askchapo

could be YouTube AB testing some bullshit because I've not personally noticed this in the UK

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

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 use Freetube nowadays if privacy is a plus for you.

https://freetubeapp.io/

i'm using firefox and ublock origin and i have no problems with youtube or crashes ever

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.

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.

Same, but it comes and goes for me and it doesn't crash, it just doesn't load. I have to refresh the page to actually load the video and even then I can only see the first minute. I have a yt account mostly for making comments, giving likes and making public playlists but it's kinda over. I'd prefer to have something like Audiotube or some other free software client

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.

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.

yeah. haven't had crashes like this but get pages slow to load and 2010-style buffering sometimes. i think my FF is just bloated with extensions and shit though, I might need to try a full reset. using librewolf with just ublock made things a bit smoother. the website does suck though

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

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

Yeah, past few weeks on YouTube have sucked on Firefox

~~was having this problem recently, but closing some of my tabs helped it. I had like fifty youtube tabs open and I went and watched a bunch of them so I could clear them out and my remaining youtube tabs stopped chugging so bad and now it's much less painful~~

spoke too soon, just tried to open a tab and it was laggy as fuck, like 8 seconds to get response and after closing the tab the audio continued for about as long

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.

Yeah, I get tabs that are just showing a white screen with a loading wheel in the middle

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.

I assumed it was some memory leak maybe from one of my extensions. Restarting Firefox makes it snappy until it bogs down again. Scrolling, pausing/unpausing, hovering on the timeline, all of it slows down.

I've thought about this. It hasn't crashed for me yet, but I feel like Youtube didn't need to be refreshed 5 times for the UI to show properly in the past. Don't know how it is on Chrome.

For the last few weeks when I'd try to watch any YT videos, it would actually not only kill FF but also fuck up my desktop. I'm not sure if it's a Linux specific thing but my whole computer would slow to a crawl, my graphics would wig out, and my system monitor applet's CPU section would freeze up. It hasn't happened for a few days though.

i use mac os FF + ublock and haven't bumped into this yet. occasionally there's a hiccup between ublock updates but I'm sure it happens on a system by system basis. I echo the freetube sentiment i just checked it out and it looks cool

I've found that opening each and every video in a new tab seems to be a partial workaround