This is about a pattern of behaviour that started when Chrome launched (and had less market share than Firefox) and has continued since then. This isn't "They're trying to take our tiny market share", this is "This is how they took our quite substantial market share".

If they already took substantial market share, why would they need tofurther break Firefox users' experience? You just made my point for me.

> why would they need tofurther break Firefox users' experience

To prevent the market share from going up? That's the logical thing to do after spending millions developing and marketing your browser to the number 1 spot.

Why would they waste that money and effort by playing nice now and letting the market share go back up?

Not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes users just prefer faster, better advertised, better supported software. To suggest Google is actively and wilfully interfering with <3% of browser market share is just so ridiculous, so foolish, it is actually amusing.

Firefox had 30% market share in 2011, the article links to the discussion about when google chrome first released. The article discusses how this behavior ate away at the market share every time google released something that worked on google chrome, and broken on firefox. And as a result over the years, now firefox has a 3% market share as you say.

Firefox share declined because the market objectively decided Chrome is a better browser. Framing it as Chrome "picking" on Firefox is just silly. And I say this as a die-hard Firefox user and fan.

You have no evidence to support this assertion. I know this because there is no objective "browser quality" standard. It is as least as likely that Google aggressively advertising it on every single page load of every single web presence gained traction for chrome.

Actually, I do: the fact most people use Chrome and not Firefox.

That's a popularity metric, not a quality metric. Conflating the two is disingenuous at best.

Turns out quality software is also popular. Imagine that!

Plenty of quality software is unpopular, and plenty of popular software is shit. I'm confident you know this. What is driving this series of pointless nonsense posts?

I do. I also happen to know people use Chrome because it's quality.

Youtube on firefox has been broken since they started their ad-blocker brigade. It's even broken for me, a user on macos using firefox without an ad-blocker enabled for youtube in premium mode. The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'. Videos play fine but often when trying to scrub with the timeline the timeline thumbnail will not respond or other controls will be very sluggish.

If it is a old video (3 days), just search for it in DDG, and just watch it via DDG.

This is not a solution that will work for mom and pop. Exactly the kind of workaround that relegates Firefox to being a "techies only" browser.

Firefox's irrelevance is why it's regulated to techies. And sure, you're free to blame Google for some of that, but let's not pretend Mozilla has always been some wellspring of user-pleasing decision making.

> Youtube on firefox has been broken since they started their ad-blocker brigade.

I use Youtube in Firefox daily, even in Strict mode with many user.js tweaks, and have never had a problem.

> The UI has become sluggish and 'pause-y'.

Get a faster computer.

This is the wrong assumption to make. I can tell you as someone with a powerful rig that is by no stretch a "slouch" sitting at 0% CPU and 0% GPU I have seen Youtube act like garbage for absolutely no reason. I've even had video playback skip ahead a second as well and it throws me off when watching videos.

> Get a faster computer

or... and keep up with me here. Google has been known to do A/B testing on users. Just because your part of "B" group that doesn't see it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It only means Google is artificially putting their thumb on the scale and I take serious issue with people handwaving issues with "get a better computer" Nothing is wrong with my computer and only Youtube has this issue, any other video platform does not do this so why is it only Youtube?

> Get a faster computer.

Yeah my m2 max is a total fucking slouch, just barely better than a 486.

If you can't play videos on an M2, that's not a Youtube problem, that's a "you messed your computer up" problem.

Vimeo works fine, nebula works fine, max works fine.. youtube videos play fine, the ui is hitchy/pause-y/janky. It's WIDELY reported that this is a problem with youtube specifically on firefox and ONLY since they went on their adblocker blocking schemes. (even though I subscribe to youtube premium and disable my adblocker on their site). This happens if I have 100 tabs open or if I cold boot my system and start up a new firefox with a single tab.

Swallow your fucking pride and admit that you don't know what you are talking about.