Haven’t seen Youtube tabs crash like this in like 6 years, now it’s happening several times a day. The Youtube UI is also painfully laggy- when you hover over a video it takes like 3-5 seconds for the player to show up and equally as long when I try to pause the video or change settings. When I open the Youtube front page it just shows a blank dark background for a long while before anything loads. Sometimes Youtube tabs get stuck loading, showing only the video with no UI, no way to pause, no comments or recommended videos and the only way to fix it is to open the page in a new tab. It also sometimes seems like a fucked Youtube tab drags the whole browser down, making any websites load endlessly until I close my Youtube tabs.
It’s been like this for a few weeks? months? now, but it’s steadily getting worse. I assume it might be Youtube fucking with either uBlock users, or Firefox users, or both
could be YouTube AB testing some bullshit because I’ve not personally noticed this in the UK
I assume it might be Youtube fucking with either uBlock users, or Firefox users, or both
definitely this. youtube wants you back on the web browser owned by their corpo and ads shoved into your eyes like broken glass. or if not your monthly $
i’m using firefox and ublock origin and i have no problems with youtube or crashes ever
The power of A/B testing. Fuck over a small portion of your users and observe the results and the users are just guinea pigs.
It’s genius. No matter how upsetting or disgusting a change is, they can roll it out to just the right partition of users designed to prevent a critical mass of people getting upset enough to congregate and do anything about it collectively.
Their genius is not from A/B testing, the genius is normalizing the proliferation of non-free programs that only the software’s landlord apparent can control.
We are just tenants who meekly ask for a license contract to use their programs. Only with a libre (software shared collectively) program do you actually become a user and not used.
I use Freetube nowadays if privacy is a plus for you.
Yes it is because uBlock Origin I’ve found. It tries to load ads, goes
when it can’t, and will just sit there until the ad timer is up before actually loading.Yeah, YouTube seems deliberately broken for Firefox and/or uBlock and/or the combination (I would never go to YouTube without uBlock so I can’t do isolation testing). Nowadays if I want to watch something on YouTube, I just grab the link and download it with yt-dlp to watch it locally in VLC. I can delete the video after.
This has the added benefit of not making my old computer’s fans chug, and it prevents YouTube from doing that annoying thing of throwing up a giant thumbnail for another video in the center of the video BEFORE it has finished which blocks vision of the video.
Yup it’s absolute ass for me lately. I have a pretty powerful laptop but just youtube has been crawling. And I have premium so the ad blocker I’m running shouldn’t even matter >_<. Oh well, guess it’s time to cancel premium and embrace alternate ways of getting slop.
Yeah, past few weeks on YouTube have sucked on Firefox
I’ve had problems with Google docs and sheets being laggy on first the last two-ish weeks, but haven’t turned off ublock to test. Haven’t tried YouTube recently, freetube replaced that
yep. buffering and performance once loaded has been fine, but uBlock has been failing to block ads when the page first loads, so i just get an empty player with an unloaded 15 second seek bar until i refresh. i think they’re fucking with video-embedded ads or some shit idk
This started for me(Firefox + UBlock Origin) months ago right around the time Youtube started attacking Ublock so I assumed that was the reason for the lag. Had my whole computer crash because of it. Using alternative front-ends consistently since then.
I believe google uses the same frontend framework for everything which will legit leak memory and crash if you use ublock origin. I noticed is in the google cloud console lmao. I think there was some other thing where it implements an api that wasn’t implemented on firefox, shadow dom v0 or something and for Firefox it uses a bunch of bloated shims instead but idk how accurate that is anymore. But yeah when i remove ublock my google cloud tabs stop leaking memory and crashing and perform a little better.
I should probably put together some evidence for my statements… Nah
This was on a pi, but YouTube was constantly crashing my browser. Clearing the cookies (just for YouTube) fixed it. It’s happened a couple times. Clearing YouTube cookies fixed it each time.
This only happens to me if I have more than like 4 youtube tabs open at the same time. If I keep it to 1 or 2 it seems to work a lot better. Also try it in private browsing - maybe you have a poorly coded extension installed that’s messing things up.
YouTube is an extremely slow website, if you compare it with invidious which removes all the profit-generating anti-features it’s a night and day difference.
They’re also integrating AI slop into the video player, so I basically only use invidious and Freetube.
