On Linux (Kubuntu with KDE and Wayland), I cannot use Youtube at all as it freezes for a long time when I start playing a video. It plays the sound but the browser stays frozen for around half a minute or so. It does eventually start showing the video as well... Do you know if there's any known issue for this?

I've seen numerous instances where Firefox Wayland has caused issues. Setting MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0 fixed the issue I was having.

In case you're curious: My issue was that it'd cause a burst of high CPU usage, which would result in an emergency shutdown of my system.

Use yt-dlp and a frontend like tartube?

I can use Chromium. Just wanted to report the problem.

Doesn't that confirm that google is breaking firefox? We can't prove deliberately without evidence, but it seems to fit

Firefox is fixing youtube's bug because google won't fix a bug

Google only pays because Firefox has enough users to justify it. If enough users switch to Chrome because of broken Google-owned websites, why would they keep paying?

Also: controlled opposition.

I suppose you believe that the "artificial five-second delay” for Firefox was also a conspiracy ? Google already have billionaire-rich lawyers defending them - there is no need for unpaid volunteers.

From the zdnet interview with Johnathan Nightingale someone else linked:

"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. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done,"

When exactly should we shift our framing of an issue from "conspiracy theory" to "actual concern"?

Interesting to see from the inside, where it shows so obvious that such tactics are indeed successful on large scale.

Not sure if it's related, but I have been having multiple issues on multiple sites related to Firefox, and where the issues go away when using Chrome.