Appreciate the title summary as opposed to standard click-bait, doing good work!
They're doing it on purpose.
Metal Outlaws video shows a bit of the code where it shows that it runs a 5s sleep function, and this function is only triggered if the browser has a Firefox user-agent.
Google's Polymer library working better on the Chromium engine has been known for years, and Mozilla has been doing its best to keep up with Google's wrenches in the engine, this seven-year-old bug being one of many examples: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1367205
edit4: other talked about video on subject edit3: added andriodauthority paragraph edit2: people mention only some experience this, may be adblock testing on yt part, code below may not be cause edit: added code and andriodauthority link, also in desc. of video
He talks about an artificial 5 second timeout function: Polymer script that has 5E3 (5000ms) in script
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-reportedly-slowing-down-videos-firefox-3387206/
https://cybernews.com/tech/firefox-users-frustrated-over-alleged-delay-on-youtube/
setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);
Certain discussions around the report indicate that the code could be a lazy implementation of an ad fallback if a user uses an ad blocker. The relevant code could possibly be ensuring that an ad is displayed for at least five seconds before the actual video begins showing. As mentioned, we could not confirm the functioning of the code snippet.
YouTube Has Gone Too Far This Time [10:49 | Mental Outlaw] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4gXhmzQztE
Rossman is right about things in the case that Google is targeting only adblock users (whether this 5 second delaying thing is this type of action or not)
Google can try all they want to throttle or restrict ad-free experiences as much as we're free to try to get around them, and using YouTube without ad or tracker is not compensating them so they don't owe us anything. Anti-competitive practices, invasive tracking and things like that we can target Google for doing.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=_x7NSw0Irc0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Irony
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