrome because it works&amp;quot;. I think it&amp;#x27;s a plan to annoy firefox users by serving them not compatible videos so people move to Chrome. Google IS internet.</text></comment>