How to Stop Google From Artificially Slowing Down YouTube
It seems 2023 is the year Google decided to force you to use YouTube the way it wants.
First, the company began to aggressively target viewers visiting YouTube with ad blockers . Users start out by seeing a pop-up warning them not to use ad blockers on YouTube, but can then close it and continue. Shortly after this, the pop-up window does not close, at least until YouTube detects that the user has disabled the ad blocker.
Not everyone is using this ad blocking strategy yet, but that doesn’t mean Google is going easy on them. Now the company appears to be slowing down YouTube speeds in non-Chrome browsers like Firefox and Edge.
How YouTube slowdown works
Firefox, which first noticed the “artificial slowdown,” reported that loading a YouTube video took as much as five seconds in Mozilla’s browser, while loading in Google’s browser was instantaneous. 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 page with the video finally loads into view.
Even from this preview video, it’s clear that this isn’t a common problem with a slow network connection. In this context, you can say that something is preventing YouTube from loading right away. When YouTube finally loads, it does so quite quickly.
There are reports of this activity in Edge as well, although I don’t seem to have encountered this issue in any browser using uBlock Origin.
Google doesn’t deny browsers are slowing down
In response to press inquiries about the situation, Google did not confirm that it was deliberately slowing down the browser, but did not deny it. In fact, Google has confirmed that viewers using ad blockers on YouTube may encounter problems:
To support the diverse ecosystem of creators around the world and provide billions of people with access to the content they love on YouTube, we’ve launched an effort to encourage viewers who have ad blocking turned on to allow advertising on YouTube or try YouTube Premium to access ad-free content. Users who have ad blockers installed may experience a suboptimal browsing experience, regardless of which browser they use.
Google’s announcement largely focuses on previously announced efforts to combat ad blocking. However, the claim that ad blockers may provide users with a “sub-optimal browsing experience” when asked about this slowdown issue may imply that Google is doing this intentionally. The statement says the issues may occur no matter what browser you use ad blockers in, but affected users confirm there is no slowdown when using Chrome.
How to Stop YouTube Lag in Firefox
So one way to solve this problem in Firefox is to trick YouTube into thinking you’re using Chrome at all. You can use a process called user agent switching to effectively turn Firefox into Chrome whenever you need it.
One popular way to do this is to use the User-Agent Switcher and Manager add-on. Once installed, open the extension, then select one of the listed versions of Chrome and click Update . The add-on automatically switches your user agent to Chrome, so you can browse sites like YouTube as if you were using Google’s browser instead. However, this add-on requires access to all data on every site you use it on, which is obviously not ideal from a privacy perspective.
A safer way to change the user agent is to do it manually . To get started, open a new tab, type about:config in the URL and press Enter . Accept the warning pop-up, enter General.useragent.override , click String , then click (+) . Now open Chrome on your computer, search for “my user agent,” and copy and paste the results into the text box. Press Enter again and your Firefox browser will now look like Chrome on the World Wide Web.
You can always switch back to Firefox by removing the user agent setting you made here. Keep this in mind as Firefox features such as the secondary site will not work when you are using the native user agent.
uBlock Origin has a workaround
If you don’t want to bother with switching user agent, you can try the uBlock Origin workaround . Once uBlock Origin is installed in your browser, open it, open Control Panel and go to My Filters . Paste the following into the field:
||googlevideo.com/videoplayback$xhr,3p,method=get,domain=www.youtube.com
Now click “Apply Changes” and open YouTube in a new window to check if the delay persists.
Of course, the alternative is still to disable your YouTube ad blockers or subscribe to YouTube Premium, but if you’re reading this article, you probably don’t want to go down either of those routes.