Big Tech is bad — but not all the time
How drama between YouTube and Chrome isn't everything it's cracked up to be
Earlier this week the internet went into a meltdown. Yes, I’ll go ahead and file that in the “least surprising sentences ever” folder.
Effectively, people discovered Google appears to be making YouTube load slower on browsers that aren’t Chrome.
This TikTok breaks down what people have been experiencing:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
While this story has been widely covered, I wanted to dig into it a bit more. I’m a keen Firefox user and had noticed this annoying delay in accessing YouTube, a site I’m borderline addicted to.
So… is Google penalising people for not using Chrome? What’s cracking?
First off, I spoke with Tomek, the person behind the above TikTok.
“I noticed that a bunch of videos had a long delay in loading the page content, in a way that was unfamiliar to how YouTube pages usually load,” the 27-year-old web developer tells me.
At first, Tomek thought it was a personal issue, until he saw “on the Firefox subreddit that other people were getting the exact same weird loading delay as [him].”
It didn’t take long for Google to comment on the issue and explicitly state the whole affair had nothing to do with specific browsers.
The company gave a quote to 9to5Google that basically said the loading delay is happening because they’re targeting users with ad blockers.
“We’ve launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience,” the Big G says. Doubling down, it states “users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
This is where things get weird though.
You see, I use Firefox, subscribe to YouTube Premium, and don’t run any ad blockers — but guess what? It still happens to me.
The internet, of course, sees this as a conspiracy — but that’s not the whole story.
“I think it's a bug that accidentally got released to an A/B group (hence why some people are affected and others aren't),” Tomek says.
To see if I could shine some more light on what’s going on with Firefox and YouTube, I had a chat with a pal of mine, Andy Hill, a web developer based in Amsterdam.
“There's nothing specific in the function [that’s causing the delay] about Firefox,” he tells me.
“Firefox fires a timeupdate event when an advert plays, as does Chrome, so I don't get how this would just apply to non-Chrome browsers.”
He believes that because Firefox has such “a high level of built in blocking” there’s a chance that this delay is simply a side effect of Google’s attempt to stop ad blockers, rather that something caused by specific design.
“I don't actually think that this is intentionally targeting Firefox/non-Chrome users,” Hill says. “It looks to me first and foremost like as reasonable way of detecting if a video advert has actually played or not.”
This, to me, is the crux of the issue.
There’s definitely something fuck-y going on with the way that YouTube is acting, but is it a grand conspiracy?
I somehow doubt it.
Not only is there insufficient evidence, but if Google did try and take this (illegal) risk it’d surely be slightly cleverer about it.
Consider this: if Google’s overall masterplan is to get people using Chrome, will that happen by making YouTube a bit slower on other browsers? Would that be the seismic event that’d cause us all to switch?
Un-fucking-likely.
Saying that, I can see why people are inclined to believe the worst about companies like Google.
We’re now trained to see Big Tech as intrinsically bad (I know I’m as guilty of this as anyone), meaning we search for the worst outcome in any situation. When a bug or an issue that occurs through incompetence comes up, our natural reaction is to point fingers and declare the business as heretical.
As satisfying as this is, it’s not helpful.
If everything a company does is evil, then doing something actually evil loses its ability to shock. It was the Trump tactic: if you’re constantly involved in scandals it’s tough for any one of them to stand out. A wood-for-the-trees sorta situation.
We have to call out companies when they act in an awful way, but we also need to understand, sometimes, people make mistakes and fuck shit up. And somewhere in Google, some people have fucked shit up.
The YouTube issue on Firefox is most likely a silly bug. Nothing more.
Pretending it’s otherwise? Well that makes it harder to call out Big Tech for all the heinous things it does on purpose.
Totally understand what you are saying here, but I am so tired of these companies insisting that the ads are what level the playing field and act as a democratizing force for their content creators. It's such bull, because it's so obvious (as you wrote on "enshitification" that the creators are also at the mercy of these corporations and that the majority of the revenue just goes into their pockets.