Well, Google, ya gone and done it.

I just uninstalled Chrome, and installed Firefox. The last two days, YouTube turned to shit on me - won't load videos, is clearly heavily throttled. I switch to Firefox - YouTube works perfectly.

If you've been putting off abandoning Chrome, it's a LOT easier than I expected. Firefox imported my history, my logins/passwords, bookmarks, and so on. Completely painless. Chrome has become thoroughly enshittified. Leave it behind.

@oldladyplays it does suck that firefox mobile is so slow, and the fact that some websites can be broken on firefox, overall great browser

@oldladyplays So, I'm not the only one having trouble with YouTube in Google Chrome?

Following your lead, I tried it in Firefox. It's the difference between night and day!

@oldladyplays Good on you! If you ever find a site doesn’t load or function well on Firefox, there are some good Firefox browser spoofing ad-ons that mimic chrome, edge, etc. I’ve run into it trying to access Microsoft and Google brand sites. Go figure. 😉
@samhainnight

@oldladyplays @elin Weird how YT off all things would be slower on Chrome. A few weeks ago they deliberately added code to make YT slow on anything *but* Chrome…

Anyway congrats on the switch 😊

@oldladyplays Good choice indeed. I personally use Chrome for Google only products, things like Docs, Maps and YouTube. For all other things I use either Firefox or Safari. My default search engine is DuckDuckGo.

@oldladyplays

nice job getting rid of google chrome... #youtube belongs to google... you can also see their content without the ads and tracking using invidious

https://docs.invidious.io/instances/

#peertube is even better but it does not have the same content youtube does... hopefully, it will grow in usage (it is part of the fediverse, I don't know much about it so if someone more knowledgeable than me want to chip in...)

@oldladyplays To be honest my *mostly* abandoning Chrome almost always was... "YouTube works way worse here than on Firefox." It may have been the reason that rather than installing the Chrome binary... I am compiling a Chromium browser because Electron apps won't (well maybe will now) open in Firefox, so Chromium is the "open links by default in" browser (and it's far more locked down).

@oldladyplays wait, Firefox (or any another app) can read your passwords?!?

@oldladyplays welcome to the better browser!

If you have the time, try Firefox's container tabs! They were a true game changer for me.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

@oldladyplays Oddly I've just done the same too, after a week of constant ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED from all chromium based browsers. Could be something to do with ubuntu & chromium in my case, but Firefox isn't doing it at all.

@Lulukaros Fair. I haven't switched my phone over, but I rarely use the browser on my phone as it is (I'm at home most of the time).

@oldladyplays I also switched to Firefox as I expected ad blockers to be hit by Manifest v3 which has been delayed again. Switching from Google Authenticator to another TOTP provider is a lot more painful.

@soulexpress

Yeah. I strongly suspect Google fuckery here - they are throttling people who ran Adblock. I'm just not going to put up with that crap.

@alterelefant if you're using chrome for google things to try and keep it away from you general internet life, you could look at the firefox addon "multi account containers". it lets you isolate tabs from each other ~ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ @oldladyplays

@oldladyplays then you're saved from the slowness haha

@Lulukaros @oldladyplays I use Firefox Focus for most mobile based browsing. Occasionally I need to invoke the password manager for a sign in here and there - but I don't like storing passwords in the browser anyway, as a general rule.

@mensrea @oldladyplays That is a good tip, thank you. At the moment I am happy to manually copy and paste YouTube links, in that way you know exactly what it is I navigate to.

@alterelefant you can set a site to a container. so for example you can set anytime you launch a youtube link it will auto open it in that container no matter where you clicked on it. there's also a temporary container addon but that gets more complicated to set up @oldladyplays

@oldladyplays tbh, i have had the same experience you described with both browsers and that sort of defines when i switch to the other. some important site completely fails to work. right now i'm on chrome as firefox webmidi support was broken last time i was on firefox. so i do not see obvious "great" in the browser arena...

only locked in constraint is that i don't touch derivatives because upstream gets e.g. security fixes fastest.

@oldladyplays the point of failure in my case was the web version of https://novationmusic.com/components which works perfectly in chrome. possibly could give a shot a ff if webmidi has since been fixed.

i just put this because it is not really literal truth that google has somehow "failed". google has not failed more than any other browser vendor.

@oldladyplays It even imported some extensions the last time I used the import functionality. Really useful.