Another example of https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... :

> "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said.

> "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.'

> "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?"

> "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops.

> > "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops.

I see the third option here besides malice and incompetence: indifference. I don't think they really aiming to eradicate Firefox, the last few % of users do not matter that much. But they certainly do seem to be indifferent about the experience of those users.

Selective indifference is malice.

Malice implies intent.

As does selective indifference.

Great link, thanks.

The line about “all of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course” (from the Firefox exec) reads like a winking acknowledgement that Google’s behavior is dangerously anti-competitive and deserves a federal antitrust investigation. Google has a pattern of abusing their uncontested market dominance in search engines, and considerable leverage in office web applications, to shore up one of the few product lines where the competition is steep.

IANAL but it does seem like textbook stuff you’re not allowed to do to compete.

I wonder if Youtube doesn't run CI tests against other browsers than Chrome or if those test cases just aren't covered.

According to an analysis in the Firefox bugtracker (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1697551) it seems like the error occured because a non-standard attribute is used in the JS code that only Chromium implements.

Looks like the changes are being rolled back though. Geniunely happy to see that as Youtube hasn't such a good track record of fully suporting browsers not based on the Chromium engine. I think performance on Firefox is still pretty bad with the new UI because of some inperformant polyfills for Shadow DOM code?

> I wonder if Youtube doesn't run CI tests against other browsers than Chrome

They have a strong financial incentive to break functionality in browsers that aren't theirs. Why would they ever care to test?

Not really. They have a strong financial interest to have as many eyeballs as possible watching YouTube, because only then can they show ads.

I don't see how breaking YouTube for a portion of the world population is a sensible part of that plan.

For most people, if YouTube does not work in Firefox, they will not switch to a different video platform. They will switch to Chrome.

A lot of people have Chrome installed alongside Firefox or Edge or whatever and will just try the video somewhere else. So YouTube actually gets more revenue and Chrome gets free advertising. If a major website works on Chrome but doesn’t work correctly on Firefox most users will tend to blame the browser instead of the website and think “I stopped using Chrome because of the memory issues but at least it’s reliable.” The logic even sounds superficially reasonable.

It's a trade-off. Which way do they gain more money? From showing the YouTube ads to Firefox users, or from getting users into the Chrome ecosystem for however that is monetized?

Making the web buggy on firefox means we're in the extinguish phase for alternate web engines. Soon there will only be chrome based browsers. And then once that happens, they'll make it harder and harder to build alternative browsers around chrome.

Microsoft will fork Chromium in that case.

Maybe, but it wouldn't help much: They too would be happy to get rid of ad blockers.

They have a history of such changes. YT has been breaking user-experience on non-chrome browsers for years now. Between 2015-2017 they were racing with the new codecs of which none were supported on Safari or Firefox, so browsers simply stopped playing videos for several days or weeks.

I ran into this this morning and I’m floored that it’s not just me.

I like JavaScript, I develop in it daily. This is too much. Your JavaScript shouldn’t be messing with a field so intensely that it disrupts usage like this.

Also, how did this slip past internal automated tests? How did it slip past manual tests?

This has been bugging me about Disney+ ever since I subscribed to it. Unlike Youtube or Netflix, the space bar has no effect when streaming on a computer, which is just bonkers.

This particular problem is that the space bar does not actually print the space character in the search field.

But that space to play/pause not working in Disney+ drives me crazy

A closely-related issue: Space has long been partially broken in YouTube: if a button is focused, then Space toggles the play state and lets that button activate (the browser default behaviour). This is probably most frustrating if you clicked on the play/pause button with your mouse, so that it’s focused: now pressing Space will pause and immediately resume (or resume and immediately pause again). So I got used to using k instead of Space. Someone should put an event.preventDefault() somewhere.

There's another long-standing YouTube space bug too: space doesn't scroll down when the page itself has the focus, like it does on every other web page. It just plays/pauses the video, even if you're way down in the comments.

I would suspect this is intended behavior. YouTube expects users to rely on page up/page down or mouse/trackpad scroll.

The thing I don't like is if you click on a timestamp in the comments, it zooms you up to the video, so you lose where you were up to in the comments.

I wonder if there's any way to get it to not do that, even on a one-time basis? If I want to go back to the top, I'll press the Home key, thank you very much.

I verified it a few minutes ago on my computer, and now it's working so it seems they fixed it.

I guess Google doesn't bother to test on Firefox or other browsers?

Ok wow... so I'm not the only one. It took me a minute to realize my keyboard wasn't broken, it was just YouTube where my spacebar didn't work.

This just happened to me on Firefox (OSX), first time I've ever noticed it.

Also saw other strange behaviours. While writing a comment, taps on the spacebar were not detected, but typing some letters also triggered the browser's Back functionality (I did not hit Backspace).

Something similar happened to me in Bitwig last week, so I was terrified that my keyboard drivers were slowly deteriorating for some reason. This has saved my sanity.

In Firefox you can just add their opensearch plugin and submit queries straight from the address bar. It even supports having shortcuts like 'yt' assigned.

You don't need a plugin for that, it works out of the box.

[Edit] doc: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

I had the problem for ages. Spacebar triggered the brief appearance of a "play" icon in the center of the video window but didn't do anything else.

I just added it as a search engine, and now use it from the search bar in firefox.

Same thing with comments, cant use the spacebar (it stops/plays the video)...

I thought my space bar was suddenly broken and slammed on it about 10 times.

You can't even put a space into the search box.

But can you put a search box in space?

works here (chrome/mac).

but since we are on the topic, i totally understand OP posting on reddit. i have given up giving feedback to big tech websites and apps. i don't know where to enter that feedback, and when i do, i am not sure they value any of it.

nowadays, one has to take it to the socials.

and since it has come to sharing our miseries on the socials in order to be heard: if anyone, by any chance, from amazon is reading this, sorting wish lists has been broken for many weeks now.

Same for me on Firefox. Bizzare.

I had to ctrl+v space to write a comment but halfway through I realized that writing a comment on Youtube simply wasn't worth the armada of ctrl+v.

You could draft the comment outside of YouTube

Just use vi-keys ;)

One day they'll have to support void.

Thank you DDG and your bangs for preserving my search experience in the face of website bugs.