Technology

Nobody can even state that it's actually happening "for competitive browsers" as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it's just wild speculation and bandwagoning.

is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)

Which was branched from Apple’s open Webkit base, but let’s all also forget about that.

They take the IP of others, spin it a bit and then block everyone. Burn them down.

All of those are meaningless peanuts versus

• Owns the biggest (borderline only) web ad service in the world

Unchecked capitalism is a real motherfucker ain't it?

This is the exact reason I don't trust anything hosted online. If it's something I want to enjoy more than once, I download it.

Companies hosting things online tend to become authoritarian dictators in all but name, which is their right as they own the services and hardware. But it almost always makes the end user experience shitty and overly complicated, or filled with spyware, or requires you give away your rights to privacy or lawsuit, etc..

So if there's a song or something that I like online, I'm downloading that and keeping it on my computer to listen to whenever I feel like it. I don't have the time or energy to play games with these greedy ass corporations.

And the ironic part is, that while they would absolutely froth the mouth about me doing this, they're the ones that drove me to it. It feels like an emotionally abusive relationship, are they keep making our just a man some gaslighting me, then getting angry when I fight back or tell them no.

I’m sorry to be the spelling guy but it’s “forbid” not “phorbid”

I haven’t experienced it either, but Google also typically rolls out changes in waves. They rarely just push to prod and call it a day. They push changes in waves, so they can pull the update or make adjustments if the early waves have issues.

Same.

The anti-adblock warnings only lasted a few days for me too, not seen them for a couple of weeks now.

I'd seen it in my Firefox/Win10 + uBlockO setup. I just used yt-dlp and then a uBlock "quick fixes" update sorted it.

Maybe your ISP has some sort of agreement with yt?

Sometimes, less is more.

I would recommend trimming all your custom configuration from your router/firewall, one change at a time, until you can no longer reproduce the issue.

Or go the other way around: set up a barebones configuration, confirm the issue is resolved, and begin adding one customization at a time until it breaks.

How do your bufferbloat tests look?

https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

It sounds like you have a lot of stateful inspection configured. YouTube's heavy usage of QUIC (i.e. UDP transport) may not play well with your config.

And, incidentally, what does your hardware look like?

Frankly, even the most barebones router should be able to handle YouTube. I am running pfSense in an ESXi VM, with passthru Intel gigabit NICs, 2 GB reserved RAM, and 2 vCPU (shared, but with higher priority than other VMs) on a Dell desktop with a second-gen i7 that was shipped from the factory in 2012.

Yes, I am routing on decade-old hardware. And I have never seen anything like what you are describing.

YouTube should "just work."

I am going to assume that if you're running OpenWRT, then you are probably using a typical consumer router? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Have you by any chance tried backing up your OpenWRT config and going back to stock firmware?

I know, I know, OpenWRT is great. I have a consumer router that I flashed with it to use strictly as a wireless AP.

But consumer devices flashed with vanilla OpenWRT tend to have very, very little resources left over to handle fun configurations.

And I have a feeling some of the fun configuration might be contributing to your issues.

I think you give them too much credit. From what I've seen, it's just a setTimeout call for 5 seconds if you're on Firefox, which is similar to what all those shady cookie popups from TrustArc do if you click "Reject all".

And it doesn't remove promotions by the content creators, so you're still seeing lots of ads. Still, since my kids spend so much time on YouTube I think it's worth reducing the amount of brain washing, but I'm definitely not happy about the pricing. It's ridiculous when you compare it to other streaming services who also have to produce or license their content.

Hop on a peertube instance. There are ones made by normal people, eg. https://urbanists.video (this one probably won't accept your registration, but just showcasing).

If you heavily compress your videos or if they're not very long, you could also upload a .mp4 file to a file host or just your own website (johndoe.com/myvid.mp4). Then the browser would just download and play the .mp4 file.

Odysee fits the bill but be warned there are some conspiracy theorists nuts and nerds on there.

You could post the video to Dropbox or something? They might have to download the full video before playback, but i wouldn't be surprised if some file sharing services are smart enough to stream video.

Eh, works fine for me. I don't watch a ton of YouTube, but I haven't noticed any real issues, and I use an ad blocker.

I tested it in Firefox InPrivate, Edge, Brave, and Chrome and all are identical for me. I think they just fucked up YouTube. 😂