I love being oppressed by billion dollar tech companies simply because I refuse to use their software ladled with surveillance and monitoring spyware.

As someone who continually uses the Chromium ecosystem with the Ungoogled Chromium web browser, I among many others on alternatives to Google’s Chrome have noticed a significant decline in speed when it comes to watching videos on YouTube.

Specifically, when clicking on a video we’re faced with waiting several seconds of a blank page before the video in question actually begins loaded, and as it turns out to the surprise of absolutely nobody, this “error” is in fact intentional by Google to target non-conformists outside of their own browser.

YouTube has been actively promoting monetization as of late, taking measures as far as blocking ad-blockers, more or less forcing users into purchasing YouTube Premium by artificially locking them out from actually accessing the content on their service, combine this with an extreme drop in actual video quality YouTube are going above and beyond to demonize their reputation in the pursuit of profit.

So that they can continue to sponsor worthless sacks of shit such as SSSniperWolf.

A Reddit user by the name of vk6_, posted a video demonstrating a five-second delay when loading a YouTube video on Mozilla Firefox, the same exact issue I’ve been facing.

Interestingly, when manually adjusting the user agent to Chrome within the browser, the five-second delay disappears instantaneously.

Many others are reporting the same exact blank page when clicking on a new video on YouTube, some report that this only happens if you’re signed into a Google account which hasn’t been confirmed.

The user agent is a text string embedded in each browser, indicating the browser type, version, and operating system in use. Websites use this information to enable or disable specific features based on the user’s browser configuration.

And it’s quite evident that Google are using this to impose artificial annoyance upon users who aren’t specifically using Google’s own Chrome browser which is notorious for throwing the users privacy out the window, as many people have reported this five second delay across Firefox and Edge, which is also Chromium based but happens to be a Microsoft rendition.

For you Apple sheeple out there, this problem even reaches the depths of even Safari, on any and all browsers outside of Chrome this is a hardcoded artificial limitation by Google.

Changing the user data to Chrome resolves the problem immediately regardless of the browser affected, the culprit is believed to be a specific function from YouTube’s Javascript file as seen from this immensely detailed Twitter thread.

The actual function is rather simple, for those of whom are running adblockers such as uBlock Origin, if the ad stub isn’t loaded it’ll simply delay the video from actually playing for five whole seconds, like a radical new solution to dissuade adblocking, but thankfully there’s no need to actually disable your adblocker to use YouTube as intended.

If you’re using uBlock Origin, simply add this string into your filters to circumvent YouTube’s malicious bullshit.

www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)

Since I added it to my own uBlock filters list, videos have been playing back instantly like normal, but for how long it’ll last is up in the air given how aggressive Google are being to force ads on the world’s largest video sharing platform.

Their previous attempts have been met with not enough criticism I’d say, especially since it has been found that their adblock detection methods imposed recently may actually been illegal and in breach of the EU’s privacy law.

Fuck Google and fuck YouTube.

Also fuck every single journalist or media outlet begging for users to turn off their adblockers too. These goddamn content “creators” don’t deserve a fucking dime.