In addition to this, their use of reCaptcha makes using a non-chrome browser a significantly worse experience on several sites.

This is my biggest issue. I tried using Firefox exclusively for a period of time but experienced a 10x increase in the number of reCaptcha manual verifications I had to complete. Going to the same sites on Chrome has no reCaptcha.

For me, this is blatant anti-competitive practice and should be punished.

I've used both firefox (dev edition) and chrome pretty evenly for a long time (work stuff in chrome, personal in ff), and I haven't noticed any more reCaptchas in firefox than I get in chrome. If you just started using firefox, I could see the extra captchas being due to having "too clean" of a browser, or a different browser that was never used before tripping some sort of anti malware or suspicious login system.

All just speculation, but I haven't noticed the same issue.

This is exactly it. Modern recaptcha is "reputation" based. So if it fingerprint matches you against a known profile, you never see the captcha. One could argue that a residential ip block combined with a common browser should be sufficient to filter most bot traffic, but it's not exactly in googles interest to worry about non-chrome user experience.

Well TIL. This gives me hope. I will put some time back into FF and see if there is an eventual drop in reCaptcha.

As a regular user of multiple browsers, I haven’t noticed this. Could you show a few examples? I’m not doubting your experience at all, I’m just curious to see if there may be a common thread.

Their handling of recaptcha should be criminal. They are the single most annoying thing to deal with this side of popups in their heyday

The YouTube example was a bug from 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17611444/how-to-speed-up-...

It's since been fixed.

Of course it was a bug. It could only be a bug. Would they really admit if it was intentional? Would they admit that their internal testing around Firefox is not as robust as Chrome? "Oh, whoopsie, no one here uses Firefox so we didn't notice it."

YouTube for me this week, only on Firefox, incidentally only fully loads 1/3 tries. Could be another bug

IIRC that's because YT switched to polymer, and since Mozilla doesn't support the new shadow dom APIs yet, YT serves it with the older version.

My understanding is that the "deliberate slowing" reported, was such that if you have firefox send a chrome user agent, that one gets faster (and functional) results.

Is that consistent with the "it is because FF doesn't support new thing yet" explanation?

No because again, IIRC, sending a chrome user agent to YT in FF breaks a lot of the functionality.

Does it? What stops working, since I haven't noticed anything?

Ah, “the parts that work are faster but a lot of it is broken” does seem like it suggests the benign explanation

I believe it was that YT was using the legacy v0 shadow DOM API that only Chrom[e|ium] supported, with a slow polyfill for other browsers, rather than the much better supported v1 API that all other major browser makers agreed to implement.

Oh, is that why it takes forever to load google search on firefox? how is that allowed? I'm speechless.

That's...not why, and it doesn't. Try clearing your cache, or loading a profile without any addons.

> how is that allowed?

It is not the case.

But who would have the legitimate right to stop it? Do we want government dictating product features?

How is that a feature??